Tag Archives: Mushrooms

2015 – The Year In Review

Just some of our homegrown produce from this year.

Just some of what we grew and produced this year. Top left - bottom right: winter squashes, parsnip, kohlrabi, a batch of jam, mushrooms, spiralised courgette ('courgetti'), plums, tomatoes and courgettes, squashes in our pumpkin patch.

This year was our first in our current home with our rather large garden. We moved into this house in May, and although we were late out with many of our crops, we’ve had a very successful growing season. In this post we’ll look back over the year and share where we feel we were successful, and where we were not. Soft Fruits By far our largest and most used soft fruit crop was our plums. We can’t really take much credit for this crop, as all of the trees were already here when we moved in, and we have…

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Last Batch of Mushrooms Harvested

One decent sized mushroom

The entirety of the second batch of chestnut mushrooms.

I thought it time I posted an update on our mushroom growing project. I posted back in July how we had harvested (and thoroughly enjoyed) our first batch of chestnut mushrooms, and that despite the warnings in the instructions that allowing them to grow too large would result in a smaller second crop, we let them grow too large. Well just a week after posting that, another decent sized mushroom grew and it looked as though a few more were on their way too. So we harvested the fully formed mushroom and waited eagerly for the rest to mature. But…

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Growing Our Own Mushrooms – First Batch Harvested

The first chestnut mushroom harvest - they grew faster than I expected!

As you may have guessed from the photo, despite my plans to the contrary, I didn’t manage to harvest the first crop of chestnut mushrooms whilst they were still small. The problem was that they grew so much faster than I expected. I posted on Thursday that they were almost ready to be harvested. Then on Friday they looked just about there (by which I mean they were nearly the size of the chestnut mushrooms that the supermarkets sell). Then on Saturday morning they already looked bigger than the supermarket ones. Joe and I were very busy in the garden…

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Growing Our Own Mushrooms

Last Sunday was Father’s Day here in the UK. In recent years I have found it increasingly easy to buy gifts for my father due to our shared love for all things self-sufficiency. Basically I look at things I’ve been thinking of getting for myself, and then pick one of them that he doesn’t already have. This year I opted to buy him a mushroom growing kit. I knew he’d love it. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for some time. In their excellent Practical Self-Sufficiency book, Dick and James Strawbridge have a couple of suggestions for growing mushrooms….

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