December 2023
Hey folks!
It’s my second update on trying to start Living Proof, my hospitality, agriculture, and other yet-to-be-defined-things business. I realized soon after sharing my November 2023 update that I hadn’t actually explained what Living Proof is about, so I’d like to start this month’s post going over some of that.
I cover some of this in my About Me section, but here’s my elevator pitch for Living Proof:
I want to build an agritourism business that 8-year-old Mischa would have adored, a place that displays some interesting things about growing food, using green technologies, and the world as a whole. I want to demonstrate various approaches to reducing impact on climate, from new tech to simple low-energy solutions. I want to teach people how mushrooms work, how friendly chickens can be, and how cool forest management is. And I want to make it fun and engaging for folks of all ages.
To get past the marketing talk, I want to build my take on the McMenamins Edgefield in Portland, Oregon—an 11 acre property with fascinating stuff for folks of all ages, covered in character. I love mushrooms—their taste, their looks, and their weird and wild biology. I adore trains—the romance of steam, sound, and scale. I find various approaches to addressing climate change fascinating, and want to demonstrate and compare some of them, from solar panels and backup battery systems to passive solar building design. And I love showing how everything interconnects–how mushroom waste makes compost for the garden, how trees cut down to thin the woods for their health can be turned into logs to build tiny homes or to grow mushrooms on, how ash from campfire pits can be used to make soap for the tiny homes, and so much more.
It’s ambitious, and the specifics will certainly change over time, but the principles of having everything I find interesting in one place, and creating an ecosystem between those various interests will remain core to my approach.
With that let’s dive into the normal post!
Above we have the aerial view of my property from October 31st, and below we have one from November 2nd. The biggest changes here aren’t super visible. There was a group of pine trees that would absolutely not survive in their current location, so I had them removed, but more excitingly, I built my first wood chip bed with wine cap mushrooms (Stropharia Rugosoannulata) in the far back yard past the garage. The bed is the ridge with snow on one side of it. I built it behind that copse of poplar trees to protect the fungi from direct sunlight, as in the second image, below. You can also see that some cardboard boxes are still uncovered in the backyard. In my rush to finish inoculating my shiitake logs (more coming on that) I didn’t have time to finish moving my neighbors’ raked leaves to cover up the cardboard fully. In the long run I’ll lay manure and wood chips over the leaves and cardboard to begin rebuilding the soil quality.
You’ll also see the stack of logs in the driveway. Those are the logs that were a little too big for me to move into the garage to inoculate. One of my goals in December will be sawing up the remaining logs in that pile to form mushroom stumps and some shorter mushroom logs, so that no wood goes to waste.
Let’s dive into both the wine cap bed and the shiitake logs. I started with the wine cap beds because it was easier to get hardwood chips than it was to get freshly cut maple logs from tree stands that needed thinning.
Everything I explain here is untested—this is my first time growing mushrooms outdoors, and I will make mistakes despite copious amounts of reading and taking classes. I’ll need to learn about the specific micro-climate surrounding me, and how variables affect production.
My wine cap beds follow a simple design that multiple sources suggested. I lay down cardboard, then cover it with hardwood chips, scatter some spawn across the wood chips, add more hardwood chips, add more cardboard, and repeat. I started late enough in the season that there will almost certainly be no establishing of the mycelium in the bed until next spring, which is unfortunate. Starting this late means that the first fish of mushrooms will be delayed by months, since they first need to colonize the substrate fully before they begin fruiting. Furthermore there is a risk that the extreme cold will kill off the spawn, which would be less likely if the colony was already well established.
One long, continuous, mounded bed hugs the north side of a small copse on the property. We’re aiming for as much dappled shade as possible to limit direct sunlight that can dry out mushroom substrate or fruiting bodies.
We’ll need to monitor the impact of the amount of sun the mound bed gets in the winter. A good 4 to 6 inches of wood chips blanket the top layer of spawn, hopefully retaining adequate moisture. I am a bit lucky that the early snowfall has melted into the mound over the following few days, which should add to the retained moisture, but ultimately we’ll just have to see.
Later this winter or early spring I will be adding a few sensors to track humidity and temperature across the mound to help monitor water retention and nursery viability.
Other than that it’s really just a matter of waiting and hoping. If all goes well I’ll have winecap mushrooms by fall of 2024, if not earlier. Then it’s a matter of “earthing up” the mound every fall, for added insulation and food for the following season.
The shiitake logs proved to be more of a challenge, the two biggest reasons being my desire to keep tools electric where possible, and sourcing sugar maple of the correct sizes on short notice.
I knew I wanted an electric chainsaw as soon as I learned that they were viable. A friend of mine recommended Stihl as a well-established brand with a long history of quality and durability, so I naturally began by checking their catalogs. They have corded and cordless saws, which was great—I decided I wanted a corded one for now—I like being somewhat independent from the very vendor-lock-in world of tool battery systems. Unfortunately, when the Stihl website says you can order a tool, it doesn’t actually know if that tool is available.
So I ordered the corded Stihl saw I wanted, only to discover after calling their authorized reseller that no one could find one of those saws. I won’t go into the back and forth of this except to say that Stihl’s website shouldn’t be trusted when it comes to ordering their equipment.
In the end I purchased a used Stihl MSE 250C on eBay, and am in the backlog for a cordless model sometime in the next year (hopefully) for more portable work.
Next came the logs. I called around a few arborists and found one who could get me maple logs delivered in a reasonably quick turnaround. Unfortunately, he couldn’t guarantee smaller logs, so I have a couple of absolutely massive ones that are still not inoculated due to their size. At this point I am planning to convert some into oyster mushroom stumps next spring, since oysters are incredibly good at colonizing any substrate they like, even when the material has been sitting around longer than you’d like (they famously can even grow on toilet paper rolls)
The smaller logs were cut to 2- to 4-foot lengths to make them reasonable to handle (though I definitely overestimated in some cases). Next came the drilling and filling. There’s a simple attachment sold by Field & Forest that attaches drill bits to angle grinders. This drills holes incredibly quickly—much more quickly than a small handheld drill—and I churned through logs.
My process is to put a log onto the log saw horse, drill holes along the log in a rough diamond shape pattern, rotating to cover the whole log. I then use the hand inoculator to plug all the holes on the top face with sawdust shiitake spawn, put wax over the top, and then rotate the log, repeating the process until the log is completely inoculated.
This month’s post is already running a bit long, so I’ll cover meeting with some folks from the Duluth city planners and fire department about my plans in the next post, but in short, it was an absolute delight.
Thank Yous:
I’d like to thank the following folks for helping me with everything I mentioned in this post, plus one shout out I forgot last post!
Marc Goujon for suggesting that I even do this ding dang newsletter. I’m really glad you convinced me to build this into my normal monthly schedule’
Aysha Venjara and Cecilia De La Fuente for teaching the Outdoor Mushroom propagation class at Cornell Small Farms Program
Erica Frenay for teaching the Beginning Farming: Starting at Square One class at Cornell Small Farms Program
Sylvan Pritchett for teaching the Farm Woodlot Management class at Cornell Small Farms Program
Laura Erickson for being my extra pair of eyes while chainsawing. It was very nice to know that someone was listening out for any blood-curdling screams
https://www.lauraerickson.com/
Duluth Dirt for the multiple loads of very affordable hardwood chips
https://duluthdirt.com/
Field & Forest Products for providing the shiitake inoculation tools and wine cap mushroom spawn
https://www.fieldforest.net
Rick’s Tree and Stump Removal for the freshly cut sugar maple logs
https://www.rickstreeduluth.com/
Quick Call to Action:
If folks can share this with any and everyone you think would be interested I would really appreciate it! I don’t really do social media, and when I do I don’t do it well, so I rely on people spreading this sort of thing to other places for me. My first post has over 200 unique viewers already, but I’d love to see where it can go in terms of readership!