mid June

 

A few June highlights

Hi friends. Welcome to a new week.

a june weekend

A colorful weekend in June ♥

june 11

Our new Camera Strap is now available in the shop. It is currently being offered in Stone or Sage waxed canvas, with natural veg tanned leather. Other canvas colors may be available upon request, so feel free to inquire. I even have pink! :) I almost made some in pink, but thought I’d start out with some unisex favorites first. Come take a peek if you’d like.

the little things

A simple project. Often the most satisfying kind.

grow your own mushrooms

This week we started our first set of Shiitake mushroom spawn. We had a few small Alder trees on our property that needed to be removed, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to start growing our own mushrooms. True hardwoods are a little tough to come by here, but Alder makes a great host for a number of mushroom varieties.

We ordered Pearl Oyster and Shiitake plug spawn (essentially, hardwood dowels inoculated with a particular mushroom species), from Fungi Perfecti. They are located right up in the Puget Sound of Washington. For a company more local to those of you on the east coast, there is also Oyster Creek Mushrooms in Damariscotta, Maine. I have been impressed with Paul Stamets’ work for years, so it felt great to support Fungi Perfecti.

The process is pretty simple. Holes are drilled throughout the logs – 5/16″ x 1 1/4″ deep -  spaced about every 4-5 inches apart.  We used 5 small to mid sized Alder logs in this case.

Then the dowels are pounded into the holes so they are flush with the surface of the bark.

This step was optional, but we opted for the safer route and heated some beeswax to seal each entry. This protects the interior wood, and minimizes potential competition or disruption to the spawn.

We set the logs in 2 different sites, shady with filtered light, propped off the ground on small cuts of wood.

As a final step we watered them, and now we let them do their thing, with occasional watering during dry periods. Hopefully we will have successful inoculation of the logs, and we should be able to start harvesting shiitake mushrooms by next year. We will do this same process with our oyster mushroom plugs soon.

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Mushrooms are a great source of essential amino acids and a number of vitamins – including A, B12, C and D. Many mushroom types are supportive to the immune system, have been shown to lower cholesterol and have been found to be cancer-fighting. The medicinal qualities of Shiitake mushrooms (as well as so many others) have been well known for many years, and they are delicious too!

Here are a couple of resources for those interested:

Medicinal Mushrooms – http://www.medicalmushrooms.net

Paul Stamets – http://www.fungi.com/about-paul-stamets.html

Shiitake Health benefits (grow kits available too, out of Mississippi) – http://www.naturalmushrooms.com/shiitake_mushroom_medicinal.php

Anyone growing mushrooms at home? I can’t wait to see these start to grow!

This post has also been published on Tend this week.

hey, june

I tend to think of June as my favorite month of the year; or at least it usually feels like that when it arrives. It’s an exciting lead-up to summer, and it is just the very beginning of many warm days to come. So much is blooming right now and every living thing is busy outside!

Today I am emerging from a long, strange week, and I can’t wait to wake up to another, even newer day tomorrow. My back got thrown out of alignment last week, in the worst way that I have experienced in many years. It’s really humbling to be unable to pull on your own socks and underwear without assistance, and for someone who tends to be constantly on the move, it was a supreme challenge to have to mostly lay and do nothing. I did gain a new appreciation for rest this week though. I really should let go and rest more.

Today I worked on catching up on orders, and was even able to do a little bit of mellow gardening this evening. I am so grateful to be moving more freely again!

The above photos are sort of random, just some snaps from this morning – this first day of June. My sister had a baby a little over a week ago, and I was fortunate enough to assist her birth again. My best friend from grade school is also due with a baby very soon, so I have been sewing baby hats and pants. It’s so fun and satisfying to sew baby things. The pilot hat pattern is from sew liberated.

After learning about Alys Fowler’s The Edible Garden series on YouTube, I pulled out her book Garden Anywhere. It’s been nice to revisit when I take a few minutes to relax my back. She is such a fun and knowledgeable resource.

One day soon I’ll post a new garden update… Hope you all are well. Happy June to you xo

goldenrod spider

We discovered a Goldenrod Spider in the lavender this week. They can change their color to yellow or white, depending on the camouflage they need.

They don’t make webs, but instead hunt for insects on the ground or on flowers – though usually on white or yellow flowers.

There are a lot of spit bugs in the lavender this year, which may have been it’s disguise in this case. The day after we found the spider, we were reading that bees were among the bugs they especially attack (if only they ate spit bugs), so Steve went out to see if it was still there (the lavender patch is a huge bee magnet).

To our amazement (and maybe a bit of chagrin), he found it sucking the life out of a bumblebee! Poor little bumble. Definitely interesting to witness though.

(Any of the photos can be clicked to view larger.)