Mycelium in the Garden - Part 2

Mycelium in the Garden - Part 2

In part 1 of this series, I talked about my intentions for introducing mycelium into the garden and documented the first experiment which involved newspaper, used coffee grounds, and hay (not straw) in a shady spot in the garden.

In this post, I'm going to talk about my second experiment. This one involves utilizing the space beneath my bean and pea frames which gets too shady to grow much of anything as the summer advances.

This experiment will be making use of newspaper, used coffee grounds, and straw (not hay) as I want to see if there really is a difference between the two mulches.

The space under the climbing frame has grown thick with weeds, so I simply piled the newspaper over the top of them.  I did pull a few of the weeds from around the newspaper edges, and stuffed them under to make it look neat and tidy.

Once I had a good thick layer of newspaper down, I covered it with 15 gallons of used coffee grounds. This is much thicker than with the first experiment, and I decided to do this after taking a peak under the mulch in experiment 1, and saw the mycelium really infiltrating the coffee grounds, and to my surprise, no mold!

Next I sliced the used mushroom log into disks and placed them directly on top of the used coffee grounds just like in the previous experiment.

Next, I covered the disks with a single sheet of newspaper just to help with moisture retention and wet it down so it would stay put while I collected the straw.

Finally, I covered everything with a generous layer of straw, being careful to ensure that there was no newspaper sticking out.

So that's it! Now all there is to do is sit back, let the peas grow, and see if the mycelium processes all that used coffee grounds before the freeze comes.