A month all about mushrooms!
October was a strange month. Peas sown as autumn-sown crops for spring have sprung into action and on Halloween were giving us their first pods. Mizuna has rushed to flower in outside beds and the tomatoes are still ripening on the outside vines. Most annoyingly, the weeds are still romping away.
However, as always across the gardens, it was a month to think about soil health to produce the best crops next season.
There’s no doubt for Edible Bristol that the gardening year really begins in autumn, with compost making and soil preparation. As the older crops begin to slow they’re taken down and chopped up ready to compost. We add comfrey to speed up the process, making sure no flowers or seeds get in there, and this year we have an exciting new addition to our heaps as we begin to take old mushroom logs from a local mushroom grower.
This is a great addition to the compost heap. Made of wood waste, the logs are peat free and rich in mycelium, making them not just brilliant for adding carbon to the heaps but also adding fungi to help break down the heap. As well as adding the logs to the heap, we’re conducting some trials to see how they break down in black bags, how they break down out in the air, and how they work as a mulch just chopped up and placed on top of beds. With more and more small producers of mushrooms popping up, we hope this might be something that becomes a natural recycling option for growers of fungi in the future. What do you think?