Growing up, it seemed we always had a compost pile. I remember taking kitchen scraps out to it. I remember the pile of stuff, decomposing from bottom to top. When you had scraps and peelings from the kitchen, that is just where they went. In my childhood, this was the purpose of the compost pile.

I did vaguely understand in the background that compost was supposed to be used. That if things rotted enough, they would no longer be moldy, blackened soggy disgusting things, but something else instead. But I didn’t know what. Because I never saw it. My mother assures me that she used compost on the garden. But she did not do it in my presence. All I ever saw was the compost pile that gradually grew some of the healthiest weeds around, and some volunteer tomato plants that never seemed to bear.

What we did use, is the manure pile that was below the hatch in the wall of the barn. The hatch that you never wanted to be near when someone was shoveling out the barn, because that is where the manure was chucked out into a pile that always seemed to be about 4 ft high and 6 ft wide, no matter how much you had just thrown into it. The pile that produce the BEST worms in the area… And which we scraped off the top layers from so we could get at the bottom, every time my mother said we needed manure for the garden, and which produce black, black composted matter at the bottom of the pile, which we shoveled into the barrow and hauled to break up and scatter on the gardens.

I miss that old manure pile… We haven’t had sufficient large livestock at one time to generate a manure pile of that magnitude or value.

But everyone now says you have to make compost to enrich your garden soil, and to recycle the organic waste from your kitchen and yard.

The idea of saving scraps, and turning them into soil enhancement is alluring. But it just never seems to work out that way for my family. The bucket in the kitchen does not get emptied daily (no matter how we promise that it will), so it ends up being a breeding place for fruit flies which then end up in the potted plants, sprouts, seed starts, and everywhere else that we don’t want them. I know, put a lid on… but then I have to pry a lid off every time I want to put something in, and that usually means I remember after I have the knife and the mango already in my hand, and the first piece of peel is already off… and there I am with drippy fingers and full hands trying to remove a lid without getting juice on the counter or the outside of the bucket… Sigh. It is just easier to toss it in the trash.

If the refuse makes its way from the bucket to the compost outside, it sits there. If we have a container, it rots in there, making a horrid mess. IT DOES NOT TURN TO DIRT!!! It turns to mucky black stinking stuff. If we poke holes in the bottom, it turns to dry mucky stinking stuff. Oh… you are supposed to turn it, and whatever else. Who remembers? Compost maintenance is just not high on my list of must-do tasks! If it is not convenient and easy, I am not likely to get it done!

So after years of flirting with it, and failing, I don’t do compost. I USE compost. And I recycle scraps. But I don’t have a compost bin, or a compost pile.

Mostly, we feed the scraps to the animals. When the bucket on the counter is FOOD for something that needs to be fed, and when it is a savings of money (because it offsets some purchased feed), or savings in work (because it offsets some feed we’d have to either grow, or gather), then that bucket is an asset that is remembered every time we go to feed the animals. It gets emptied twice a day, because we feed animals twice a day (when feeding fresh foods instead of commercial formulated feeds, the food stays fresher and the animals do better on twice daily feeding).

There is very little that comes out of a kitchen that cannot be fed to some kind of livestock. Some of it they won’t eat, but if you toss it in a pen or field for them, they’ll eat what they want, trample the rest, and it gets reincorporated into the soil with no work on your part. Chickens are great at this, and composting refuse in their pen also provides a lovely breeding ground for all kinds of insect larvae, which the chickens will happily gobble up. Free food from free food. How cool is that? And if you need the end compost for the garden, you just shovel up some of the trampled manury dirt from the pen, and you get the best of everything.

So the majority of our refuse is recycled into meat, eggs, milk or manure. Or guard services rendered by a dog who considers every person walking past the window to be a mortal threat. So far we have seen no correlation between the amount of scraps he consumes, and the amount of barking. He is over-zealous no matter what we feed him, and the only side effect to feeding him lots of scraps is that he dogs your heels any time you go to the kitchen.

Composting can also be done by tucking refuse under mulch in the garden. This is only necessary if you don’t have chickens though, and if the food is too far gone to be fit to feed anything living.

Dry organic debris, such as leaves, grass clippings, woodchips, sawdust, even plants pulled from the garden, are much better used as mulch, where they will compost layer by layer in place, and enrich the soil and save you the work of tilling.

So far I haven’t found anything that would be better off in a bin or pile. All I have found is that if you think that compost is something you have to “make”, then you are creating needless work for yourself, and depriving livestock of additional healthy food sources. Manure, and mulch are more useful for enriching the soil and saving on work!

The lightbulb moment for me was realizing that AVOIDING making compost was actually a more intelligent choice than thinking that if I was going to do it right, that someday I’d have to figure out a way to do it like the “professionals” recommend. The great realization that I DON’T NEED TO FEEL GUILTY for not making more work for myself! That the results were BETTER, and the workload LESS – a combination I am always striving for – when I let the animals and the layers in the garden do the work the way nature intended.

So no matter how nifty those compost tumblers look, and no matter how enthusiastic other gardeners are about teaching me how to “properly” prepare compost, I WON’T DO IT! I simply cannot see the need! I get better results without the hassle!

The neighbor has a pasture, which he faithfully mows with a lawnmower every week, and waters to keep it green. Seemed kind of silly to us, we’d stick some lambs or goats in there and let THEM do the job, if we were going to all that work to make the grass grow!

Come the end of summer though, we woke one morning to find that there were horses in the pasture. And where horses eat, horses leave piles of manure. Road apples. Hocky pucks…

We cornered the neighbor and asked if we could scavenge some of the manure. He said sure… take all we wanted!

When you grow mushrooms, manure is a treasure. Horse manure especially, because it has a high percentage of undigested organic matter, which is great for many types of mushrooms.

So, a few days later when the horses vacated (his son had brought them up for the weekend, so they could take the horses into the mountains here), we headed next door with a poop rake and a garbage bag (we had no buckets nor barrow). I held the top of the sack, and Kevin scooped the poop into the bag.

We hauled it back and put it on the back porch where we promptly forgot about it. We don’t use the back porch much.

A few months later, after the manure had composted some in the bag, I dug it out and put it on top of the containers for my wild Portobello, and my Wine Cap mushrooms. I’d meant to do it for several days, and finally got it done, so I felt a little satisfaction at the completion of the task.

I haven’t had a lot to blog about lately. I haven’t had much to FaceBook either. In a conversation with a friend, on the day I shoveled the horse manure onto the mushroom containers, I admitted that shoveling a little manure had been the highlight of my day – purely because it was an accomplishment that was a little out of the ordinary.

The day we gathered the manure it was also the singular accomplishment of the day. Yeah, we milked the goat, we answered customer emails, we worked on our websites, we made product, packed boxes, made labels, etc. But those things are routine, hum-drum, and rarely interrupted by anything worthy of commentary.

Shoveling manure isn’t worthy of commentary either. It isn’t the kind of thing you blog about and have your friends and family just waiting to read THAT.

Perhaps this is why the farmer has sunk so much in society’s estimation. After all, the day to day routine leaves little to blog about that the average person can relate to, or enjoy, unless you happen to be one of those people who sees humor in every corner and also possesses the rare gift of being able to relate it, in a way that people who DON’T see it, will understand!

Having been skipped over when that particular talent was handed out, I have to make do with relating more prosaic items of interest. Manure usually does not qualify.

Often the highlight of my day is mushrooms. Finding one I’ve been looking for, in the wild. Finding an edible I did not know existed. Figuring out how to grow one that is hard to grow, in a way that is easy. Not always sharable, since most of my acquaintances don’t share my enthusiasm for mycological discoveries.

Occasionally the highlight of my day is finishing a project that is significant. A new book finally ready to publish. A website completed enough to launch. A few articles done that have been waiting a while. But even those things are usually pretty low key, and appreciated only by a few of my associates.

The general tenor of the day means the most significant thing is that I got the wheat milled, or tried a new recipe, explored a new area of the region, or caught up on something I was behind in that is terribly boring. Kevin takes pictures of where we go and what we do, and sometimes posts them. I forget about the photographs, and try to paint the pictures with words instead. When I remember. And when it seems worth sharing.

But much of the time, the highlight of my day is like manure. Valuable, useful, but not something you really discuss with enthusiasm in public!

Today began just like every other day. I got up, put on pants and a shirt, and went upstairs to grab a glass of juice. Then gathered up the carry sacks, which were loaded up with a jar of wash water, a washrag, a dry cloth, a stainless steel container, and a clean mason jar. Then I headed off to milk the goat.

Usually Kevin and I do this together. But he is gone for a few days, and will be back this afternoon. Usually he milks the goats, and I strip them out. He lets them in and out of the pen, and I get the feed ready and take care of the milk while he is putting the goats back in. We usually walk hand in hand from the house to the goat pen. A morning ritual that has been carried out for months.

Last week, there were two. Today there is one. The older goat died early last week. A combination of circumstances that her old body could no longer compensate for. We did all we could. But the choices weren’t all ours to make.

But this morning, I milked the goat alone. She was cooperative. Sometimes she isn’t. I milked her out, put the milk into the clean jar (we used to need more than one jar, but she is declining in production now). Then I put her back in her pen, stowed the feed bowl, and tossed hay in to the doe and the two younger kids that share the pen with her. I gathered up the equipment and stuck it back into the two bags that it goes in (made by my mother, for just this purpose), and headed back for the house.

The rag got rinsed and hung to dry (it gets laundered twice a week), and the dry cloth was also hung. The milk was strained into a clean jar, capped, and put in the fridge. This requires a complete rearranging of all the jars in the fridge – usually there are 3-4 jars of milk from the previous days, and the newest has to go at the back, oldest at the front. Then the milking container has to be rinsed, and the milk jar, and the strainer also.

Once these things are done, I am free to shower and dress for church. When we have chickens, rabbits, or other animals, the Sunday Morning chores are more. But for the moment, it is just the goat. Soon, it will also be quail, as we adjust our farming to our location, and to the ups and downs of life right now.

Sunday Morning is like every other morning – except that other mornings, I shower before I dress for the day, and I don’t need to change clothes.

The rest of the day is different. We do different things on Sunday. A lot of things we do not do. We do what is necessary in daily maintenance, and no more. We do not conduct business – though sometimes I slip and read a business email, because I am an impatient woman and always struggle with that.

But the animals must be cared for. A milking animal cannot wait just because it is Sunday. They still need milked and fed. The eggs still require gathering on Sunday, and the lambs, and calves, and kids, and chicks must be fed and tended.

The pens do not need cleaned, and the garden does not need to be weeded, the compost does not need turned, and the mushrooms do not need to be sown in. The hay does not need stacked, the feed does not need to be bought, and the cages do not need to be built today. These are chores for another day.

Sunday only starts like every other day. Then it becomes a day of rest. I used to puzzle over that. Especially since Mormons tend to fill Sunday pretty full, and sometimes it is anything BUT restful.

Then I realized that when you are sleeping, you are not doing nothing. You are recharging. Rest gives your body time to repair, and time to rebuild strength. And that is what we do on Sunday, though it is spiritual, not physical. We set aside all the daily demands that can be set aside, and give ourselves wholly to the work of the Lord for that one day.

It used to be a day when I COULD NOT. And now it is a day when I DO NOT HAVE TO. So rather than grumbling that I am behind in work for our business, and worrying that I cannot answer those emails or pack those boxes, I now relax and know that I don’t have to worry about being behind for this one day. I can ignore all the feeling of being overtaxed or behind or of never being enough, and today, on Sunday, I am enough, and all of that can wait until tomorrow.

I have learned that when I let it go for one day, trying my best to obey the law of the Sabbath, I am blessed. I catch up faster on what I was behind with. We have more orders on weeks where we get it right than we do on weeks when we give in and take care of things that could have waited. I have more energy, and more creative thought processes which lead to more productive writing and business management. When I give that one day to the Lord, He gives me back a better week.

The farm animals have no agency, and no conviction that would compel them to obey the same law of the Sabbath that we choose to obey. They have not the ability TO choose such a thing, and they cannot care for themselves. So they still require feeding and some tending. So Sunday morning seems just like every other day when it begins.

But everything else can wait. And the farm can rest, for just one day.

It seems that once people know you are interested in mycology, they take an interest in sharing their finds with you. This has provided some interesting experiences in the last few weeks.

First, a Giant Puffball walked in the front door, in the hands of a little boy who had been in the Primary class I had substituted for a few Sundays previous. A mushroom that has been requested by my customers, so I was very pleased to receive it! It was set to cure in the basement, where it emitted an unpleasant odor for about a week before it finally stopped stinking. But it is curing well, so it was worth the smell.

Next, some Aspen Boletes made their way here, along with some lovely mature King Boletes. Easy to tell them apart – the Aspens bruise dark, and the spore tubes go dark gray with age, whereas the Kings do not bruise, and the tubes turn an olive green shade. Both were riddled with maggots, which is not a problem since they drop out as soon as we start to dry the mushrooms. Disappointing to me though, because the maggots drop out onto the drying trays (we have screens, over trays, so there is a catch pan under each screen), and we have no chickens right now to enjoy the benefits of those maggoty mushrooms!

Some Aspen Oysters wandered in one day, and were promptly set to dry for spawn, and some were used to sow a box of aspen shavings so we can grow more. Oyster mushrooms are easy to grow, and Aspen Oysters have the distinction of being able to grow on Alder.

A few days ago I was given two mushrooms that were old and degraded. They appeared to be a polypore of some kind – not that there was any spore surface left, but I’d seen a polypore before that had degraded in the same way, with the same kind of pattern on the underside when the spore surface had been eaten away by bugs. They were waterlogged, soggy, and maggoty (more so than the boletes). The stems were falling off, and the caps were hardly holding together. I chose NOT to bring them into the house!

The lady who gave them to me said as an afterthought, “They were growing from the same stem.”. I promptly forgot that she said that.

Later, when trying to ID them, I could see the texture and color of the caps, and combined with my assumption of a polypore was a good start. But I could not get an ID for anything, there are just too many stemmed polypores of similar color.

Finally went back outside to look at them again, and paid attention to the stems. I could see where they had broken apart, and they had a common base… and a ROOT! They had a sturdy black root that descended from one of the stems, that I had not noticed before.

I knew that was the identifying feature, because roots like that on mushrooms are uncommon. Turns out that there is only one rooted polypore, and it is known by that name.

If I had not had the stems, and had not seen that root, I could not have ID’d that mushroom. Having the root made the ID EASY because there is nothing else like it – orange cap, and black root, confirmed the polypore ID.

When you receive mushrooms from other people, they may or may not have the entire stem intact. It is always more helpful for identifying if you have the entire mushroom with the stem base, and a description of the habitat where it was growing, because those things can help to confirm an ID, and in some cases, they can be the ONLY clue to a certain ID.

A lot of people have been sending me photos of mushrooms to ID. 9 out of 10 of those images are Little Brown Mushrooms, and an ID is fairly hopeless. I generally only bother with edibles, if they are not edible, or medicinal in some cases, I could care less what they are called.

There is a rule about edible mushrooms. Generally they are the more substantial mushrooms. There are a few LBMs (Little Brown Mushrooms), or LWMs (Little White Mushrooms), or LGMs (Little Gray Mushrooms) which are edible and grow in troops, but overall, the good edibles will be large, and have distinctive features. The smaller ones are too difficult to differentiate, there are just too many like them, and they are generally not worth identifying anyway, since they would take too many to be worth the effort to pick. Consequently, many have never been identified, and most mushroom hunters ignore them because they are too tricky to get right, and not worth the bother anyway.

Today I felt impressed to go to an abandoned chicken coop that is on the property we are renting. It has rained daily for the last several days, so today was a good day to look for mushrooms. But I had not thought to look in there before – the roof leaks, and it has a good layer of old rotted sawdust and chicken manure in it. It occurred to me that something might come up in there because of the rains.

As soon as I came inside the door, I laughed. There was a mushroom, about 3″ across, right in the middle of the floor! Not just any mushroom…. Agaricus Bisporus. Brown Bisporus.

A few old nearly dried mushrooms lurked in the corners, and some new buttons peeked up here and there. Clearly the composting litter was well colonized with Agaricus Bisporus mycellium.

The MOST COMMON commercial mushroom. Nothing special. Nothing exotic.

But this is a fine thing for me, because I was unable to find a strain of Agaricus Bisporus with which I felt satisfied, because it has mostly been crossed with Agaricus Brunnescens, and the distinction has been lost with many commercial strains. I have a really excellent strain of true Brunnescens, but my strain of Bisporus was not as good as I wanted. This new find is a BETTER strain – it has the distinctive differences that set it apart from Brunnescens (slightly thinner cap, less reddening when cut or bruised, and gills that are less pink and turn brown sooner in the maturation process). So now I have a new strain of Bisporus… which I have named “Chicken Run”. What would otherwise be no big deal has been a delightful find for me!

The same people who gave me the old rotting mushroom to ID also gave me another unidentified mushroom which keys out as Albatrellus. I have been wanting a specimen of one of the edible Albatrellus species for many months, ever since I found an old, soggy, and stinky specimen in the woods one day. Completely inedible due to its age and condition, not even usable as spawn, but identifiable due to the stem position and  the fact that it is a large stemmed polypore and there are not many of those. So receiving an Albatrellus specimen was a real gift.

I am unsure of the species exactly – the genus of Albatrellus is certain, but there are a dozen or so species within the genus, many very alike. I only know it is edible because the family that gave it to us have been eating it. Narrows it to Ovinus, Confluens, or Citrinus (based on other features, but they are VERY similar). Started a box of it today, to see if I can get it to grow. I am going to have to find a way to purchase a microscope to be certain of the species though.

It has been a lot of fun having mushrooms walk in the door. I never know what is coming in next. The most amazing thing has been the number of mushrooms that I have on my “needed specimens” list that have been either handed to me personally, or shipped to me from somewhere in the US. Often the person sending them isn’t sure what they are, other times they know for certain. But in both cases, I have been brought some really amazing finds, which have added to our inventory, and are blessing our lives, and the lives of our customers.

I’ve been drawing mushroom images for our website, for the mushrooms that I do not have pics for. Some of them turned out well. Worth a look if that kind of thing interests you, they are on our Mushroom Store website – just click the link on the left for Mushrooms that can be grown indoors, and the other links below that one.

I wonder who it was that decided that people could make soil better than Mother Nature, who has been at it for thousands of years by Creationist reckoning, and millions of years by Evolutionist reckoning.

It is sort of like processed foods. All the good stuff is stripped out, and a few essential (though undigestible) nutrients are added back in, and a nice looking but nutritionally deficient and often outright harmful product is released to the public in the name of “good food”, and the manufacturer persuades millions that it is better than what they could cook themselves, mostly because it is convenient.

With potting mix though, it isn’t necessarily any more convenient than the alternative! And it is several times the cost! It is made from various forms of industrial waste, and a few synthetic manufactured items (made in China, principally from petroleum). Oh, and some of the “better” stuff has chemical fertilizers thrown in. A few “organic” types have a wee bit of sterilized manure or fish emulsion (ground up fish guts) thrown in. No wonder it is so difficult to get things to grow in it, and no wonder it is impossible to re-wet if it ever dries out completely!

No more convenient, WORSE performance, and MORE expensive. MORE harmful to the environment, and a pain in the neck to work with under less than ideal conditions. Wow… they’ve really managed to snooker the buying public!

The best thing to grow plants in is…

Drumroll, please, this is a major revelation…

DIRT!!!

Rich, nutrient filled, bacteria and fungus laden, water holding, DIRT!

Topsoil, to be exact.

With some compost on top.

Easy peasy.

Even in pots indoors, DIRT is the best thing to grow plants in. Seriously, folks, how hard a concept is this? The substance that plants EVOLVED to grow in (if you subscribe to that theory), or the substance that GOD PROVIDED for plants to grow in (if this is your belief) is the BEST thing for plants to grow in! (I am still astonished that I have to actually EXPLAIN this to people, and even more shocked that most will hear my instructions and promptly go out and buy another bag of potting mix because someone else told them to or because the picture on the bag was prettier, or worse, because the sales person told them it was better.)

You either have dirt where you want to grow things or you don’t.

If you don’t have dirt, why buy a mixture of industrial waste and manufactured synthetics to plant your plants in?

What you SHOULD buy, if you HAVE to buy some kind of potting medium or soil for your garden, is….

DIRT!

Topsoil to be exact.

Just buy a bag of topsoil instead. It is less than $2 for a bag of topsoil. Compare that to $5 for a comparable size bag of potting mix. You just made out like a bandit! Less than half the price and BETTER!

Buy a bag of compost also. That will cost you another $2 if you live in an area where things cost a lot.

Fill your pots with topsoil, or spread the topsoil over your garden. Then top it with about a 3″ layer of compost.

If you need it to hold water really well, DON’T get anything with those nasty silica beads in it! Avoid those! They cause the soil to LOSE water (they absorb the water, and then the water evaporates directly from them, the plants never get it from the silica, it will cause your soil to dry out FASTER – we’ve done side by side tests with this, it FAILS every time).

The key to getting your soil to hold water is MULCH. Try one of the following:

• Grass Clippings
• Leaf Litter
• Wood Shavings
• Sawdust
• Woodchips
• Straw (you will get some wheat grass sprouts)

You can purchase Aspen shavings, or even use Pine Bedding or Cypress Mulch from the pet section of your local store. Just don’t use Cedar.

A good layer of mulch on top will reduce the amount of water you need by 70%.

And it is EXACTLY how nature does it in the wild. She leaves the last year’s plant debris on the top of the soil to compost down and give you a layer of compost on top of your soil, and then a layer of coarse debris on top of that to protect the compost from washing off, and to keep the moisture in the soil.

You can do this in a container garden, with houseplants, and in the garden, in your landscaping, etc. Wherever you GROW things, you can create this three layer miracle of growth and productivity.

• Topsoil
• Compost
• Mulch

It is that simple.

Potting mix does not come into it ANYWHERE. Mother Nature didn’t invent potting mix. She doesn’t like it! Plants don’t like it!

Get the good stuff. The REAL stuff.

It will save you money, and your plants will grow better.