Good news #1: Almond House
The first good news is that we finally got enough cardboard to cover the entire Almond House! Hooray! Our employee Cyle started moving in old logs to delineate the beds. We’re making plans about how much compost to get and when to have it delivered, what wood chips we can use for the Wine Caps, and lots of other details.
Almond House cardboard is done!
Good news #2: Mushroom CSA
The 2020 Seward Co-op online CSA Fair is going on right now. Check out their Instagram or Facebook for videos featuring lots of different CSAs. We will be featured tomorrow, April 27th! It will be a funny throwback to winter because it was cold, windy, and snowy the day we made our video!
Following are the farms we are offering our mushroom share add-on through:
Blackbrook Farm Farm Farm Good Acre Growing Lots Urban Farm Shared Ground Steady Hand Threshing Table
If you have signed up with a different CSA that we don’t currently work with, you can now get a mushroom CSA directly through us!
What you get in the CSA: in the course of 10 deliveries you will receive 9 quarter-pound boxes of fresh mushrooms, a reishi brownie, 1 oz. package of dried shiitake, and a mushroom butter. You will pick up your share from our booth at the Mill City Farmers Market during market hours. Pick up dates are every-other-week from June 13th through October 17th.
You can read more about our new direct farm share on our website.
You can read more about our share through the farms above on our website here.
Good news #3: Next Stage Grant award!
The really, really, really good, great news is that we applied for a Next Stage Grant through the Mill City Farmers Market Charitable Fund, and we were awarded the grant! Hooray!
The grant is to help us purchase a couple dehydrators for drying mushrooms. Our old dehydrators are pretty old and kinda cheap. They do the job, but they take a LONG time and we know the quality could be even better with these new dehydrators. And we’re excited about being able to dry more mushrooms and faster than we’ve been able to before.
This is especially important as we are pretty much completely sold out of dried mushrooms now! I said you all wiped us out at the last farmers market. =) We’ll have to wait till mushrooms are growing again to start drying again. We’ll let you know when we have dried mushrooms available for purchase again.
A huge thanks to the Mill City Farmers Market Charitable Fund and all who donate to that to make this possible!
Inoculation progress…
Work continues on inoculations. We are doing about 5,500 logs this year and we passed the halfway mark about a week ago. We weren’t working on inoculations as much during the first part of the year when we were logging, but with all the logs gathered, we’re working on the inoculations pretty much full time – six days a week, all day long! We’ve been averaging about 95 logs a day for the past month. Some days we have distractions and get maybe 50-60 done. On really good days, with no distractions, we get over 100 done; we did 130 in one day last week! We were hoping to finish by the end of May, but it looks like we’ll need to go into at least one week of June. We have a new employee and a WWOOFer starting next week, so that will help a lot. Wish us luck!
Inoculated logs piling up!
(p.s. I’m on a little winter project to add stories from our newsletter to our website blog – which I’ve been terrible at doing! So I’m adding in some posts and back-dating them in case anyone wonders what’s up!)
