How to Make Forests Renewable

A number of Maryland counties give out awards to people and businesses for excellence in recycling. This year, Calvert County has followed suit. I am deeply involved in recycling for the purpose of building better soil and would like to apply for one of the awards in order to bring more publicity to the potential for recycling woody waste in the form of biochar.

My recycling bona fides could also include acceleration of carbon cycling, which is a major element of what +Paul Stamets describes as mycoforestry. When forests are logged unsustainably (as they have been repeatedly in the U.S. since the settlers arrived), then many of the extant fungi have nothing to feed on after a few years and they die away. This interrupts the carbon cycle, reducing the quality of soil with every new tree harvest. The remedy Stamets prescribes is to insure that logging residues are left in close contact with the forest floor. This gives saprophytic fungi the opportunity to thrive on the dead wood, enriching the soil, leading to more rapid regrowth, giving the endophytes and mycorrhizae an opportunity to bridge the gap.

As a forest gardener, I like to get wood chips dumped on my property to use for food forest patches. The chips could well end up as mulch elsewhere, but when my place is closer, the tree guys would just as soon leave them with me. Either way, it's recycling, but I get it down to the soil fungi right away by keeping the chips no more than 1 foot deep. After 6 months, I add horse manure and biochar to accelerate the composting process, engaging a host of other microbes to break down the dead wood into food for plants.

In addition to encouraging persistence of native mycelia subsequent to logging, Stamets suggests dusting new tree roots with edible mycorrhizal mushroom spores before planting. Some of the recommended species are chanterelles on oaks and sweet tooth on conifers. That means going back to harvest the mushrooms in subsequent years. If these edible mushroom spores are used, then it isn't a good idea to also include spores for other non-mushroom-producing mycorrhizae, because they tend to outcompete the edibles. Sweet tooth also can be found under other deciduous trees, so I might try out this suggestion when I begin planting my forest garden.

Morel Dilemma

+Paul Stamets, in Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, gives tentative support to using wood ash as an ingredient for the growing medium on an outdoor morel mushroom patch. +Tradd Cotter, author of Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation, says that Eastern U.S. morels found in the wild don't seem to have a preference for burnt areas. Tradd's research points to use of nonnutritive media for morel sclerotia to form and an underlying nutritive zone for hyphae to grow into. I am thinking that uncharged biochar (as opposed to wood ash) could act as the nonnutritive medium instead of the peat or coir Cotter recommends. After all, biochar would be a lot more native than peat from Canada or coir from the tropics.

I have a tulip poplar in my backyard, conveniently near my log spawn run area where I could make a morel rain garden by berming around the dripline and directing overflow from my rain barrel into the depression. There I could set up two plots, one with coir and one with biochar.  Then, using a slurry from a single morel species, I could inoculate the beds and see what grows. This, of course, means that I have to find time in the coming weeks to hunt for morels.

I wish it were as easy as this video makes homegrowing morels out to be, but you can get a general idea of how slurries are used to inoculate and how much fun it would be to harvest the mushrooms. Stamets and Cotter both cover spore mass slurries in their books.

Pharmaceutical Fungi

Mushrooms are like insects - there are some that can cause disease, but the vast majority are beneficial. The proof of whether many of the mushrooms I started cultivating last year will emerge will begin soon. I am very confident of having a good crop of shiitakes, as the few logs I started in early 2015 are already wanting to explode with mushrooms. The lion's mane, hen of the woods, reishi, and three types of oyster mushroom are still in question. I am getting turkey tail, but I can also find natives quite easily.

The turkey tail tea I am sipping while composing this may ward off prostate cancer, should it darken my backdoor. Paul Stamets devotes a page-and-a-half to the medicinal value of turkey tail in his book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. In my upcoming talk to Calvert Eats Local, I plan to concentrate on the medicinal value of gourmet mushrooms that are often available commercially in our area. These include those just mentioned and two others, almond portobello and garden giant, which I am also attempting to grow. Their medicinal value ranges from helping the immune, cardiovascular, and/or digestive system to fighting cancer.

Mushrooms offer some unique compounds that you probably won't get from eating plants. Since I have eaten plants all my life, but few mushrooms, chances are that my body hasn't received its due from the fungal kingdom. Common ways to get these compounds are by either cooking the mushrooms at low temperature (< 220 F) or by extracting them with alcohol. Some of the compounds that come out with alcohol won't be extracted through cooking, and visa-versa. Since taking a homemade alcohol extract of shiitake, I've instantly enjoyed what seems to be better digestion and sounder sleep.

The medicinal benefits from shiitake also extend to helping the immune system, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and cardiovascular system.  They are anti-viral, anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic and they suppress many cancer cell types, e.g. breast, prostate, colorectal. They are also delicious. One cannot eat enough mushrooms to get the full range of unique benefits found in each species, but extracts and teas could supplement your diet to help. If you have a particular medical concern, then there is probably a mushroom that you can benefit by eating a lot of, while supplementing with others.

One mushroom that many people would like to eat a lot of is the morel, mainly for its special flavor, but also for immunity support. I don't cultivate them yet, but finding them this year should be easier with the help of guidance from one of our area's premier mycophiles. Things to look for are stands of tulip poplar in areas where moisture collects. Searching should begin for black morels when average night air temperature is above 50 F. Morels appear for about 6 weeks in early spring.

Oyster Farms on Land

Let me clear up some common misconceptions about mushrooms. We used to have a saying in the Navy, that the Combat Information Center (CIC) watch was like being a mushroom, since we were always kept in the dark and fed sh*t. The truth about mushrooms is a little more nuanced. Yes, they do enjoy shade, but most tolerate a bit of direct sun, and most grow in the soil or on wood, though some are cultivated in manure or compost.

It's the manure part that bothers people, leading them to eschew mushrooms. In fact, I'm not particularly thrilled about buying button mushrooms from the store, seeing all the growing media residue still clinging to them. Thing is, the manure, if used, was probably composted and possibly topped by a pasteurized,non-fecal casing soil to remove pathogens and interfering fungi in the process of being implanted with the fungus you'd be eating. That's better than you can say for the soils that grow many of your vegetables. Farmers often apply manure to their soil, allowing as little as 3 months for natural processes to kill off pathogens before harvesting the crop. So, wash your vegetables, as well as your mushrooms, before cooking or consuming them.

We could do better by the Bay than to spread manure on farmland. About 20% of Maryland farms are restricted in the types or amounts of manure they can use now because of the Phosphorus Management Tool (PMT) regulations. Phosphorus is an important pollutant to manage, but Nitrogen is also a growing concern, having negative impacts on at least 5% of affected ecosystems' endangered species. Much of the sandy soils in the Coastal Plain don't accumulate nutrients and pass them through quickly to aquifers and waterways. Rather than base manure application limits on soil phosphorus content, we should be looking at nutrient flows.

One of compost's key characteristics is that it holds on to chemicals, such as phosphorus, acting as a filter in the soil to limit the amount of nutrients that make it through to the Bay. The same can be said of biochar and mycelium, but to an ever greater degree. Blaming the PMT on the decline in the number of Maryland farms ignores the whole issue of nutrient pollution, while the PMT ignores the flow of nutrients from the soil. Adopting a more rigorous protocol for reducing nutrient pollution seems to be warranted, but we need to avoid burdening small farms with added costs and management effort. Options in the PMT for measuring reductions in actual pollution to waterways, rather than strict limits on fertilizers, could be the way to go.

Of all the methods mentioned, I think mycelium is the most promising (though farming with biochar would do enormous good). In Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, Paul Stamets discusses implanting bunker spawn in trenches to filter runoff from areas of concentrated pollution. I'm starting to do this on my own property as I acquire mycelium in my various experiments.
Oyster mushroom mycelium is supposed to be good for this use. Once the mycelium is established it can flourish, if fed new wood chips occasionally. The great thing about it is that farmers could harvest and sell the highly nourished oyster mushrooms that would grow out of these mycofilters.

Cornucopia

The idea of scarcity, when it comes to food, seems a long ways off these days. Even the unemployed and destitute have free kitchens and food banks to avoid starvation. I imagine that starvation these days is mostly on the level of particular nutrients. Food deserts exist where nutrient deficient food is the norm.

The immediately obvious way to ensure a more nutrient dense diet is to grow your own produce, and if food ever does become grossly scarce, that choice brings a little more security along with it. Since I really dig gardening, that's my chosen solution, but it's really not an option for those whose schedules are already crammed to bursting.

If you can't afford the time, transportation, trepidation, and toll of routinely dining out, cooking your own food is a good way to go. According to Michael Pollan, the most important thing we can do for our health is to cook our own meals. I've found that I can make just about any produce on hand taste good with the help of recipes available online, using tools such as the Perfect Produce app.

If you find grocery shopping difficult, and don't mind a little adventure in your diet, a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) arrangement may be for you. The type that will save you some time at the grocery store offers pre-packaged items from the local harvest and might include meal kits and processed items such as breads. Here, we have Taste of Southern Maryland offering in-season, locally grown, nutrient dense foods delivered by priority mail with weekly plans scaled to your needs. Like growing your own, this approach seems like a good way to make your meals more veggie-centric.

If the chore of cooking is too much to handle, Calvert County (and many others) host Meals on Wheels to eligible (invalid or shut-in) persons. If you don't qualify for that free service, you can drive a short distance and get the same menu by signing up for lunch at one of the local Senior Centers for $3 to $5, depending on your age.

Our next local food outing will be tonight's Calvert Eats Local meeting, which is a pot-luck this month. There is usually a presentation, with next month's to be given by your's truly on the topic of gourmet mushrooms.

Off the Beaten Path

When we first came to Maryland, it wasn't long before we decided to pay a visit to some local farms which surround us. Driving until we saw a welcoming sign, we tentatively approached what turned out to be a ramshackle farm with goats scrounging amidst the junk heaps. Before we could quietly turn around and leave unnoticed, we encountered the Amish owner, with whom we held a brief, polite exchange of pleasantries and then departed, a little unnerved by the messy reality of farm life. I am sure today, that any visitors I bring to my 'mini-farm' have similar troubling reactions after trying to mentally screen out whole sections of the landscape that contain industrial detritus (which I employ for making biochar). It's slowly improving, as I landscape the area and shift the production into more hidden parts of the property, but it's a multi-year project.

For the farms in the Maryland Governor's Agriculture Hall of Fame, refinements are often multi-generational projects. The Hall of Fame, established in 1991, includes 46 farm families from 23 counties who have been honored for their high standards of conduct; personal values; contributions to their community; and performance, leadership, innovation, and achievement in agriculture. Calvert County has been honored to host more than their share of these stellar farms, including Taney Place, belonging to the late Y.D. Hance, Maryland's first Secretary of Agriculture. The latest addition to the list is Swann Farms out near the end of Chaneyville Road in Owings. All of these farms have something to offer to those interested in various aspects of agriculture or who just want wholesome food. +Swann Farms, for instance, offers u-pick produce of various types throughout the year.

Our first (faltered) foray into agri-tourism could have been better informed had we initially found the Hall of Fame or one of the local guides put out by the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission. I would hope that all of these farms exemplify the ideals expressed in the documentary film, "Out to Pasture: The Future of Farming?" put together by students in the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. The film lauds deindustrialization of farming, especially with regard to animal husbandry.

Thought for Food

If Michael Bloomberg throws his hat into the ring this year, he will get my vote because I love the programs being conducted at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Bloomberg, a fellow Hopkins alumnus, gave over a Billion $ to the school three years ago, so the research they conduct is likely to have a significant impact, both locally and farther afield.

Let me list the program elements under the CLF that seem to jive with my view and have direct impacts in Maryland:

• The Aquaponics Project - learn about aquaponics and its potential
• Food Policy Council training - to create systemic and meaningful improvements in the food system through collaboration amongst various sectors – community, government, nonprofit, and private. Almost 280 food policy councils now exist throughout the country.
• Maryland Food System Map - op. cit.
• Improving food security and food sovereignty within the greater Baltimore community through education and financing.
• Documentaries about the food system.
• Community Food Assessments using a structured tool to measure needs and progress.
• Meatless Mondays campaign - stepping into healthier, more humane diets.
• Lectures on Food System Sustainability - watch for yourself!