Did you know that you can inoculate stumps with edible mushrooms soon after you cut the trees down?  Since the roots are buried in the moist soil, the stump will stay damp enough for the mycelium to run through the wood, then mushrooms will pop out of the cracks.  After a few years of creating mushrooms, the stump will have broken down into good compost, and the mushrooms might even spread into the soil of your garden and help your vegetables grow.

Sadly, I didn't know this five years ago when we cleared our garden area, so the mushrooms coming out of our stumps are of dubious edibility (though they are quite beautiful.)  I wish I'd been reading my blog when I started working on the farm!  (Although a time loop like that might do more harm than would be merited by a few extra mushrooms.)

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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