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.

Fast Forward

Truth be told, I’m tired of writing about adventures that happened months ago. I’m ready to start writing about new, Vermont farm-centric adventures. However, I feel that the past 6 months should at least be touched upon, so here’s a condensed version.

New York City was even more fun that expected. We walked all over the place, ate great food, saw good friends and took in our fill of the big city. We walked from Brooklyn to Manhattan, via the Brooklyn Bridge, went to Central Park, took the subway to Coney Island, walked all over Brooklyn, saw old friends and decided that though New York was great to visit, we definitely aren’t city people. However, we are both glad we have friends who live there, because it’s a great excuse to go back someday.

After leaving New York City, we headed south, hoping to make it to Charlottesville, Virginia to get our car fixed at the same mechanic who fixed our clutch. It became apparent rather quickly that this wasn’t in the cards. Our heat gauge was all over the place, mostly in the red, as we crossed through New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. We made it to the tip of Virginia when the heat gauge hit the top and refused to go back down. We pulled off the interstate and were lucky enough to be 2 miles away from Prince William State Park. We limped the car to a campsite and settled in for the evening. The next day we called a mechanic who sent out a tow truck. The car was in worse shape than we thought, so we ended up renting a car for the week it was in the shop and spent some time with friends in Charlottesville and then headed out to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for some rainy adventures and finished out the week in the Blue Ridge Mountains. After our car was back in working order, we headed to Iron Station, North Carolina to pick up some things from my friend Therin’s house before heading west for the holidays.

Our route west took us through Kentucky where we stopped at Mammoth Cave National Park. Here are some pictures:


After Kentucky, we headed to Wisconsin to spend 5 days with Mark’s brother Eric, his new wife Crystle and her 2 year old son Ian. We spent some quality time with the three of them and I got to see my first Great Lake. I knew the Great Lakes were huge, but until actually seeing one, I had no idea how huge! There had been a Salmon spawn sometime before and there were dried fish everywhere.





After saying our goodbyes, we struck out through Minnesota and into South Dakota. We slept at a rest stop just outside of the Badlands and went into the National Park early the next morning. What an otherworldly landscape.







After South Dakota, we crossed into Montana, landing at our friend’s Nic and Sarah’s apartment in Bozeman. We spent a few fun filled days in the excessively snowy town, cooking and eating great food, going to Norris Hot Springs, lounging and generally having a great time. Our next stop was Hamilton, Montana where we would remain for the next 4 months, kind of on accident, kind of on purpose. I got my old job back at Chapter One Bookstore and my parents were house sitting up in Missoula for most of the week, leaving their house empty for Mark and I to house sit. While in Montana, Mark did a lot of writing for his blog that he plans to turn into a book in the not too distant future. You can check it out at http://mybestfrienddave.blogspot.com He also did some embroidery work and made an excellent winged buffalo.
We spent Thanksgiving at my Cousin Alison’s house where we got to meet new baby Bennett and I finally gave him his baby quilt that I’d been working on since January, but due to my obsessively tiny stitches, it took me 11 months to complete. In my defense, it’s difficult to get excited about sitting around with a quilt on your lap, hand quilting in the Texas heat. One good thing about driving across the country is it leaves lots of free time for quilting.

We went back to Bozeman two more times to visit Sarah and Nic, our friends Katie and Audrey dropped by on their way across the country
and we spent a fair amount of time with Hamilton friends, eating good food and playing darts. Mark also went home to Colorado for 3 weeks and got in a lot of good family and friend time and went on some outdoor adventures.
The main focus of my winter turned out to be the musical Annie. Our local theater was putting it on and on a whim I tried out. It turned out to be very time consuming, but fun. I discovered a whole new group of people I never knew existed in Hamilton. I had 4 lines and a 5 word singing solo. As a homeless person and Annette the servant, I spent a lot of time on stage, but mostly in the background. While I was off becoming a star, Mark went on a bunch of hikes and went on a solo backpacking trip. He also encountered a grip of wildlife including a moose and a wolf. I made another quilt, this time for Eric and Crystle’s new baby, my new nephew, Brock.





Three days after the final Annie show, Mark and I left Hamilton. We had spent the winter applying to farm jobs all over the East Coast and had decided to spend the season at Harvest Hill Farm in Walden, Vermont. We left Hamilton on March, 17th with a month to make it to Vermont in time to start work. In logical fashion, we headed west to go east.



First stop on our eastbound road trip was Portland, Oregon. We spent a lovely week there, enjoying the spring weather, exclaiming over the flowers and spending time in parks with our friends. We also hit up some of our favorite Portland locations, such as Powell’s bookstore, Mt. Tabor, a number of our favorite restaurants, specifically Asian ones as we were skeptical of the abundance of Asian food in the Northeast Kingdom. One of the highlights of our Portland experience was seeing ‘Back to the Future’ on the big screen at Laurelhurst, our favorite beer theater. I also, personally, drank way too much good coffee. After saying farewell to our Portland friends, we headed to the Oregon Coast to visit our favorite beaches. We stopped at Arcadia, Hug Point and Oswald west, before cutting inland to spend the night in Corvallis with our friends Cosmo and Gwenn. They gave us a tour of their newly remodeled home, fed us tasty food and took us on a lovely evening walk. The next morning we continued south to Medford, Oregon to spend some days with our buddy Ross. The night we got there, ‘The Devil Makes Three’, a raucous bluegrass band was playing in Ashland. The show was a great way to start off our Medford portion of the trip. A lot of relaxing was done in Medford. Picnics were went on, hikes were taken, movies were watched, hot springs were soaked in and the balmy weather was enjoyed.

From Oregon we crossed the border into California where we spent time in both Wilits and Ft. Bragg, visiting our friends Katie and Alex and Nora. Though wet and chilly, Northern California was gorgeous. We spent a lot of time outside, both inland and on the coast and took way too many photos.

From California we finally started heading towards Vermont instead of away from it. We spent 10 days in Berthoud, Colorado visiting Mark’s family, but on the way there we managed to hit 3 different snowstorms in 3 different states. Passes in California, Nevada and Colorado were all determined to dump ridiculous amounts of snow in the path of the poor Subaru. At least we got a break in Utah. Berthoud was nice and relaxing. We spent a lot of time with Mark’s family and friends. The time felt too short, but then again, it always does. From Colorado we booked it through Kansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee to make it to North Carolina in two days. We reclaimed everything we had left at my friend Therin’s and loaded up the car all the way to the front seats. Maggie still managed to find a little niche to crawl into. We spent a few days with Therin and she and Ellick even talked us into going to Hot Yoga. Mark loved it. I, however, was not cut out for an hour and a half of yoga at 94 degrees and only made it through a little over half the class before going out to sit in the lobby to avoid passing out. At least I tried.

After North Carolina, we made a stop in Charlottesville, Virgina for a few days. We stayed at my friend Jed’s house and he and his roommates were once again incredibly accommodating and fun. These southern folk know how to have a good time. From Virginia, we headed north and made it to Vermont in 12 hours. We slept at a rest stop on Interstate 93 and the next morning met up with my friend Emiko in Montpelier. Emiko and I studied abroad in Ecuador together and it was great to see her again. We went out to Kismet, a great breakfast place and then hit up the indoor Farmer’s Market before bidding her and her friend Matt farewell and driving the last 45 minutes to the farm.

Here are a sampling of photos from our road trip East:




































Next post: Welcome to the Northeast Kingdom. Get ready for some gorgeous Vermont photos!