The weather patterns of the Lower 48 and Alaska have been inverted all year. Last winter was absolutely balmy in places like Chicago and New York, while Alaska experienced record breaking snow. This summer is sweltering in the Continental US, but tepid here. In fact, the first half of July has seen the coldest average in Anchorage’s recorded history (the closest major city to us): +52 degrees.
Needless to say, gardening has been disappointing in yield, size, and speed. On yet another cool, overcast day, I thought, “Perfect mushroom weather!” It is cool and damp and we live amidst shady woods full of an Alice in Wonderland array of mushrooms and other fungi. However, because I don’t feel competent to forage for edible mushrooms in the woods, (and dare I say it – I don’t actually like them) I bought mushroom plugs to plant now and harvest next year for my husband. Today was the day to start.
The entire vocabulary for mushroom farming is different from other gardening and frankly, somewhere between gross and disturbing. Instead of buying seeds, one buys “plug spawn.” Rather than plant them, one “inoculates” a log or stump. Instead of growing, one “incubates.” The longer one waits to “force fruit”, the higher the “colonization.” Doesn’t this sound like something in a Bio-Hazard laboratory? Didn’t I see this in The Andromeda Strain? Still, boredom and yet another incipient rainfall can be a marvelous incentive to play outside with “plug spawn” so we gathered together the tools of the mushroom farmer and sauntered off to the birch tree base in the woods now bereft of the trunk that Bryan had dispatched earlier in the week.
