Mushroom Mania

One of the great things about working at Harvest Hill is that every so often we get to go on field trips to other farms. Bill knows a lot of other farmers in the area and is committed to taking us on outings to learn about types of farming that he doesn’t do, such as mushrooms, herbs, and orchards. He wants this internship to be an educational experience as well as a taste of what running a functional farm entails.

On May 26^th, we went to Wild Branch Farm to learn about mushroom and mycelium cultivation. It was awesome. What some people may not know is that mushrooms are only a small portion of the organism known as mycelium. Mycelium is the main part of the organism and mushrooms are just the fruit of the mycelium. Glenn and his wife Cathy have a diverse farm involving vegetables, cows, goats and mushrooms. You can check out their website at www.wildbranchmushrooms.com The mushrooms they grow for market are oyster mushrooms, but Glenn is also interested in cultivating mycelium that will aid in environmental clean-up. As both primary and secondary decomposer, mycelium is effective in removing harmful elements from the surrounding area and consolidating the toxic elements it removes.

Glenn cultivates his mushrooms from wild mushrooms that he collects. Once he finds a mushroom he likes, he brings it into his lab and shakes it in front of this fan system while holding a Petri dish underneath to catch the spores. The Petri dishes are then left to grow more spores.
Once he has grown a strong enough culture, he then uses the spores he has grown to inoculate more Petri dishes and continues this cycle.
If the spawn is fully grown, but not immediately needed, it can be stored in the refrigerator for up to a year. Once he is ready to grow mushrooms from the cultures, he soaks barley or oats in hot water. Once the grain has cooled, he packs it into a vacuum seal-able bag and adds mushroom spawn. He then seals the bags and lets the spawn feed on the grain for approximately a month. Below are three pictures of these grain/spore mixtures in various stages of growth.

Once the spawn has fed on the barley for long enough, it’s time to add this mixture to straw. The first step in this process is to steam straw in a wood-oven fired steamer.

The straw is steamed for 4 hours and then left to cool for about 30 minutes. Once the straw is cool enough to handle, it is pitchforked onto a stainless steel table and mixed around to get all the hot pockets of leftover steam out. Next, the bag of spores and grain is opened and mixed into the straw. The grain has a very earthy, fungal smell, somewhat of a cross between tempeh, mushrooms and good soil. You can see Brandon partaking of the smell in the second photo down.

After the straw has been thoroughly inoculated with the spores, it is stuffed into giant bags made out of thick, greenhouse plastic. The straw is thoroughly compacted as too much air will cause the straw to grow bacteria and spoil the mushrooms. Next, the tops are tied off and small holes are cut in the bags to allow the mushrooms to emerge. It takes about two weeks for the mushrooms to poke through the bags and then another 5-10 days to become fully grown. Oyster mushrooms grow best at around 60-70 degrees with 90% humidity. Though many mushrooms can grow in the dark, oyster mushrooms need light to grow.

Glenn built a special room connected to his greenhouse for the mushroom bags to be hung. In the winter the room is heated by a wood stove, as is his greenhouse. He also set up a special drip line that drips water onto the walls, which helps control the humidity level in the room. The bags are hung on stands made out of rebar and left until the mushrooms mature.

Our afternoon at Wild Branch was great. Aside from learning about mushroom cultivation, we also got to see baby sheep and goats and Mark and I bought some of the best ground beef either of us have ever tasted. Glenn and his family have 200 acres and only 9 cows, so the free range cows have all the grass they could possibly want. There also seems to be something about meeting the farmer and seeing where the animal or plant lived out its days to make the food taste that much better. As an added bonus, Glen gave us a mushroom bag that had already fruited twice to bring back to the farm with us. As I write this, the bag has just started producing mushrooms again. Soon enough, we will be eating some very local oyster mushrooms!

Welcome to Harvest Hill

We finally made it. After 2.5 months on the road, then 4 months in Montana, then another month on the road, we arrived at Harvest Hill farm in Walden, VT on April, 17th. When we arrived, the farm looked like this:

With snow still on the ground, I was skeptical that there was any farming to be done, but 2 days later, our job started. The first weeks of work involved lots of seed starting in the greenhouse, transplanting seedlings into bigger trays, and eventually transplanting tomatoes from their trays into 5 rows in the greenhouse. We also did some outside work, primarily preparing the fields for planting. Bill even let me drive the tractor on day two! It was a little scary and I kept picturing myself somehow rolling this $28,000 machine or ramming it into a rock pile at the edge of the field. Needless to say, I did neither of those things and emerged from the day unscathed.

Our housing at Harvest Hill is a giant leap up from Montesino. Instead of living in an airstream trailer or a construction zone, we inhabit an old farmhouse that was built in 1919 and has a great view. Though it has its quirks, there is a working kitchen and indoor plumbing and all in all, it’s quite cozy. The house is heated by 2 woodstoves, one in the kitchen that can also be used for cooking and one in the basement. They are both excellent heat sources, putting off more heat than I would have imagined possible. Our first few nights here we really loaded the wood into the stove and managed to get the house up to 90 degrees before finally figuring out a good balance to keep the fire going all night, but also keep the house at a reasonable temperature.

A week and a half into our stay we got a surprise in the form of 16 inches of snow!


Maggie had to take bounding leaps to get anywhere and the snow was over the top of my mud boots.
The snow was picturesque and somewhat magical to behold. After a fairly dry winter in Montana, it was nice to see a little moisture.

Our first weekends were spent exploring the surrounding areas. We went to a great brewery, Trout River, which serves pizza on the weekends and took in a movie at the Catamount Arts Center in St. Johnsbury. We also familiarized ourselves with the local Co-op, Buffalo Mountain, and got library cards. Vermont is unique in that it has many functional, self sufficient, small towns. Most towns have a grocery store or co-op, library, post office, gas station and at least one good restaurant. One weekend we went into Montpelier, which is the smallest of all the state capitals, weighing in at around 8,000 people. Our boss, Bill, also informed us that it is the only state capital without a McDonald’s. While in Montpelier, we took in the opening day of the farmer’s market, went to a ‘Greenup Day’ festival and finished the evening at a craft brewery festival.

One Sunday we decided to hike Wheeler Mtn. Loop. It wasn’t a particularly strenuous hike, but it afforded some nice views at the top.


We also ran into our waitress from Trout River Brewery on our way back down. Vermont is a small state in more than one sense.

In the beginning of May, our co-workers and housemates, Brandon and Miranda and Miranda’s dog Cookie showed up. After a few days of Maggie making a great show of being the dominant dog, she and Cookie became good friends. On their 2nd day here, we all went for a walk in the woods surrounding the farm and Cookie met a porcupine. We think he must have tried to bite the porcupine, because his whole muzzle and nose were covered in literally hundreds of quills, as well as his paw and the inside of his mouth. The rest of the evening was spent holding Cookie still while Mark and Miranda pulled quills out with pliers. Cookie was a trooper, but finally enough was enough and he started biting any pliers that came near his face, putting an end to the quill extraction. The next day Miranda had to take him to the vet to get the rest of the quills removed. It turned out to be a good thing she did as there were quills stuck down in Cookie’s throat that we never would have been able to pull out while he was conscious. After a week or so of limping around, Cookie was back to his happy self. It’s been over a month and he has yet to encounter any more porcupines, so hopefully he learned his lesson. He is, however, still afraid of pliers, tucking his tail and slinking away any time one of us wields a pair.

The last month has been filled with transplanting, watering and weeding. 3 weeks ago we planted 13,000 onion plants in two days. Now we’re hand weeding those 13,000 onions. We spent a morning planting 1,700 pounds of potatoes. A good yield is 7-10 pounds of potatoes for every pound planted, meaning that we will be harvesting anywhere from 12,000 to 17,000 pounds of potatoes, come fall. Other veggies we have planted into the fields include broccoli, cabbage, head lettuce, lettuce mix, carrots, radishes, beets, kale, chard, brussel sprouts, peas, beans, corn, basil, winter squash, summer squash, artichokes, peppers, cherry tomatoes, eggplant and sweet potatoes. We have also spent countless hours, weeding, pruning and mulching blueberry plants and transplanting flowers.

All in all, we really love Vermont and our experience at Harvest Hill so far. Bill is a good boss, our location is gorgeous and the surrounding communities are welcoming and lovely. For such a small population, there is a lot going on, including Vaudeville shows, puppet troops, 5K races, agriculture/sustainability fairs and lots of farmer’s markets. It’s good to finally be here. I will leave you with a few more photos.View from Route 2, near the farm.


A storm rolling in over the greenhouses.


The onion patch before we planted 1,300 onions.


The view from our front porch.