Tao In Agriculture-Natural Farming

[voidisyinyang]

sounds good but complicated.

 

All these special products.

 

I just harvested awesome 2 pounds of shiitake shrooms off a downed oak tree I sawed out wedges for putting in sawdust mycelium.

 

I was supposed to water it - I did once before I put wax over it. Most of the wedges fell out. I expected that to be the end of it.

 

I forgot about it - I put in the mycelium two years ago. Turns out shiitakes sometimes don't fruit until 2 years and sure enough - fruit they did big time!!

 

haha. So scrumptious! Meaty - medicinal - gourmet.

 

The place I ordered the sawdust stopped internet sales - you have to call them to get a sale.

 

No big deal - there's two more big oak trees downed.

 

I really should order more sawdust.

 

It's a bit of work unless it will rain some more. Not sure if it will rain.

 

I used up a lot of old candles - not sure we have enough old candles to spare.

 

You're supposed to use some cheese wax - but again that's too complicated for me. I got to look up cheese wax and find out where to order it, etc.

 

I don't have plastic - so ordering online or over the phone is not the norm - unless they take checks.

 

Anyway I'm sure everything you say on this is true - and I appreciate knowing there is this fermentation method.....

 

It's just like making kombucha though - you need the "starter" yeast or bacteria or whatever. So first I would have to track that down - I tried to see if the local co-op sold some starter kombucha but I had no luck yet. Guess I gotta call - or maybe I did already -- can't remember. But anyway....

 

yeah I fermented some cabbage a couple times - it was fun and I loved the effect -- but you gotta make sure not to use too much salt or just enough - and make sure the lids don't get too much pressure build up...

 

Anyway yeah I agree that humanure compost is slow - I did speed things up by using biochar - since the black heats up the compost faster and also the charcoal provides nanopore homes for the bacteria. Only again to make biochar without making more pollution - you need a fancy set up which is too complicated for me. I was just making biochar the old fashioned way - but that was also very labor intensive. I don't mind labor intensive if I have the time. But I don't have the time now.

 

Anyway - yeah so when I used leaves - the compost for humanure wasn't fast enough....

 

But anyway if there is a rotavirus - you can just use garlic to knock it out - provided you can get away with smelling like garlic - if not then you gotta use fresh greens to counteract the garlic smell....

 

So suffice it to say - yeah I will compost for a year (I'm done adding to that pile) and then just rely on green manure in the mean time.

 

I'm not even sure I will compost more humanure - because of this time commitment - I don't own the property and who knows when I might have to move, etc.

 

Anyway land ownership is the first issue - for example in Brazil it's now illegal for big landowners to let their land sit idle without crop cultivation for 7 years - after that people can just grow food on their land as a human right issue - even if they don't own the land.

 

Rock on. The rich need to stop whining about their land that they don't even use or even see - just whine about how property values have not gone up enough in value. haha. Speculation.

 

Anyway so hopefully that will happen here - the poor should have a right to grow food on idle land...

[ion]

sounds good but complicated.

 

All these special products.

 

There is absolutely no use of products in Natural Farming. All inputs are homemade out of readily available materiels found in nature specificly in your local, not in a far off place.

 

All of the micro-organisms are collected from an area within a few miles of the grow sight preferably, but certainly never bought as in a laboratory grown product, or imported from another region.

 

If it was, imported or bought, they wouldn't be IMO(indigenous micro organisms.)

 

The starters dont need to be bought. You would just need a supply of wheat or rice or oat or any kind of bran or flour. You add 1 part flour, to 1 part water, put a cover over it and secure the cover with a rubberband or twine. By "a cover" I mean a cloth type thing to keep bugs and dirt out. In about three days the culture of wild yeasts and bacteria, your sour dough starter will be active. You'll see bubbles in it.

 

With your shiitakes, you can use your used log as spawn, and or get the mycelium to grow onto cardboard.

 

Shiitake will grow on sawdust or straw too but youd want to pasteurize it first which is not difficult to do. Youd also want to supplement the sawdust/straw with bran or something like that. Not flour though. Innoculate the stuff, then fill bads with it and keep it on the cool side of warm for shiitakes.

 

On that note, Im officialy handing this thread over to pythagorefulllotus to use as his gardening journal.

Edited October 4, 2013 by ion

[voidisyinyang]

used log - the two new downed oaks are already colonized by other mushrooms.

 

So i don't think I could innoculate them with any "farmed" shroom -

 

I did leave a big shiitake shroom on the log I innoculated 2 years ago - just so it can go to seed hopefully.

 

A squirrel took a bit out of one of the shrooms but didn't finish it yet - so hopefully this big one will go to seed.

 

it rained half an inch a couple nights ago but no new shiitake shrooms yet....

 

maybe too cold or maybe that's all the mycelium is going to produce....

 

I don't know.

 

Still they taste awesome.

 

There were huge puffballs in the produce warehouse today -- didn't know people ate those.

 

I bought bulk wheat and brown rice - so I could use that to create a fermentation - but it's already down to 50s and 40s at night here and it's just gonna get colder.

 

We'll have some more warm stretches but the trend is to get frost soon - probably a couple weeks away.

 

So anyway I stopped doing humanure compost and will just do leaves/kitchen waste/urine/wood ash for a 2nd compost pile.

 

I'll let that first one sit for a year.

 

The 2nd one won't have humanure -- so it will be ready in a few months I think -

 

too much wood ash - they say it kills the compost - but also to have wood ash provides key micronutrients.

 

So I don't know - I figure balanced with leaves and kitchen waste and urine - should be o.k.

[ion]

used log - the two new downed oaks are already colonized by other mushrooms.

 

So i don't think I could innoculate them with any "farmed" shroom -

 

I did leave a big shiitake shroom on the log I innoculated 2 years ago - just so it can go to seed hopefully.

 

A squirrel took a bit out of one of the shrooms but didn't finish it yet - so hopefully this big one will go to seed.

 

it rained half an inch a couple nights ago but no new shiitake shrooms yet....

 

maybe too cold or maybe that's all the mycelium is going to produce....

 

I don't know.

 

Still they taste awesome.

 

There were huge puffballs in the produce warehouse today -- didn't know people ate those.

 

I bought bulk wheat and brown rice - so I could use that to create a fermentation - but it's already down to 50s and 40s at night here and it's just gonna get colder.

 

We'll have some more warm stretches but the trend is to get frost soon - probably a couple weeks away.

 

So anyway I stopped doing humanure compost and will just do leaves/kitchen waste/urine/wood ash for a 2nd compost pile.

 

I'll let that first one sit for a year.

 

The 2nd one won't have humanure -- so it will be ready in a few months I think -

 

too much wood ash - they say it kills the compost - but also to have wood ash provides key micronutrients.

 

So I don't know - I figure balanced with leaves and kitchen waste and urine - should be o.k.

The original method the japanese came up with for reinnoculating new logs was to build new log stacks and whap the old and new stacks with clubs. It helped distribute the spore mass of the mushrooms and the damaged surface of the new logs were the innoculation points for the spores to hopefully germinate on.

 

It was pretty random but worked well enough. Im pretty sure the log culturing was done in the forest where the shiitake grows naturally, so they had that advantage though. I believe it is alder that shiitake naturally decomposes, thati could be wrong tho but the name shiitake denotes its habitat. If Im right, the translation is "alder mushroom" Shii=alder, take =mushroom. Most Japanese shrooms have the "take" suffix as in shiiTAKE, maiTAKE, or matsuTAKE.

 

for log culture, you want to innoculate in the spring. Take a healthy section of a live tree and innoculate befor a competitor takes hold. You want to 'noc 'em up, as they say right after you cut a section. Cut the section while the tree is still dormant and not full of sap yet; before it puts out its leaves uring dormancy but not too early. The section would idealy be about 3 ft long and not more then a foot wide, but that is ideally. You could noc up a stump with a 24 inch ddiameter, but for stacking logs and ensuring quick colinization the 3 ft length of a less then a foot wide log is ideal.

 

If you plug the log or uses wedges in the early spring you should have shrooms in the fall. A method for ensuring repetitive flushing, usually 3 or 4 but possably more smaller flushes, is to dunk the logs-meaning, submerge them for 24 hours. This is almost shiitake specific though and doesnt necessarily mean all shrooms benifit from dunking. Other wise you can water them.

 

But if you cultivate the mycelium on an airy substrate like saw dust or straw, you can harvest perpetually so long as the conditions for growth and fruiting are met.

 

You can also work up mycelium as though you were growing in bags, but use it to make an outdoor bed in the groun that should produce shrooms anualy. You can ad mulch every year to freshen up the nute supply.

 

With outdoor cultivation of fresh logs, pasteurization is un necessary. It is fairly necessary to pasteurize straw first though, but fresh saw dust, fresh wood chips and also wood products(lumber) arent necessarily things that require pasteurization.

 

The idea of pasteurization in mushroom culturing is for alot of reasons. Sterile technique works great if you are in a controlled environment and can maintain sterile conditiond till full colinization but its a high risk atmosphere for competitor micro-organisms. its the perfect setting for contamination because you create a perfect substrate with perfect nutritional content, then kill all the inhabitants by sterilizing one way or another, then you grow it in warm conditions so if a local mold or bacteria gets in there it takes off you have to toss the whole thing. It definitely has its pros too.

 

Pasteurizing on the other hand is when we bring the temp of the substrate up to 185 degrees and down to 120. I usually just shoot for the middle, 140 to 165 and hold it there for 30-60 minutes then let it cool down to 80ish, by then all the competitor organisms have been killed off by then, but the thermal tolerant bacteria, yeast, and acetomycetes survive and remain on/in the substrate.

 

This biological community acts as an immune system to the prefered fungi, and in know way competes with the mushroom, in fact, it beneifits the fungus to have these creatures on there. The organisms that remain on the straw or whatever after pasteurization will hold of competitors for up to 10 days which is usually long enough for the mycelium to colonize an airy, nutritios substrate like supplemented straw or sawdust.

 

My method has been to set the hot water heater to 175 then use the bath tub with a submerged sea bag stuffed with straw till it cooled down.

 

for smaller batches i use large stock pots on the stove with the substrate packed into pillow cases and held down with bricks or the like. Using a candy thermotetr or a meat thermometer you can easily maintain propper temps for the hour ish it needs to be on there.

 

Whenever doing anything like this with water you have to keep the "field capacity" in mind. Thats the water to substrate ratio. You want it saturated with water, but dry to the touch, definitely not dripping unless squeezed hard. Too wet causes anerobic conditions, too dry and the mycelium will completely dry out everything as it grows, then it wont grow onto the dry stuff.

 

When pasteurizing, going too far over like 185 plus will kill the good organisms and leave the substrate vulnerable and susceptable to contamination.

 

So, thouroughly pasteurize in a pillow case or a canvasish bag, then hang the bag over night, the next day it should be at field capacity and should be innoculatedd promptly.

 

However, if you have a washing machine you can put the pillowcases in the washer on spin cycle, when its done its at field capacity, then you dont have to put off innoculation til morning.

 

If you do a log section at the end of winter early spring, it shouldd be at field capacity already, you may even thouroughly water the tree if you can right before logging it if its been dry/ and/or if you can.

 

Any kind of wood prouct from hardwood lumber to woodchips/saw dust should be soake submerge (wood floats) in water for 48 hours, then hung to "dry" to field capacity.

 

Cardboar deserves mentionhere too. Same thing as far as soaking. More then 24 hours, possably boiled if its dirtyish. Mycelium of wood decomposers like oyster will grow right on there. Shiitake should too especially if the mycelium is connected to a nutrition source already. If it has a chunk of substrate on it, it will use its own nutes to colonize the card board, then the cardboard can be used to store the culture, or as spawn.

 

My "d" key is busted so sorry for the EXTRA typos above the usual.

[ion]

If you picke up rice to make the starter, you will need to grind it, either in a blender, or bit by bit in a coffee griner. You need flour or bran so grining it will produce flour.

 

Again, just mix 1 part flour to one part water. Blend it togeather into a slurry. Use a container with a wide mouth to collect organisms easier, plus to allow for better air contact. Cover the container with a cloth an secure it with a tie, or a rubber ban. Place it outsie out of direct sun-light so it doesn't dry out. But put it some where that the critters in your area wont discover it. I lost my last sour dough starter to a fox one night.

 

Check on it every 24 hours an give it a little stir. Probably within 72 to 96 hours you will begin to see bubbles. Once you see bubbles, give it another 24 to 48 hours, then feed it.

 

To feed it, tranfer it to a larger container and add a fresh flour/water slurry made the same way you made the initial starter(1 part to 1 part). Blend it togeather, but this time, keep it inside. Stir it every 24 hours for for 2 days or until it is obviously active. You coul a a spoonfull of yogurt or kefir if you want an mix that in to it at this point if you want but it should work fine. Once the fed batch becomes active, (bubbles) which will happen much sooner, probably within that 2 days, you can cover with a lid and store in your fridge til your reay to use it. It shoul not mold over because its colonize by the yeasts an bacteria.

 

Now you have starter for decomposing excrement or making yummy home made bread.

 

This is not too dissimilar to the product called EM-4. EM-4 is often sold for breakown of excrement in septics an out houses. Its also sold for use on plants.

 

EM-4, aka Effective Micro-organisms 4, is a prouct from japan containing laboratory grown micro-organisms, namely yeasts, lactic acid bacteria, an a photosynthetic algae.

 

Sourough starter is a collective of various yeasts andlactic acid bacteria. You can also add a teaspoon of live vinegar, like braggs applecider unpasteurized vinegar with the mother(meaning with live culture) an mix that in the sourdough starter to add acetobacter to the list of micro organisms.