mushrooms

We got our first snow fall of the season. It was only an inch or so, but just enough to make everything pretty for a day.  Living in the north woods really makes me appreciate the winter. I love the wood stove heat, the smell of French press coffee, bacon in cast iron and wood smoke. I enjoy splitting wood and the soothing rhythm of the maul going up and down CRACKing the wood. My first couple of fires this year I got too hot and got the house up to 79 degrees. I'm back into my fire building zone. What I love most of all about winter, no snakes and no bugs. As I mentioned before this year was particularly terrible with mosquitoes. 

I taught my first class through community education this past week. It was titled DIY Holiday Gifts. I taught students how to make sugar body scrub, lip balm and soap making basics. Its all part of my effort to find alternate sources of income that still allows me to stay home with my son. I prefer giving homemade gifts at the holidays, birthdays and baby showers. I also really enjoy getting homemade gifts. I won't lie, a gift card to the local coffee shop is really great too. I really hate going to the mall in search of that perfect gift, fighting crowds, traffic and worst of all listening to that mall Christmas music. Since I live in the woods now, the closest mall is an hour away so its even more annoying to go. This means I start compiling Christmas gifts in October. I bake/can items, make soap and try out making new crafts.

This year I have been playing around with home made table center pieces. This one I made out of aspen logs and drilled out the centers for tea lights and my crystal collection. My next one will be made out of birch logs, the white color of them look more winter like.

A friend of mine gave me some shiitake mushroom plugs that she got for free last March. These looked like the wood plugs you get with Ikea furniture with white marshmallow foam all over them. We have no idea if they are still good or not, so we decided to do an experiment. It is not the time of year recommend for shiitake mushroom plugs to be tapped in from what I have been reading. Since all the plugs are free we will not be out anything if they don't grow, plus we are getting our technique down for spring. I had Travis cut down a small oak tree that was growing in too crowed for a space near our house.

My friend came over one Sunday morning with bloody Mary mix, vodka and all the accompaniments. We had a beverage and got to work. We drilled holes the size of the plugs and tapped in the plugs with a mallet. I'm not sure if the some of the plugs were rotten or what, but some just flattened right out instead of going into the log.

After we got all the plugs in I covered them with melted beeswax.

I moved the logs into the woods with walk in access from my house. Part of growing mushrooms is that you need to water the logs. I do not have running water outside of my house, so any watering I do in the spring will have to be by hauling 5 gallon buckets of water. This is why I kept them so close. I'm hoping for a big snow fall and wet spring. When you look at nature mushrooms grow on logs with out being watered by a human so I might end up doing a total hands off experiment to see what we can get.