Chicken of the Woods

Last year, knowing how we love mushrooms, someone brought a huge chunk of Chicken of the Woods to Andrea after finding it while GPSing. (Thanks guys!)

She brought it home, we cooked a bunch, ate a bunch, dried a bunch, and I cut up the parts that still had pieces of bark on it and spread it all over the yard onto various dead wood and stumps.

Well this morning as I headed out to our remote garden I saw this on a stump at the end of our driveway.



 Plant your scraps. Plant everything. When you buy mushrooms from the store,  cut off the bottoms and throw them into media that they normally grow in... coffee grounds or wood chips or something, Throw it around the yard. Button mushrooms grow in fields, like agaricus campestris, so throw them in your lawn. Chicken of the woods and oyster mushrooms grow on wood, so throw them onto logs or stumps (like I did) - or in your wood chip mulch. Those mycelia might take hold and spread, and you'll have free food.






Update: 9/21/2016
It's starting to lose some color and is definitely growing, so I thought I'd harvest some of the edges of the larger pieces before they start to turn old, but I left enough to keep growing (in case it does) and I definitely want it to drop more spores.

So I read in Wiki:

 Testing showed an hour of UV light exposure before harvesting made a serving of mushrooms contain twice the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's daily recommendation of vitamin D, and 5 minutes of UV light exposure after harvesting made a serving of mushrooms contain four times the FDA's daily recommendation of vitamin D.[13]Analysis also demonstrated that natural sunlight produced vitamin D2.[14]
Sooooo - I will leave them in a sunny spot today, and fry them up in vegan butter for my sweetheart and me this afternoon.
Yumm!

Great New Goat Hay-Feeder

So when we first got Cinnamon and Laverne, we'd feed them hay and the next day find it trampled, pooped in and peed on in their pen. Couldn't figure out why.

Then Andrea read on a homesteading website that goats won't eat their hay if it's on the ground. They're browsers, and like to eat things that are bush- and branch-level.

We talked about putting together some 2x4's and some netting or chicken wire or wooden slats to make our pygmy goats something to eat out of so we didn't waste hay. Since we haven't had a lot of time, we didn't get around to that yet, and the next morning I went out to let the goats out to browse and, looking over at our brush pile that never got burned, I got the idea....

The brush pile makes a great feeder. It keeps the hay high and dry, and any that falls out just gets caught by smaller branches. They eat every bit of their hay now, and run to the brush pile every time I let them out to browse.

(Shhh - Zion thinks she's a goat - don't tell her. She'll be out there eating grass right alongside them, when she isn't getting headbutted by Cinnamon.