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Today the Way of the Preserver and I finished making the rocket mass heater. We will finish details like deciding where the chimney will go and cobbing elements for after we move it to its semi-final location. Once the larger chamber is filled with insulating wood ash, it will be too heavy to move in a car without removing a lot of messy ash. I'm putting my word in there to have it inside the yurt, when we build one, so we can do some winter camping. Pictures are forthcoming.
Today I bought a King Straphoeria at Pete's Frootique to try to collect spores from it. I've also finished scraping puffball spores for storage in the freezer. Puffballs* are tasty. They're also micorhizal, which means they are symbiotic associates and help the roots of trees collect nutrients. They even pass carbohydrates from trees that have more access to sunlight to trees growing in shadier areas. It turns out most woody plants actually rely on fungal associates (Stamets, 26).
In Mycellium Running, (a book I heartily reccommend) Paul Stamets suggests innoculating young trees in a slurry of water and spores, to help give them a boost in life. If you're lucky, you might even get fruiting mushrooms as well as fruits from your trees! (Stamets, 28). So I will use these spores to do just that at our next Halifax Fruit Tree Planting Day.**
I also bought some Enoki, because I'm feeling adventurous about my mushrooms. To my delight, I found that the stem-butt was still attached to the mushrooms along with some sawdust medium. I've cut that off and am encouraging mycellium to grow on some damp cardboard (As seen in Stamets, 148). When the cardboard is well-colonized, I'll transfer the mycellium to sawdust in a burlap sack. Maybe by the spring I will have more enoki! Maybe not as long-stemmed and little-headed as those coming from a grocery store but I'm sure just as tasty.
*I suppose it still needs to be said: If you take fungi from the wild for eating, be damn sure you have the right one. Fungi can be trickier than edible wild plants, even micologists sometimes make deadly mistakes. I know I've misidentified lots of fungi, and I've been eating wild things for a long time. Puffballs are one of the more distinctive mushrooms out there and harder to misidentify. A good list of foolproof edible mushrooms can be found in Mushrooming without Fear by Alexander Schwab.
**If you're interested in participating in Fruit Tree Planting Day, just contact me and I'll make sure you're on the list and I can get you a tree and price list. We order trees from Charley the Tree Guy and while you pay for the tree and transport costs, our team of volunteers makes sure to plant it properly and give good growing instructions.
Today I bought a King Straphoeria at Pete's Frootique to try to collect spores from it. I've also finished scraping puffball spores for storage in the freezer. Puffballs* are tasty. They're also micorhizal, which means they are symbiotic associates and help the roots of trees collect nutrients. They even pass carbohydrates from trees that have more access to sunlight to trees growing in shadier areas. It turns out most woody plants actually rely on fungal associates (Stamets, 26).
In Mycellium Running, (a book I heartily reccommend) Paul Stamets suggests innoculating young trees in a slurry of water and spores, to help give them a boost in life. If you're lucky, you might even get fruiting mushrooms as well as fruits from your trees! (Stamets, 28). So I will use these spores to do just that at our next Halifax Fruit Tree Planting Day.**
I also bought some Enoki, because I'm feeling adventurous about my mushrooms. To my delight, I found that the stem-butt was still attached to the mushrooms along with some sawdust medium. I've cut that off and am encouraging mycellium to grow on some damp cardboard (As seen in Stamets, 148). When the cardboard is well-colonized, I'll transfer the mycellium to sawdust in a burlap sack. Maybe by the spring I will have more enoki! Maybe not as long-stemmed and little-headed as those coming from a grocery store but I'm sure just as tasty.
*I suppose it still needs to be said: If you take fungi from the wild for eating, be damn sure you have the right one. Fungi can be trickier than edible wild plants, even micologists sometimes make deadly mistakes. I know I've misidentified lots of fungi, and I've been eating wild things for a long time. Puffballs are one of the more distinctive mushrooms out there and harder to misidentify. A good list of foolproof edible mushrooms can be found in Mushrooming without Fear by Alexander Schwab.
**If you're interested in participating in Fruit Tree Planting Day, just contact me and I'll make sure you're on the list and I can get you a tree and price list. We order trees from Charley the Tree Guy and while you pay for the tree and transport costs, our team of volunteers makes sure to plant it properly and give good growing instructions.
