Celebrating

We have several things to celebrate on the farm this last week.

First, it was farmer Jeremy's birthday! We took a couple hours away from the farm and met his mom and sister's family at a sweet park near the farm for a picnic. This included, of course, The Cake! For the last several years I've been making Jeremy this extravagant gluten-free "log" cake: layers of almond and chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream frosting, chocolate "bark" on the outside, and cute little marzipan mushrooms.

Another reason to celebrate is that we have such a good crew of employees and interns right now that we were able to escape the farm for a couple hours and know everything was in good hands and getting done. Yay!

Next up: the 2020 logs are fruiting nicely! I'm not sure what we'll do with those 2019 ones. It's hard to imagine pitching them all out - some of them are fruiting. But the 2020 ones are doing much better. Yesterday evening Jeremy asked me to do the "late pick," a final pick we do in the late afternoon or early evening. If we don't pick those mushrooms then, they will be over-mature by the next morning - that's how fast they grow! He thought there weren't really that many and it would just be a quick task. Well, there were quite a few and I picked over 8 pounds! It was nice to see them doing so well and so many coming on.

So many shiitake!

Our last celebration for the week is that with all these employees and interns we've really caught up on most tasks. Craig and Simon are getting into the daily and weekly routines of soaking and moving logs and picking mushrooms; and our picker/packer Jewel is getting pretty familiar with all the various prep and packaging tasks. This has allowed us to finally take on some delayed projects - such as fixing all the leaking pipes around the farm and finally getting back to working on the fruiting chamber!

Craig got the fruiting chamber all cleaned up - again! We'd taken to storing things in there because we hadn't been working on it so long. He shaved off all the foam that was sticking out and got it generally ready to go again.

And just like that, the floor is in and vapor barrier is going up!

Today Craig is working on the floor drain in the back corner and very soon the wall panels will be installed. It's feeling very exciting around here. I can't wait to show you all the progress next week!

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Such a happy kitty! He loves hanging with his people on the couch, getting snuggles.