I know this photo doesn't look like much, but you are witnessing a real, live break through!  (Yes, I am excited.  How could you tell?)

A mere week after starting our oyster mushroom propagation experiment, the fungus has already taken hold.  Its mycelium is running across the damp cardboard and even growing up through the cardboard to the next layer.

As oyster mushrooms ripen on our mushroom logs, I've been cutting off the stem butts and putting them between new layers of wet cardboard in my flower pot.  I hope that in a few weeks, the pot will be chock full of mycelia.  Then I can use the mycelia to seed new containers of damp cardboard, eventually growing enough to innoculate a bunch of new logs in the spring.  No more paying top dollar for mushroom plugs!

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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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