Hugelkultur in a stump

So my neighbor has had this dead tree snag next to his driveway for so long that it was threatening to fall over and block it.  He decided a couple months ago that it had to go and fired up the chain saw.  It didn't take long to get it down, and we carted it over to my hugelkultur staging area.  Lots of rotten wood for me to build more mounds with!

But back to the stump that was left. There was a large cavity extending below grade, so I poured in a wheelbarrow load of sand, threw some squash seeds on top, and raked some of the rotted wood on top of it all. 

Fast forward to today and what do we have?

That butternut squash is doing great! There are two vines running out of the top and the right side of the picture, each about 10' long with a hefty size squash.  The only thing I could have done better would have been to add 2 wheelbarrow loads of sand to the stump.  That's quite a bit of volume eaten away below the top of the stump.

Lingzhi, known in the west as Ganoderma.

I had some business to take care of in downtown Augusta, so I parked in the shade of a massive live oak tree and set out on foot.  As I was walking, I noticed the stump of another live oak that had been cut at ground level quite some time ago.  It had rotted away considerably, and in the center of it was a Lingzhi mushroom:

 What struck me about this particular specimen was that it had a rougher, alligator-skin like surface rather than the usual sanded-and-varnished appearance of most Ganodermas.  There was no stem present, and the underside is pure white.

I've read about the medicinal properties of Ganoderma soup, maybe part of this one will have to get a bath in the crock-pot.

Mystery mushroom

Here's a picture of a polypore that I scraped off of an old hickory stump.  The tree had been cut down at least 5 years ago, and the stump is in the end stage of its rot.  Any guesses as to the name?

How to plant acorns

This was an experiment from last year that turned out far better than I expected.  My starting materials were saw oak acorns I collected fresh off the tree in late August, and boletes from the shopping mall.  No, they don't sell boletes at the shopping mall, they overmulch and overwater their oak trees in the parking lot, so right after a heavy rain, there is usually a new flush of them free for the collecting. Here's what I came home with. 

The bucket contains a mix of 50:50 composted manure and peat moss, the acorns get dumped into the bucket, and then the boletes go into the blender with some water.  The bolete gazpacho then goes into the bucket and it is time to plant some acorns. 

Next post I will let you know how it turned out.

May harvests

It's been a while since I last blogged, and in that time, I have had potatoes and peas to harvest.  These were the last of the pre-hugelkultur crops I put in, and they had a hard time of it.  A cold March meant that I waited until the end of May to harvest, unlike last year when the unseasonable warm winter had crops ready to harvest at the end of April.  I really didn't put much effort into the potatoes and peas this year; most of my time was spent planning and preparing hugelbeets for the summer crops. 

Variability of precipitation has been a readily apparent facet of our new climate.  We had 2-1/4 inches of rain for the entire month of May, and in the first 10 days of June so far, we have had 6-1/4.  One good thing about all the rain this last week: I scored big on a mushroom hunt today.  I've come to the conclusion that the best place to hunt mushrooms, other than old growth forest, is at shopping malls.  The reason is that they overmulch and overwater the trees in their parking lots, creating perfect conditions for fungal cultures.  Today I was able to collect 4 different types of bolete, some non-descript Laccaria type, and some marble sized puffballs.  I also came across a near picture perfect specimen of Amanita muscaria, save for the fact that the cap was a shade of yellow rather than red.  Perhaps it was due to age and the color had not developed yet, as there were several in the area and most were still in their button stage.

I brought home a good haul from this mycological cornucopia, and I'm going to use them to fix the front yard.  I planted some semi-dwarf apple, plum, and pear trees in the front yard in 2010 and so far they have been disappointing -- failing to set fruit and just surviving, certainly not thriving.  I have gotten a good stand of crimson clover to grow in this area, so I'm puzzled as to why the trees are lagging.  What I am going to try is a mixture of retro-hugelkultur and heavy mulching with a fungal drench.

"Retro-hugelkultur" is a technique I developed that uses a garden hose and decaying branches about an inch in diameter.  First you go around the area with the hose and use the water pressure to drill holes into the ground.  Depending on what you run into, the hole can be 8" to 2' deep.  Then you shove the decaying branch into the hole, maybe giving it a good tap with a sledge hammer.  Not exactly the way to go about doing real hugelkultur, but it's faster with less soil disturbance. 

I've already put 4 to 6 of these 'hugelsticks' around my fruit trees, and today I finished mulching them with a 50:50 mix of wood chips and aged horse manure.  To top it off, I put my mushroom haul through the blender, added it to some aerated compost tea to which I had previously added some blended biochar, and drenched the mulch with this inoculant.  Now to wait and see what the results are.

Turkey tail toxin treatment

I'm posting over on permies.com about how to do you own mycoremediation.  One of the common species used in mycoremediation is Trametes versicolor, which can be a striking example of a fungus to come across in nature.  A standing dead tree, once infected by T. versicolor, can give rise to a huge column of fruiting bodies up and down the length of the trunk.  Like this:

These are a little small and pale to be T. versicolor, and after studying my field guide section on 'Polypores and other Shelf-like Fungi', I still haven't made a definitive identification.  Nevertheless, it probably does a good job metabolizing lignin, so it is good starting material for a mycoremediation experiment. 

Now I need to hack my way up to this trunk and scrape off of the fungus to make some inoculate.  More updates as this project progresses.

Okra, sweet potatoes, and peanuts.

Can you tell I live in the Deep South from that title?  There is a reason certain foods are featured in certain cuisines -- they grow well there! In fact, I've had volunteers from last year's crop for all three of these pop up on their own.  But since I went and dug down 8" and built up 18" to make my hugelbeds, I'm starting from new seed this time.  Now we will see what they can really do. 

Peanuts and sweet potatoes are low spreading crops, and okra is the tall crop (I've had some go as tall as 8' before the frost got them), so that leaves a middle-size, bushy type crop to fill out the triad.  This year, I'm filling that niche with eggplant and hot peppers. 

Agricultural research has a big blind spot when it comes to intercropping, with most of the serious studies taking place in Third World countries.  American universities are still in the thrall of agribusiness, with its unquestioned acceptance of (large) monocultures.  But the days of big agribusiness may be coming to a close.  High fossil fuel inputs to agriculture in the way of diesel fuel for tractors and fertilizer manufacture aren't sustainable.  Pesticide and herbicide use to create an otherwise sterile culture medium for one crop plant isn't sustainable.  What is sustainable is growing a polyculture, with decaying organic matter as fertilizer, and clever and labor-intensive methods used to foil weeds and pests. 

My 25' row of potatoes is still growing, compared to last year, when potato harvest was around the first of May.  Even though spring was late in coming this year, the summer heat is holding off and giving the potato plants time to grow and set 'taters.  And this year I am having little to no bug problem.  Maybe a few small holes on just a few plants.  I don't know whether to attribute it to the regular compost tea applications, or the companion planting of red clover and cilantro that surround the potato row, but something is working right.  It bothers me as a scientist that I can't isolate and rank all the success factors, but in consolation, maybe I am learning how to be a successful gardener in a multi-, multi-variate world.