mushaboom

I got my garden all tilled up and spread with compost this weekend, and not a minute too soon:

Looks like it's really going to start being winter around here, and besides needing shoes that'll keep out the wet and cold, I'm ready to face my least favorite season.

While working outside, I found that a group of mushrooms that I'd seen growing on an old elm stump this spring are back again. I'd been told by a couple people from Mushrooms Society of Utah that they were probably Flammulina velutipes, or flaming velvet foot/flaming shank. Now that they've returned, I was able to take a spore print and double check with field guides to be sure.

And they are! So now I've got some really lovely winter mushrooms growing thirty feet from my back door, and I'm ready to experiment with them. Luke is too nervous to eat them (and even doesn't want me to), but I did my research and am confident, so I'll probably cook some up in a stir fry for one.

Sundays at home

Luke and I spend one Sunday a month at each of our parents' houses. The other two Sundays are for us to relax at home and spend time together. We decided that we want to start making big breakfasts together on the Sundays at home, a 'tradition' we'd like to continue when we have kids, too. This week, the first week, we made tomato/spinach/bell pepper omelettes, toast, and the strawberry basil lemonade.

Isn't our new table cute? I've spent almost a month looking at consignment shops and antique stores, and finally settled on this blue formica one, which fits perfectly with the 50s tablecloth-turned-curtains in our kitchen.

We took our coffee out to the porch, and then we spent the afternoon up the canyon hiking and mushroom hunting (it's still a little too early, I think, but we found a couple kinds).

I think this summer, Sundays are going to be my new hobby day. And this was a good one.

Most of my hobbying lately has been cooking with Luke. We've been going to one dinner party/potluck after another (can you call it a dinner 'party' when there are just four of us?) and trying to cook good meals for just the two of us.

Luke and I also inoculated a log with mycelium- I found a good log on the side of the road and brought it home to drill with holes and fill with spawn (live fungus mixed with sawdust and grains, grown on a small wooden dowel), in hopes that we can grow some oyster mushrooms. Hopefully, we'll have something like this by the end of next summer:
We did it a little too late in the season, but we have a lot of spawn left so whether it works or not we can do some again next spring, summer and fall.

And lastly, lookit!

Luke's brother and his wife are having a baby in a couple weeks. I don't know any babies, so this little girl (London) is going to get a bunch of presents from me because I want to make teeny tiny things. These little booties will probably only fit the kid for a couple weeks to a month (and if they have a big baby, they might not fit at all), but I'm really happy with them. Now I just need to buy a two little buttons for the ankle straps, and they'll be done!

Failures

Haven't had the best results in the crafting world lately: a tank top I tried to sew, thinking bias tape wouldn't really be necessary (and of course it was); a summer dress that, no matter how much I tried to fix it, always looked like it was maternity; and skinny little zinnias I've been growing in my windowsill that just keep getting taller and taller, but never fill out or get adult leaves (my mom laughed when she saw them).

One of the more disappointing failures were the Maitake mushrooms I was trying to grow. From the start, they took much longer than they were supposed to, and even though they went through every expected phase, they took so long that they started getting moldy before ever totally maturing. We saved a handful of almost-mushrooms, and we'll see how they taste.

Some Maitake well on their way to being ready to harvest.

I've also failed to follow through on a lot of the embroidery I've started lately. One was a Ukranian-inspired flower embroidery for my mom for mother's day. The other, an anatomical heart for my dear friend Drew's birthday. Both have been sitting around my house, untouched for the past week and a half.


Not everything has failed lately. The garden is starting to do well, we made some pretty yummy salmon for mine and my brother's birthday dinner, and our house has been full of pretty bouquets of lunaria, iris, muscari, and penstemon. So I'm still optimistic that I can crank out some things that I actually like.

shitake

Once a month for three months, we get a mushroom growing kit in the mail. It was one of my Christmas presents to Luke, but I get the feeling I actually like it more than he does. This month we got Shitake. The kit is a log of woodchips and sawdust that is covered in mycelium. You soak the log in water for a few days and then cover it with a humidity tent, and in a few days, you see cute little mushrooms starting to grow. It was really cool to watch, because they went from not being there to being ready to eat in ten days or so.









After the first crop of mushrooms is done, you dry out the log for a couple weeks and do it all over again. In the meantime, we'll be getting a Maitake log in the next couple days, so I'll get to see a whole new kind of growth.