Plum Crossroads Farm

08/06/2023

Can a flower give you courage?

The ancient Celts believed so. They believed that borage - these bluish-purple starflowers - would lend you courage in battle if you steeped the fresh flowers in wine and drank it before a battle. (It may have had more to do with the wine!)

They might’ve got the idea from the Romans. Roman soldiers braced for battle by swearing on Borage, but the Greeks loved the stuff!

In Homer’s Odyssey, there’s a potion Homer is given called Nepenthe that’s described as banishing grief and trouble from his mind. Pliny the Elder claims that this was a potion made of borage.

Greek physician Discorides wrote in De Materia Médica that borage would “cheer the heart and lift the depressed spirits.”

Various sources from the ancient Greeks on to Francis Bacon have claimed borage as a source of courage, a cure for depression/anxiety, or even a way to make people forget things, and the typical preparation was to steep flowers in wine. Here, my fresh borage flowers have only just started to steep in a nice Reisling.

The flower petals are entirely edible and have a mild cucumber flavor, so I thought the Reisling would be sweet enough to enhance the flavor without being too overpowering. The seeds (that usually get tossed in with the petals) are a different animal…

You see, the seeds of borage contain some of the highest levels of GLA (gamma linoleic acid) of any plant. This is the chemical found in evening primrose oil. So let me preface this by saying that borage seed oil should be ABSOLUTELY counter-indicated for anybody who is trying to conceive or is pregnant, and it should never be used vaginally, just like EPO.

The oil from these seeds can help prevent artherosclerosis (clogged arteries), and it has a good anti-allergy and anti-inflammation effect. However, it’s best not to take this without medical supervision. Borage seed oil also contains some alkaloids that can cause liver and kidney damage. It’s fine if you’re just eating the petals in a salad, but taking borage seed oil at therapeutic doses for longer periods of time can cause those alkaloids to build up and cause damage, so it’s important to keep an eye on things. Plus, it can interact with some medications commonly prescribed for conditions like high cholesterol and high blood pressure.

In lower doses, borage is used externally as an astringent poultice, a diuretic, and an expectorant. It can be constipating, and it was often used to treat bronchial infections. It’s being studied as a potential way to kill amoebas.

But to be honest, I didn’t grow it for the medical or courage-inducing properties. I grew it for the BEES!

Borage is a gardener’s best friend!

It nurses and helps beans, peas, brassicas, spinach, and strawberries. It attracts pollinators like bees to all the other plants nearby, helping to ensure a good pollination and lots of plants. I’ve NEVER had so many bees in my garden as I have this year with my borage! And it confuses tomato hornworms, keeping them off your tomatoes.

We use companion planting because it allows us to use the natural properties of plants to help them grow and protect them from pests, and this helps us to reduce the chemicals (and also our labor!). But the companion plants themselves often have really neat uses and a really fascinating backstory, too! :)

28/05/2023

Well, we’re making progress with cleanup and getting things going again!

Got stuff ordered, and got the plan…

We should have MICROGREENS coming online in about a month, including the nutty, crunchy sunflower microgreens (great for bodybuilders looking for high-protein super-greens!), our spicy and mild salad mixes (our own special blends, designed for optimal flavor and appearance for soups, salads, sandwiches, etc.), and our proprietary blend of rainbow radish microgreens for a powerful peppery zing with a bright splash of color!

Just a couple of weeks after that our fruit vinegars should start to come available, as well as some artisanal jams and jellies. I have a batch of strawberry, honey, and lemon balm jelly and vinegar that will be the first batch available, then a blackberry peppermint that will come next. 😀 Combining fresh fruit with fresh-grown herbs makes for unique culinary creations that you’ll absolutely LOVE!

We’re hoping to have oyster mushrooms producing by August. Summer production will be the amazing strain of pink oyster mushrooms - the good one with the floral aroma that everyone thought was just top-notch for taste. Summer also carries the brown PoHu oyster mushrooms (super meaty, great flavor) and the summer white mushrooms (milder but still aromatic). Winter should have blue oyster mushrooms (smaller but holds up well to cooking), the PoHu’s (they do well year-round), and the Italian oyster mushrooms (the culinary standard).

We’re also hoping to have some meat chickens and some additional chicken eggs available soon!

So much to do! Not enough hours in the day.

27/05/2023

Sooooo…

Remember Plum Crossroads Farm? Remember the oyster mushrooms, microgreens, fresh herbs, salad greens, colorful chicken eggs, and gourmet value-added products? remember how y’all have been bugging me for like two years to get back to farming?

Well, I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I just couldn’t handle the physical labor, the early morning markets, and the extra TIME involved. But it turns out, I may have a solution…

My son, CJ, will be taking over the day-to-day management of the farming this season. My daughter, Mika, will be managing the customer-facing side of the business: market setup, social media, etc. I’ll continue to oversee finance, management, and supply/logistics issues while I train them both on it, and I’ll continue to manage things like the website, but they’ll do the heavy lifting.

I suppose passing the torch to the next generation is the solution I’ve been looking for all along. 🙂

So…

Wichita Falls peeps: what do you want to see? I CAN accept food stamps. I CAN arrange for “on-farm pickup” (I live in the middle of town so it’s fairly convenient). I CAN consider regularly scheduled deliveries, like a CSA-style setup or something - I’m not limited just to the Farmers Market. I can also do value-added products: jams, jellies, baked goods, salad dressings, etc.

What sorts of things have you been wanting to see more of?

06/06/2022

I’m looking for some land to lease. Does anyone know of anyone who has land available to lease for the upcoming year? Pasture or farmland would be fine (but if it’s farmland, it needs water), preferably under 5 acres and within a 30-minute drive if Wichita Falls.

Or… if you know if a better place I can go to look? I’ve looked a few of the recommended places and had no luck, so if you know of any websites or classifieds that have ag leases, that would be great!

Thanks in advance! :)

09/06/2021

This week at the

We’re going to be doing our Salad Boxes again! Those were a big hit, and I have a new salad dressing for y’all that I think you’ll LOVE! This one is a Fresh Herb House Italian with roasted garlic and loads of fresh herbs straight out of the garden! :)

We will also have the full complement of this week, along with the Roasted Garlic Lemon Vinaigrette we had a few weeks ago, and we’ve got a good selection of dried ready for you, too.

Can’t wait to see y’all!

04/06/2021

Are your salads sad?

Here's my handy dandy guide to making an AMAZING salad! https://plumcrossroads.com/2021/06/04/salads-for-everyone/

Salads for Everyone! June 4, 2021  |  No Comments Are your salads boring? Tired of eating the same old thing because it’s healthy, even though it makes you sad? In this post, I’m going to tell you how to make your salads AWESOME! Avoiding Yucky Salad: Basic Tips Good salad greens (and microgre...

03/06/2021

FRESH Blue oyster mushrooms! I harvested these just now, and they’re available for on-farm pickup. I think there will be 3-4 boxes, and they’re priced at $6 each. These are first come, first served, so please PM me.

I’m located in Wichita Falls near Maplewood and Southwest. These MUST be gone by tomorrow night, but they usually go pretty quickly, so they’re unlikely to last that long.

02/06/2021

It’s that time of year, y’all - the time when every business likes to pretend that they actually CARE about the LGBTQ+ community for one month before returning back to business as usual.

Thing is, it’s not hard to tell whether they’re legit or not. Go look through my old YouTube vids. Talk to me or any of my helpers at the Farmer’s Market. I’ve never pretended to be anything other than what I am, even though my identity doesn’t always play well in Wichita Falls.

I am pansexual, married to a demisexual. Three of my kids are bi/pan and one is trans. My best friend is non-binary and pan. And if that costs me a few sales, then so be it.

I am also an Air Force veteran married to an Army veteran. Both of us took an oath to support and defend our neighbors, and that oath did not discriminate based on sexuality, gender, race, religion, national origin, or political ideology.

I am also a Texas native, born and raised. Y’all means ALL. It means people of color. It means poor people. It means LGBTQ+ people. It means everyone. It means that everyone deserves to be treated equally, with kindness, dignity, and respect.

This is who I am. And this is why I do what I do. I strive to provide good, healthy, delicious, nutritious food for my community, BECAUSE I care about and love all the members of that community. I strive to care for the land and be a responsible steward of the natural resources BECAUSE I want to preserve those resources so that all members of my community can benefit from them. I strive to educate my customers and readers so that they can become healthier and more self-sufficient BECAUSE I want every member of my community to thrive.

My farm is built on the values that I hold dear, and those values are part and parcel of who I am as a person. That’s not some rainbow banner I throw up once a year; it’s a part of my deeply held beliefs and moral fiber that won’t change, even after Pride month ends.

Food is life. And I’m proud to be a part of the life of this community, for all of y’all.

30/05/2021

After a pound of fresh mushrooms Friday, that little “accidental” bed of pink gave me 1.8 pounds today! Unfortunately, because it’s been drier today, these aren’t really in great condition, so I’ll be cleaning these up for dried mushrooms. They’ve already dried out a bit, so I don’t think they’re good enough to sell fresh, but they SMELL amazing, so they’ll be wonderful dried!

28/05/2021

Pink or blue? What’s your favorite? (We’ll have BOTH tomorrow at the Farmer’s Market!!!)

27/05/2021

Nature finds a way. A couple weeks ago, I had a nasty case of sour rot contamination in my incubation room that destroyed a half-dozen bags, several grain masters, and weeks of work. I had to spend over a week cleaning, sanitizing, and resetting my incubation room, and all the contaminated bags were tossed out into the backyard.

This is going to be the second bed for . I believe that EVERY garden bed needs mycelium to be healthy, so I scattered my rotten pink bags under the compost and soil into this new bed. The contaminant wouldn’t have contact with the greens, and it’s actually a beneficial bacteria for soil.

But we’ve had tons of rain here lately, so I came out this morning to this. I was CERTAIN those mushroom bags were dead when I scattered them, but it turns out that nature had other plans!

When we take care of Mother Nature, she takes care of us.

27/05/2021

Guess what we’re going to have this weekend!!!

The blue are ready! Well, mostly. Well, I had to harvest today because I’d rather harvest a bit early than late, and some of the were just hitting their prime. So we have one and a half POUNDS of beautiful blue oyster mushrooms! These are very carefully harvested to prevent bruising, stored at optimal temperatures, and sold in and

You’ll get mostly small and medium mushrooms, and I’ve pre-trimmed them for you to remove any substrate, so they’re ready to go! They smell AMAZING!

Come and see us this weekend at the Downtown Wichita Falls Farmer’s Market! I’ll also have rainbow radish and plenty of fresh basil, dill, parsley, and oregano.

25/05/2021

Growing a garden and having chickens sounds like the perfect mix, right? You can toss the w**ds to the chickens when you w**d and use composted chicken manure as fertilizer. I’m a big fan of “closing the loop”, so this appeals to me.

When the wind knocks open my gate to the chicken yard area and the chickens spend a few early morning hours perusing my garden for treats, that’s when things don’t always go together!

Fortunately, I’ve already got almost everything covered by chicken wire because we have a very aggressive squirrel named Geoffrey that loves to nibble on my basil, parsley, and strawberries. The only bed I have that wasn’t covered was my greens bed, because I was waiting on them to get a little bigger before I put insect netting over them.

Looks like I’ll get my greens bed covered, then maybe let the chickens have some access to the main yard. I’ve got some patches of overgrown grass that I don’t want to mow, and the bugs have started coming out with all this rain lately. I always give the chickens free run of the garden in the winter season, but maybe I’ll just start covering beds and letting them have the whole yard?

I need more chicken wire...

25/05/2021

I’m loving this next batch of blue that’s fruiting right now! This block took longer than my last one, but it’s giving me so many more and I’m loving this deep color on them! I hope they keep some of the color as they mature; my last blues faded a bit to brown as they got older.

Any wagers on when they’ll be ready? Fingers crossed I’ll have them for the next Saturday but they’re still pretty young so I’m not entirely sure.

24/05/2021

Y’all, I am so excited! So THIS is what rainbow look like in their prime! These beautiful babies are absolutely gorgeous! And the colors are just wonderful. They add a peppery radish bite to your dish, without the bitterness or bulk that comes from fully grown radish.

Unfortunately, these matured way too fast. I can keep them for a day or two before I cut them without sacrificing quality, but I wasn’t planning on doing a again until next Saturday. I make it a personal policy not to ever sell 🌱 more than 48 hours after a harvest, so that really only gives me until Thursday before they get fed to the

So... here’s the deal... I normally sell these at $4/box at the Farmer’s Market. If you’re willing to do on-farm pickup (I’m over by Maplewood & Southwest), I’ll make it $2.50/box. I’ll also deliver Wednesday to anywhere in WF, Burk, or IP, at $4/box. OR, if you want them shipped, it’ll be $4/box plus the cost of shipping (which is just around $12-13). AND... for my customers, I do have special bulk pricing, so just PM me.

These will be first come first served, but I have six beautiful trays that all look this good, so I have a decent stock. I’ll cut on Tuesday night with pickups and deliveries on Wednesday, so get your order in ASAP.

23/05/2021

What can you grow on an ? Wheat, apparently! This is about a fifth of the wheat I planted last fall as an experiment; this bit got damaged in the recent storms, so I went ahead and harvested some early. It’s stooked and hanging on the front porch to dry out. This has been a fun experiment, so we’ll see how it goes!

22/05/2021

I still have rainbow radish microgreens and a few boxes of FRESH oyster mushrooms! I’ll be here at the Downtown Wichita Falls Farmers Market until 1:30, but I don’t expect my product to last much longer, as it’s been a super busy day! Come down and see me quick! :)

22/05/2021

Who’s going to come see me tomorrow at the Farmer’s Market?

20/05/2021

Come see us tonight!!!

20/05/2021

Okay, y’all! We’re trying something new for tonight’s Happy Hour market! My salad greens started producing (thanks to all the rain!), so I’m swimming in salad greens, microgreens, and fresh herbs. So I got to thinking... the only thing you need there is a SALAD DRESSING!

So, we’re going to try a new thing tonight. You can customize your own salad kit. Pick your salad mix (sweet or bold), then your microgreen (spicy brassica, mild brassica, or radish). Every salad mix kit will come with a bundle of onion scapes (the tops of onions - you use them kinda like green onions but the flavor is bolder and mellow). Pick an HERB bundle: cilantro, basil, or dill. And take home a homemade jar of dressing to top it all off.

Y’all, I’m SUPER proud of the dressing; I’ve been cooking this up since last night! It starts with roasted garlic, sautéed in extra virgin olive oil. I added some dry mustard and lemon zest to the olive oil to fully infuse it with all the necessary flavors and simmered it for an hour to get it all infused. Then I added a little Himalayan pink salt, a little pepper, some lemon juice, and some fresh lemon zest for that added zing! My husband has been on a low-sodium diet lately, so there’s only about 1.5 tbsp of salt in 12 jars of the stuff; most of the flavor is from the garlic and lemon, and it has a REALLY strong flavor!

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Okay, now the deets:
The salad is enough for 1 entree salad or 2 side salads, and it’s priced at $4.

Microgreens are priced at $4.

Herb bundles and onion scale bundles are priced at $2 each.

The salad dressing is priced at $5 for an 8-ounce jar.

Separately, the whole salad kit is $17, but it’ll be just $12 tonight if you get the kit! So, essentially, buy all your green stuff and take home the dressing free! 😉

I will also have some samples of the dressing for you to try (all sanitary and stuff).
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Now for the super specific bits:

SALADS:
Both salads have a base of spring mix, which is a mixture of lettuces, mustard greens, and a touch of arugula. The sweet version is mixed about half and half with baby spinach and the bold version is mixed about half and half with baby arugula. All the greens are baby greens, so they should not be bitter.

MICROGREENS:
The rainbow radish mix is a very bold, zesty, peppery flavor. The spicy brassica mix is broccoli, mustard greens, arugula, and kohlrabi, so it’s got some zing to it. The mild brassica mix is broccoli, mustard greens, and red clover, so it’s more earthy and sweet.

HOW TO PREPARE YOUR SALAD:
I recommend that you take it home, wash everything, chop up your onion scapes and herbs, spin everything in your salad spinner or dry on a towel, then add a little bit of dressing and toss it together. Put it in a Tupperware in the fridge for at least an hour to let the flavors all mellow and merge together. That way, you’ll get all the flavors together in every bite! You can also pre-make your salads for the work week. Just add about 1 tbsp of dressing to every quart of salad before you prep it and save the rest of the dressing for later; this works best if you’re doing it in something like a mason jar where you can shake it up periodically.

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Okay, there’s the news! I’ll see you tonight from 5:30-8:30! :)

19/05/2021

Four days of growth on these Blue Oyster Mushrooms. Started pinning Saturday afternoon. By Sunday (first picture), I could see clusters within the bag, so I cut them free. Blue Oysters in particular need a LOT of fresh air or they’ll get those leggy stems. See how leggy they are in picture 2 (Monday), when I first cut them free?

By Tuesday, they were already starting to flesh out more. Today, Wednesday morning, they look AMAZING!!!

Now, I have the Thursday After Hours Farmer’s Market tomorrow night, and these MIGHT just be ready by then! And I have a new salad pack product that I think you’re going to LOVE for healthy, convenient meals and snacks.

If they’re not ready by Thursday, you’ll see them this Saturday, but if I offer them on Thursday, they may be sold out by Saturday. So... at this point, it’s in Mother Nature’s hands!

See you tomorrow! :D

17/05/2021

This is inside of my homemade glove box. Once this cools (about 20 minutes), I’ll inoculate each jar of rye with liquid culture. This is the start (for me) of mushrooming. But the process actually begins earlier, in a full laboratory.

They take tissue samples from mushrooms and culture those tissues on Agar plates. This allows them to watch the growth and remove any contaminants. Once they have a CLEAN culture, they put that mycelium into a nutrient-rich “broth”, and it colonizes it. That’s what I buy; it comes in a syringe of this stuff that looks kinda like chicken broth but has all these little white “strings” inside it.

With my rye, I had to remove all the debris and rinse it 3-4 times to get off any dust and dirt. Then it had to be soaked overnight, then cooked to where it was tender. After it cools and drains, I put it into these glass jars with special lids. The lids allow me to inoculate the jars without opening them (which might introduce contaminants), and they allow airflow but filter out most spores and bacteria.

These jars have to be sterilized by pressure sterilization or autoclave. And that’s where I am now! They have to cool a bit - too hot, and it’ll kill the mycelium when I put the liquid culture into it. But the longer I let it sit without inoculation, the greater the chance that something else in the environment can get in and gain a foothold. I have to time it just right.

So I sterilize my work area thoroughly. I wear gloves and a mask and cover my hair, and I use this homemade glove box. While everything is cooling, I cover my glove holes with a HEPA filter to allow filtered air to pass. When that’s done, I have to work using two little holes cut in the side of the box. The box protects from any contaminants that might fall from the ceiling, the air, or from me onto my workspace.

This next step is critical. Get it right, and I can produce almost 200 pounds of oyster mushrooms from each jar I inoculate today. But one small invisible contaminant can destroy all the work I’m doing today and I have to start all over.

With each step of the process, the mushrooms get a little stronger and more resilient, but these earliest steps are working with extremely delicate, fragile microorganisms that we’re trying to encourage. Wish me luck!🤞

17/05/2021

We’re back to mushrooming!!!

If you’ve been following, you may remember that our incubation room had some contamination last week. Almost everything had to be tossed out and the whole thing had to be re-sanitized. I had ONE jar of grain master that wasn’t (yet!) contaminated, so I replaced it into the incubation room to use as a control. I figured, if it’s contaminated in a week, I didn’t sanitize well enough. If it’s NOT contaminated, then that means that my incubation room is clear of the bacteria and I can resume mushrooming.

Well, GREAT NEWS!!! That jar is totally free of sour rot and fully colonized with large Pearl mushroom mycelium! So THAT means that today is a catch-up mushrooming day!

This is 9 pounds of rye grain, cleaned and left to soak last night. Now it has to be cooked until the grains are tender, but NOT burst (a very narrow window). 7 pounds of this will be used to expand that large Pearl grain master that survived the disaster last week. The other two pounds will go to inoculating two new grain masters for future use.

Later today, I’ll be prepping about 12 pounds of my Master’s Mix - a mixture of locally sourced hardwood sawdust (from a local cabinet maker) and soybean meal (from a local feed mill). That will be combined with the four pounds of remaining grain spawn I have for summer white oyster mushrooms.

And of course, EVERYTHING has to be run through my autoclave. This will probably be two loads at about 1.5 hours each. I’m loving my new autoclave - my old pressure canner took 3 hours to do the same job!

AND... in case that wasn’t ENOUGH amazing news... my blue oysters look GREAT!!! I should have them ready either by Thursday for the After Hours Farmers Market or by next Saturday!!!!!

16/05/2021

👀 what I see!!!!!

These are Blue Oyster Mushrooms starting to pin! I can’t tell you how thrilled I am!

Last week, I lost my entire incubation room: eight bags containing about $60 of materials and six weeks of work. I’ve been kind of down and upset and frustrated. I mean, I know that sometimes these things happen, but it still sucks. And I’ve been having feelings about it.

And then, I find my blue oyster bags pinning, and it’s just like a burst of motivation! I’m excited to finally see some good progress on these guys, and hopefully we’ll have some delicious shrooms for you soon. :)

15/05/2021

14/05/2021

Do you know how much I love y’all?

I love y’all enough to wake my lazy butt up at 5:30 in the morning on a SATURDAY just so I can see your smiling faces at tomorrow’s Downtown Wichita Falls Farmers Market! And I am NOT a morning person, so that is pure, unadulterated LOVE right there!

Lucky for you, you don’t have to drag yourself out of bed before dawn. The market itself doesn’t start until 7:30, and we’ll be down there until 1, so feel free to sleep in a bit and come see me at a slightly more reasonable hour like 9 or 10. 😉

A few quick notes about this weekend’s market. First, I had to pre-package my microgreens instead of doing live cuts. FOUR of my trays broke this week and I’m waiting on new ones to come in, so I can’t really transport full trays without dropping the whole thing on the ground, so my packaging is a bit janky this weekend. I apologize in advance. It’s not ideal, but I’m trying to make the best of it until I can get my new trays in next week.

One more note: I will be there until 1, but I may sell out before then. I will have a small amount of rainbow radish, a moderate amount of spicy brassica and mild brassica, and a LOT of sunflower microgreens.

I hope to see you tomorrow!!! :D

12/05/2021

I try to be positive and cheerful, but you know, Mother Nature is not always sunshine and roses. Sometimes, she’s a bit of a ... well, let’s keep this page PG.

Six bags - about 20 pounds - of pink oyster mushroom blocks had to be tossed today. And now, I just have to hope and pray that I didn’t get the contamination onto my PoHu’s and got everything cleaned up okay. I also lost one jar of grain master for yellow oyster mushrooms. This one little mess is going to set me back by about six weeks and cost me a good $50 or so.

What happened was something called wet spot or sour rot. It’s caused by a bacteria called Bacillus subtilius. That bacteria itself isn’t really dangerous. Variations of it are used in everything, from fermenting natto to probiotic supplements for humans and animals. It’s pretty much found everywhere: in soil, air, and in our guts. But when you accidentally capture it in a nutrient-rich environment with loads of moisture and a great incubation temperature (like the inside of a mushroom bag), it tends to get really happy. And when it takes off, the fungus for oyster mushrooms can’t really grow.

So everything had to be moved out of the incubation closet. Everything had to be scrubbed and sterilized, and the contaminated bags had to be taken out. But how does a mushroomer dispose of contamination? For me, it went straight into my second greens bed!

You see, there’s still SOME mycelium and fungus in those blocks. And Bacillus is commonly used as a soil inoculant and additive to boost yields in agriculture. It’s considered “food safe”, so it’s okay to use around growing food, and it helps to promote healthy microbes in the soil.

So for my new bed, I put down a thin layer of cardboard for w**d suppression, then a layer about 4 inches thick of wheat straw. The straw has trichoderma on it, a common agricultural fungus that some people use to help prevent pathogenic (bad) fungi like fusarium. I spread my contaminated blocks (with the Bacillus) on top of the straw, then topped the whole lot with 3-4 inches of rich, black compost.

Trichoderma is the bane of mushroom cultivators; I battled that foe last year. Wet spot is another very common mushroom growing hazard. At least both of these can create useful soil additives in the garden.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. Not all mushroom killers make for good garden soil, so I have to be able to identify the problem before I put it into my beds or compost. But at least in most areas, Mother Nature gives me a decent consolation prize when Plan A doesn’t work out!

10/05/2021

Looks like this shelf for colonization is pretty much filled. This is two weeks of grain masters and substrate bags, but it’s about to get MUCH worse! This shelf contains the beginnings of pink, brown, Italian, yellow, blue, and large Pearl oyster mushrooms!

Oyster mushrooms (the varieties I grow, at least) will colonize around 65-75 degrees, so I often hide them in closets around the house to colonize. Once they’re ready to fruit, they get moved out to the fruiting room, where the temperature is a bit lower. But, as you can imagine, space can very quickly become a problem.

Each of these little bags will colonize for about 3-4 weeks, then it will fruit for 2-3 weeks before producing its first “flush” (harvest). Best case scenario, each of these bags should let me harvest about 3-4 pounds of fresh oyster mushrooms. I may be able to get a second flush about 2-3 weeks later, usually about half as much. After that, the bags are mostly “spent”, so they get composted.

What’s inside the bags? There’s some hardwood sawdust from a local cabinet maker. It’s just a waste product for him, but I can use that to make mushrooms! I also add some soybean hulls, a high-protein animal feed that I get milled right here in Wichita Falls.

This year, we have some HUGE changes coming for mushrooms here. We’ve got a lot coming soon, so STAY TUNED!