Shiitake log inoculation

Because we're never planning to be a big farm, we're hoping to be able to diversify in ways that other farms can't.  We figure, we don't have to have SUPER efficient methods for harvesting massive amounts of any one thing. We can use more/different methods that work better on a small scale. 

One thing we hope to provide to our CSA members (which has doubled since last year!) is farm grown mushrooms (and wild harvested - I can't believe I never blogged about our bounty! This year).

We've decided to start with shiitake mushrooms since they're pretty easy to grow, and lots of people like them. Shiitakes grow well in Red Oak, and we have a lot of that on our property. We ordered some mushroom spawn and some inoculation tools from Field and Forest.

Here's how you inoculate a log with shiitake spawn in our usual photo montage fashion. :)

One of the tools we ordered, and it is AMAZING! It's a modified electric grinder. Instead of the grinding wheel (which we could still attach and use if we wanted), there's a modified drill bit with a stopper. So, you basically touch this thing to the log where you want the hole, and it drills the perfect size/depth every time. Amazing.

Here's Anna in action. You can see several holes she's already drilled. The wood chips did go flying a bit, but we noticed they mostly flew sideways and not up. So, for safety reasons...

Always wear eye protection when your face is at log level. You'll notice the farm manager supervising his apprentice from a safe distance in the background.

This is what the spawn looks like. It's actually spawn in sawdust, so it mostly looks like funky sawdust....but it smells like mushroomy goodness! It's white on the outside because that's the mycelium, and it's about to fruit -- it's only good for up to 6 months in the fridge after you get it.

After holes are drilled, you use another super tool to stuff each hole with spawn. This tool is perfectly sized to push a plug of spawn into the predrilled holes. They seriously have this down to a science.

It's best to work on some overhead presses while moving newly inoculated logs to the next station...

They were unimpressed with our antics...

Next, you seal each hole and the ends of the log with cheese wax. This seals the moisture in the logs so they won't dry out, and  the mushrooms can feed off the log for years to come. The nice thing about this step is that the wax needs to be warm to be liquid (duh!). So, pick a cold, windy, rainy early spring day, light the wood stove in the basement, pump up the jams, and inoculate some logs -- sounds pretty perfect to me!

One year later...  We did two logs at a workshop last year, and it takes a year for each log to start fruiting. Once they start, however, they'll fruit for up to 6 years!  This year was our big mushroom log push, but hopefully if we do a few each year, we'll always have a rotating stock.

A river of gold

After keeping bees for two seasons, we finally extracted honey today.  Those of you who know about beekeeping, know that it's really late for us to be extracting honey. Don't worry, we removed the honey super from the hive in September, but it's been sitting in our basement waiting for a good extraction day.  We have a friend visiting, we lit the wood stove in the basement, and let the river of gold flow.  

And now, a photo montage -- it's my favorite way of showing stuff. :)

This is the honey extractor.  Anna's dad used to keep bees when Anna was a kid, and this is the extractor he used then. He stopped keeping bees, lent the extractor to a friend for many years, and now that guy has stopped keeping bees so we have it. I love all our classic handed down manual farm equipment (like our cider press).

We decided to clean out the extractor before putting the honey in it since it sat in our garage collecting dust and pine needles for a while. The farm manager supervises all activities with gusto.

Farm apprentice was not taking advantage of this learning opportunity rather he was distracted by a treat sent to him by a friend. Also, he decided the sawdust was a really cozy bed.

The inside of the extractor.  Originally, it had 4 chambers for frames, but now it's down to two. We're hoping we can find 2 more. It basically works like a centrifuge. You put the frames in, turn the crank, honey goes flying. Amazing.

We only had one honey super to do this year -- 10 frames per super.  Here, Anna removes a frame from the super.

Anna's pretty stoked about all the honey in this frame.  All the part that is capped and pale white is full of honey. :)

The remaining 9 frames in the super.  We're pretty excited.

Lisa examines the honey filled frame. 

Before extracting the honey, we have to remove the caps on all the cells.  

Like a hot knife through buttah.  OK, seriously, the knife is warm, and you just skim the wax off the top of the cells exposing the honey -- sometimes it drips onto your finger. Tragic.

"My favorite part was when Anna cut the wax off and the honey just oozed out. I just wanted to stick my face in it." -Lisa, first time honey extractor.

Here we go...Lisa makes it look so easy!

If only you could smell the goodness. You can kind of see the honey on the sides of the drum.

If the frames were uneven weights, the stand was a little wobbly. This necessitates a team effort.  For the future, we're going to build a solid stand and this thing will live in our yet-to-be-built sugar shack.

The golden goodness.  The chunks on the top are bits of wax from the comb, but it will be filtered out.

  

Look at the river of golden goodness. Sometimes your finger gets in the way.

The bucket has a strainer to catch all the wax bits. The bucket isn't really as full as it looks here.  Next year...

Anna scraped the sides to get all the goodness into the bucket....

...also so she could do this.

And there you have it. Our first honey extraction was a success. I cannot wait until we have more supers to do next year! 

450+ gallons in less than an hour!

It is a gorgeous day outside, and there are plenty of weeds to be pulled, but alas, I'm feeling less than optimal so I'm taking this time to write a much overdue post.  One of these days I'll finally get some sort of a regular schedule going on this blog...

We've all heard the talk about the benefit of using rain barrels to collect water, but it wasn't until my permaculture course that I realized just how much water we were 'wasting' by letting it just run off our house.  When we moved into our house, there were no gutters on, and we had a hard time keeping the basement from flooding with really heavy rains.  We wanted to add gutters to collect the rainwater, but we were also looking forward to the benefits of keeping the water away from the foundation of our house.

Enter rain barrel construction.  Now, you can buy rain barrels completely ready to go at many hardware stores, and there are even some cities that sell them or give them away.  We bought 3 barrels that were put together off 'Bob the Barrel Man' on Craigslist.  The put together barrels were about $75 and the plain barrels were $30, so we opted for doing the rest of the plumbing ourselves.  Our overall plan was to daisy-chain many barrels together uphill from our veggie beds, high tunnel, and duck pond so we can use the water as efficiently as possible.

Here we go...

Site prep -- remove grass, add gravel, repeat.

More prep work -- add cinder blocks on which to build a level platform.  This is the side of the house that will have the most barrels that will be used to water our veggies.

Here's the other side of the house -- these barrels will also be used for veggie watering, but also for duck pond flushing. The pond doesn't have a pond liner and is spring fed, but when we have a dry spell in the middle of the summer, it gets pretty low and can use some help.

Platform construction. I love building stuff. :)

Almost done.  We used left over cedar boards from our chick coop building.

Mighty fine!  

Unfortunately, we neglected to take any photos of the interim phase of rain barrel connection.  We had the barrel on the platform you see above connected to one other barrel, then one free standing barrel under each additional down spout.  So, in short, we had four barrels....and this is where it stayed for the winter.  We were thwarted by back ordered parts for the barrel connection, and by the time they arrived, it was too late in the fall to make our efforts worth it.  Now, one might think we would put the rain barrels in the garage or something so we could work on connecting them throughout the winter.....that would have been the logical thing to do.  Instead, they sat upside down just outside of the garage since the unfinished chicken tractor was taking up all the space in the garage.  Go figure.

At any rate, we finally got to the connecting part a week ago, so let's pick up there...

First, drill holes in the barrel -- watch out when that bit hits the barrel, it could send you flying!

Reason number 32879453785783280543 to marry Anna -- she can fit in a rain barrel.

Ear protection is essential -- and an adorable smile.

Did I mention these barrels used to hold Kalamata Olives, and they have not been cleaned?  Yum.

Yeah...

Duh....where did she go?!?!

And, if that photo montage wasn't enough...

We then used spa tubing to connect all the barrels.  We have caulked everything quite extensively, but we still have a bit of leaking going on.  Next time we empty them, we'll re-seal them, but it's ok for now as the leaks are really minor. 

It's a thing of beauty! I'm already regretting the high connection on the first two barrels, but alas, we were beginners at that point.  

Glorious.  About 500 gallons of water storage.  We have 5 more on the other side of the house, but we didn't photograph those.  

For those of you thinking that this seems excessive -- say you have 1000 sq. ft. of roof (not accounting for pitch), and you get 1 inch of rain.  You can collect 625 gallons of water from that one rain event.  Seriously.  The other day, the barrels were all totally full and overflowing after less than an hour of raining.  We still need to dig the overflow trenches to channel that water away from the house and into a more useful area, but the bulk of the work here is done. 

No till tilling

While we did decide to till the garden last year, we are not going to do it ever again.

There are things one can do to avoid tilling, and the long term effects of tilling are actually quite detrimental to the soil. Most people will tell you that they till to avoid weeds and enrich the soil.  The first year you till your land, it will produce an incredibly rich and bountiful crop.  In subsequent years, however, things won't be so great without a lot of amendments -- tilling exposes the precious topsoil resulting in topsoil loss and nutrient depletion.  As far as weeds go, there are lots of dormant weed seeds in the soil, and tilling simply brings them to to surface giving them the sun and air they need to grow.  They should thank us!

I'm not implying that tilling is some evil empire of agricultural practices, but for us, it isn't something we want to do.  For larger scale operations, it may be unavoidable, but on our scale, we're trying to avoid it. As I mentioned before, if you till, you'll need to add amendments to maintain fertile land, so why not skip the extra step and simply build soil from the ground up.

Many people claim that no-dig practices don't work and you end up with compacted soil.  This parsnip grew at a friend's house in Maine -- clearly there's no compaction there!  She's been building the soil without digging or tilling for years, and look at this bounty!  Credit: Lisa Fernandes.

Our plan is to use permaculture techniques to build soil that will get better every year.  Why simply go for sustainable (status quo) when you can make something better than how you found it?

One of the techniques we're using to improve our soil involves letting our chickens to the "tilling" work. :)  The jury is still out for us on whether or not we are going to get organic certified, so we can still do this.  If we go the organic certification route, we can't put our chickens directly on our veggie bed, but for now we're happy to have them eat weed seeds, spread manure, and generally stir things around.

In order for them to do this, they need a temporary and mobile home -- enter the chicken tractor.  It's a mobile home that we built for them that we'll move around the field.  And now, a photo montage…

Cheapo bike tires that are going to make our tractor mobile.  We ended up replacing the tubes and tires because they didn't hold air for crap.  

The bottom frame -- we struggled with how to attach the tires, but you'll see below that we figured it out quite nicely.

Oliver is always on hand for scale. :)  Bike tires need two points of attachment or they wobble all over the place.  With this setup, they are pretty secure and sturdy.

Dr. Trafton thinks it is a really good idea to ride the frame down the hill into our field.  I made her wear the helmet.

Dr. Knapp, however, thinks this is a supremely bad idea since there are no breaks and no ability to steer.  Here's what happened...

We have a floor, people.  Olive and Oliver were clearly more interested in a squirrel than being scale models.

Wall frames are up!  

…and we have a chicken door!  

We started building this in the fall, and this was our beautiful view.  Not too shabby!

Walls, big door, and more.  All we need now is a roof!

Here's the inside -- roosts and the nest boxes will go on the top ledge there.  Clearly, we built this entire thing from scrap wood we had lying around.

I heard a lot of flapping coming from the chicken yard, and this is what I found.  Wing clipping followed shortly thereafter.  Don't worry, it is just like cutting a fingernail, there is no pain involved.

Fast forward to now -- we got a corrugated plastic roof, and Dr. Trafton put it on.  Add some temporary fencing with a solar powered electric charger to keep dogs and other animals out, and the ladies are enjoying their first days on the veggie bed.  Naturally, we had to observe them for a little bit to make sure they weren't going to jump out or the dogs weren't going to try to get in.  The only dog to attempt getting in thus far is Baxter….shocker.  He learned his lesson and won't be trying it again any time soon.  Oliver is, obviously, on hand for supervising and keeping everyone in line.

Here's a better view of everything from our deck.  They worked the bed like champs, and we have since moved them to the perimeter of the bed where they're eating weed seeds.  We're going to swap out chickens for ducks once the seedlings are in the ground so they can work slug patrol.  

This is what was happening during our supervising.  This guy is such a snuggler, it is borderline ridiculous.  Please note his little smile. :)

…and then we attempted a family portrait...

So, we're really pleased with how quickly the chickens can work things over.  We're hoping to try to keep moving them around the field, especially where we've planted fruit trees.  It is our hope that we won't have to mow these areas, and we can keep to only mowing the very lower part of the field where we have no trees around which we'd have to navigate.

Stay tuned for how it works...