You gotta love 'shrooms

Last night we ate the first mushroom grown on our place. You expect homegrown veggies to taste better (and they sure do), but we never thought it would make that much difference with a mushroom. It does. Neither of us have ever tasted such a delicious, great textured button mushroom.

We have two types of button mushrooms as well as oysters growing. One type of the buttons is starting to fruit.

It was super easy.

• We put horse manure and cut up hay in an ice chest and added water.
• We turned this mixture every couple of days to speed up the composting. As it composted, it got super hot (you couldn't even hold your hand in it), thus killing any unwanted critters.
• After about 20 days, we put the compost into plastic lined boxes, and added the spores.
• Once the spores filled the soil, which it has done with the one type of buttons, we added a sprinkling of peat moss onto it, opened it up and spray it with water every day. The mushrooms are our reward.

We plan to build the mushrooms their own little underground house when we get a chance. Right now we have them in the power house, which stays a pretty constant temperature all year around. This is key with mushrooms - you don't want it getting too hot or too cold.

Starting on the Powerhouse

Sorry I haven't blogged for a while. Our routine has changed a little. We were working on the house Monday through Friday, and then doing computer work (including the blog) at the weekend. Now, we are doing all kinds of different things, any time we can get to them. We trade off working and playing with Leo, and do any 2-man jobs while Leo naps. So, now that blogging doesn't have a particular place in my routine, I don't seem to do it at all!

Now that the house is so far along, our main focus for this year will be developing the other systems further. We will be increasing our power, water and food systems considerably.

We still have some building work to do, which we have started. We are converting the first building we built and lived in into a bathroom, powerhouse and hallway. We have wired up the two partition walls, and put a scratch stucco coat on the powerhouse section. More photos.

We have started our first round of seedlings inside in soil blocks. Once they are big enough and the weather is warm enough, we will be transplanting them out in the garden.

Leo is doing great. While I stucco, Abe has been taking him for huge hikes. He is a natural born hiker it seems. They walk down in creeks and the river, and it's hard to get Leo to leave the water's edge. For photos for this month, click here.