Mushrooms on the Farm and in the Garden

Fungi cycle nutrients that nourish new life in the soil. Recognizing this essential function, inventive gardeners integrate mushrooms into farm, garden, and permaculture systems. Mushrooms can also be grown in lawns, polytunnels, vegetable gardens, and woodlands.

Terri Marie Beauséjour, a writer for Mushroom the Journal, encourages creativity and imagination when planting mushrooms in a garden. Look at the "fungamentals," she writes, the necessities such as available substrates, microhabitats, sun, shade, wind, and humidity conditions. Gardens offer ample substrates—organic waste materials—while plants provide shade and humidity. Plug-inoculated blocks buried among plantings work well for oyster and Stropharia rugoso-annulata mushrooms. Beauséjour suggests using a misting sprinkler for mushrooms in gardens.

Grower and author Ken Litchfield notes that mulching, a standard gardening practice, not only regulates soil temperature and humidity but also nourishes fungi. He also suggests surrounding raised beds with partially buried logs to create mushroom habitats. Inside the beds, vegetables, flowers, and shrubs offer the requisite shade and humidity for mushroom cultivation. In weedy areas, Litchfield suggests putting down organic material and covering it with wet cardboard and wood chips, an ideal substrate for fungi.

These methods of production are not likely to yield huge numbers of mushrooms. However, they can provide an attractive addition to directly marketed produce.

Mushrooms in Permaculture* Design

*Permaculture is a system of combining perennials, trees, shrubs, and vines to create a "permanent agriculture." Using an intensive design process, the natural elements of an ecosystem are replaced by food-producing relatives, creating an edible landscape.

Paul Stamets was an early advocate of integrating a variety of mushrooms into a permaculture system. In his design, agricultural wastes like cornstalks, wheat straw, or rice straw can be used as growing media for oyster mushrooms. After harvest, the spent substrate can be recycled as fodder or mulch for garden soils.

Shaggy manes (Coprinus comatus), Stamets notes, do well on manured soils and near compost piles. The King stropharia or wine cap mushroom (Stropharia rugoso-annulata) grows best outdoors and plays a key role as a recycler of woody debris. Bees, attracted to the sweet mycelium, help pollinate the green garden plants. The mushrooms are good to eat when small. Large, mature mushrooms attract fly larvae that make excellent fish or poultry food. These can supplement feed for other on-farm enterprises or be sold to pet stores.

Stamets also uses King stropharia mushrooms for their ecological benefits. He found that, when established along waterways, they acted as microfilters of fecal coliform bacteria generated by his small herd of cattle. He also planted them along greywater runoff areas. Stamets believes mushrooms can play a large role in mycofiltration.

Stamets grows shiitakes, namekos (Pholiota nameko), and Lion’s mane (Hericium erinaceus) mushrooms on inoculated logs set in a fence row, while other species like maitake (Grifola frondosa), reishi (Ganoderma lucidum), and clustered wood-lovers are cultivated on stumps as part of a hardwood forest management system. He introduces mycorrhizal species such as chanterelles, King boletes, and others to new areas by "satellite planting," in which seedlings are planted near trees that have a desired mushroom species growing around them. After several years, the seedlings and their mycorhizal associates are transplanted, creating new patches of mushrooms. Morels are more difficult to propagate, but some types can be encouraged through the use of small burns.

(http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/mushroom.html)