Bypass

I watched a pretty gross show with Tucker called "Gaslit" and wanted to go into detail about how gross it was: how it used the excuse of being "of its time" to be super mysogynistic and racist in great detail, then it glossed over the real-world damage those qualities caused to the people it purported to describe; how it was one of the worse depictions of mental health issues I've seen; it was blatant enough that it made me think about how much we do something similar in fiction where there isn't the balance of being able to look up someone's real story and seeing the damage that was caused.

But.

I've spent more than enough time with that, actually watching it and thinking about it, and it's keeping me from writing anything else. So this will be enough on that topic for now.

Fertile Endings

Permaculture says "the problem is the solution" and "produce no waste" and honestly, even though these aspen trees on the south side of my house are a problem (shading the garden, getting into the septic line) they can be the solution to many things. Turned into woodchips, they'd be very useful for mulching etc. And.

I ordered a bunch of mushroom spawn, so when Josh comes up this fall we'll take down the ones we can without hitting the house or the power lines, and we'll innoculate them with shiitake and oyster mushrooms. This is another multi-year project, they won't fruit for a couple years, but since I'm here I'm going to do it. I also got a small amount of lion's mane and bear's head plug spawn, which will need to go into a conifer, and I do have some spare spruce.

The plan is to put the logs behind the goose shed, in the dip between the bird shed and the pig field. Water runs through there in spring and it tends to stay humid, it's shaded, it holds snow for insulation, and mom and I recently cleared it out so it's a space waiting for a use. It does have a bunch of coppiced/polarded willows, some very nice wild roses, and some saskatoon berries. All of those should be fine growing around the logs and keeping humidity up while the mycelia colonize their food source.

The logs should take a couple years to produce (shiitakes take longer, oyster shorter) and then should produce for a number of years. By the time they're a couple years from done, I should have a new crop of aspen trees looking to be taken down. So that's nice.

I'm also getting some winecap/king stropheria/garden giants to sow in a woodchip mulch in my garden bed.

As a plant person I've tried very hard to find hardiness ratings for the various fungi but haven't been able to. It seems like it might just not be an issue other than the tropical pink oysters, which I'm staying away from. I know the lion's mane and many oysters grow wild here. So, fingers crossed, but it is an experiment as is everything I do (I'm trying two kinds of shiitake, and two kinds of oyster mushrooms, too).

Incidentally, what I'm pretty sure are button mushrooms have sown themselves in the main pigpen and a little in the back field, colonizing the straw spillover from the pighouse in the main pigpen. At least, white mushrooms come up and grow there in spring and fall. It makes sense they'd have come from the expired grocery store produce; I only wish I had a clear ID on them so I could eat them.