The Three Sisters, corn, bean and squash, grown together by the native Americans, have a mythical aura that exerts a pull on many a homesteader or experimental farmer.  I too, heard the siren of the Three Sisters, and was seduced.  In the past two years, we have planted a Three Sisters plot.  It is a homage to the original farming practice of this place.  But it’s also an experiment in the possibility of growing more and more nutritious food with simple tools, on less land, and little enough labor to make economic sense. 

​The Three Sisters were grown by the native peoples from Central America, to the Southwest, and up through the Northeast into Canada.  At the time when the Europeans arrived here, the Three Sisters compared favorably to European farming -– they produced more food per acre than the rotation of monocrop fields common in European agriculture; the mix of crops was nutritionally superior to what the Europeans brought; and the no-till management was able to maintain soil fertility without fallowing over longer periods than the European practice of plowing.  Nonetheless, it was the Three Sisters that disappeared.    That was unfortunate, but I don’t think it is useful to bash the old folks over it.  Let’s acknowledge, forgive our ancestors if we feel the need to, and move on to see what can be learned.
 
Having studied the Three Sisters in books and articles, I planned to try a plot with 100 mounds, and to include our animals in it.   Our plot would be on the “common” of our little Big Foot Food Forest “village” - the open area between the big house, the little garden house, the straw bale studio, the two hoop barns and the solar panels.  The use of animals is my innovation; the native Americans did not have sheep or chickens, but we do, and we like to put them to work.  Otherwise, our plan pretty much follows the books.

​In April 2023, we grazed ten ewes with lambs for 25 days on the common.  Very idyllic!  They ate hay, nibbled on anything that emerged and deposited their manure with more than enough NPK and other nutrients for the Three Sisters.  When the sheep moved on to bigger pasture, we made the 100 mounds on 48” spacing on a plot about 1200 SF.  Mid-May, we planted heritage flint corn, waited for it to emerge and grow; then planted Scarlet Runner and Cherokee Trail of Tear beans and Butternut squash seeds and waited for the Three Sister magic to happen…. ​

Year two, in Spring of 2024, instead of the sheep, we let our 100 chickens into the village common for a month.  They too, ate early weeds and deposited enough NPK equivalent to fertilize the Three Sisters – such handy little helpers!  I made some other changes to try to improve on the year before: we planted the corn a little later; and we planted squash seedlings instead of seeds, hoping they might get ahead of the weeds.

​No frost loss this year, but we lost about half of the corn to high winds again.  Perhaps we’ll plant a wind break next year?   Overall though, the remaining corn grew well.  The beans were a little slower than the year before.  The squash grew out over the whole plot and produced some fruits, but eventually was totally overwhelmed by weeds - again.  Ok, next year, we’ll do some selective weeding!   The beauty of the plot was stunning – I just love this way of growing food!   

​ Like the year before, once the corn was ripe, something started to eat it.  This time, I intervened, although we still lost about half of the corn.  Next year, I’ll keep a better eye out for the scavengers!  We dried the harvested corn on our deck in the hot August sun for a couple of weeks and then shucked it.  It had such pretty colors – red and blue!   Our bounty was 23 pounds of dried corn seeds.  Hooray!   No animals came to eat the beans, so we were able to let them dry in the field and harvest them in October.  They gave us 24 pounds.  I think we’re getting better!   We also did extricate a few squash from the field but just one single fruit dried well to keep. 
 
I was a little frustrated by the loss of squash this year, and by all the weeds.  Next year, we’ll manage the weeds better for sure!  After the harvest, we let the sheep back into the plot to clean up. They had a blast!  They ate everything (except the corn stalks) – all the weeds, plus the dry corn leaves, and bean vines.  One of the ewes, Palm, invented the method of standing on her two hind legs against the tall corn stalks to bend them down for everyone to get at those leaves and vines.  So clever!  Who knew? 
 
In short, growing the Three Sisters is fun, it is beautiful, you get good food, I love it.  I need to get better at it! 

How do you move a little flock of sheep across and down the road to their new pasture without a herding dog or a lead sheep?  This is a question that vexed us since we started to use a field across and down the road last summer.  ​Until we invented the sheep car....

​The past four years, we have been rotating our sheep around one large field, moving them every few days and passing over the entire field two or three times per year.   We use moveable electric netting to set up their paddocks, and by setting up fenced chutes we’re able to guide them each day over some distance from the barn to their paddock of the day and back again. 
 
Last year, I wanted to start using a new field and it was – as mentioned - across the road and down a way.  Our experience is that while most of the flock will follow a person with a bucket of grain, there is inevitably one sheep, or a small group, that gets side-tracked by a tasty morsel, an intra-flock sheep tiff, or plain old sheep orneriness.   Add cars and unknown territory to that baseline situation, and it was clear that if we tried to lead them to the new field, they would be scattered all over the place.

​Materials
6 x 10’ metal conduit ½” diameter
1 x 5’ metal conduit ½” diameter
4 x coupling for ½” conduit
2 x cattle panels
Two fat wheels around 12” diameter with 5/8” bore
72” threaded rod ½”
Washers
2 x End nuts ½”
To tie conduit to cattle panels: strong twine, zip ties, or small, metal hose clamps
 
Tools
Conduit bender for ½” conduit
Wrenches to tighten nuts
Screwdriver if you are using hose clamps.

5. Fasten the two conduit rectangles to the inside of the cattle panel frame, one near the top and one near the bottom.  The bottom one should be at a height so that it can be joined with the axel for the wheels in the next step.  This height will depend on the diameter of your wheels.  You want the frame to ride 1-3 inches above the ground – low enough so that no lambs or sheep feet can get caught under it, but high enough so that it doesn’t drag too much along the ground and grass.  You can fasten the conduit to the frame with rope or twine, or zip ties, or small metal hose clamps.

​6. Cut the a few inches off the remaining small 5’ length of conduit, so that you can attach it at the back of the sheep car frame with a bit of extra length on either end so the wheels don’t interfere with the frame.  This is your axel holder.  Attach this to the conduit and/or the cattle panels.  Again, make sure that the height of the axel is such that your sheep car frame will clear the ground by a few inches. ​

9. Cut a door opening out of the cattle panels at the back of the sheep car.  Take another small piece of cattle panel or other sturdy grid material for the door and attach to the sheep car.  The simplest is to use a couple of carabiners, but you can also make it more official and use hose clamps.   Use carabiners for closing though – it’s simple and works.

​10. Optional: you may want to attach handles to the front to make pulling easier.  We did not in this version, but think it would be a good addition, especially if you need to take the sheep car over rougher pasture.    

I have had an on-and-off fascination with growing mushrooms for the past 15 years.   My failed attempts at trying to grow them were chronicled in some earlier letters.  I since learned to grow mushrooms and at a small scale, I'd say I have a reasonable measure of success.  This is the entire story, including the early failures and later learning.  Hope my experience is of use for those entering into this fascinating activity.

That note above was the email I sent to my father-in-law on October 24, 2016, seven years after he had brought a pile of 3-foot logs from a freshly cut ash all the way from his woods in Utica, New York to our house in the Boston area. ​In 2009, my husband Mark and I had inoculated those logs with shiitake spawn and closed the holes up with beeswax with the help of our young daughters, Charlotte (10) and Josephine (9), and their two cousins, Saitha and Max.  We had followed the directions from Field and Forest, our source for the spawn to a tee – choose hardwood, let the logs rest for two weeks, and put the logs in a nice shady spot in moist woods in the back of the house – so we were sure we that a whole series of delicious and bountiful shiitake harvests were just a year or two away.  As those two years went by, we made sure to spray the logs if some weeks of the summer got too dry.   After two years, we started to check for shiitake after rainfalls.   Nothing came.  No worries, we’ll wait another year.  Nothing came.  And so, it went.   Until, having given up all expectation, on that October day, a little flush of shiitake came our way.  And that was it.
 
This little story is the first in a series of mushroom growing mishaps – some of which are recounted here. I have been fascinated by fungi for more than 15 years – in their role helping plants grow by transporting nutrients; in their destructive role as decimators of animals and plants (American Chestnut!); and in their role as delicious and healing food.  Current mushroom farming is booming, which is a wonderful thing, but even organic mushrooms tend to be material- and energy intensive, including single-use, virgin plastic, and climate-controlling machinery inside large enclosures.  I wanted to grow them in a low-tech, low-input, and small-scale way on logs, on waste, outdoors, and in re-usable containers.   And today, I do. Our mushrooms grow outdoors 6 months of the year in buckets, tubs, and on logs.  In the future, I hope to move even more in the log- and field-growing direction.  We sell them at the Greenfield Farmer’s Market and to a local bakery for pizza, as part of the diversified products from our farm, Big Foot Food Forest. 
 
It's good now, but I would say that early mushroom growing fail rate was close to 100 percent.  It is possible that I started out my mushroom growing career being the least talented mushroom grower in the Universe.   On the other hand, I have been persistent, prolific, and creative in my attempts (including dumb creative), and in this way, I racked up a unique collection of experiences, many of them involving green mold, but some fraction actually producing delicious fungi.  I would like to share some of my early experiences, because frankly, we need some information balance in the mushroom information world. 
 
Today, there are numerous practical and color-illustrated books, as well as countless YouTube videos all telling you how you too can grow mushrooms, just like we did, if you just do This!   Nowhere are there accounts of people who did those things but did not grow anything.  Yet, I am sure that growing nothing is the experience of many beginners.  People, I am here to tell you that you are not alone nor are you just crooked-handed and clumsy.  Growing mushrooms is persnickety and a lot can go wrong.   Here are some stories of my early failures - and then some stories of success.
 
Some early mushroom defeats
 
At the time when I started to try to grow mushrooms in the 2000’s, I was fascinated by the possibility of growing this delicious food organically and on waste.  I was still an urban worker and denizen at the time, but with seeds of transitioning farming in my mind. I could imagine a small mushroom business,  say bringing mushrooms to my farmer friend Kate’s stand at the local farmers market. 
 
I was encouraged by the expansive writings of Paul Stamets, the undisputed Guru of modern American mushroom growing and his book “Mycelium Running”.  Stamets says you can cultivate gourmet oyster mushrooms on waste products like old newspaper, and they basically grow themselves.  Now that spoke to my live-sustainably heart!  Next thing you know, I ordered two bags of grain spawn from Field and Forest.  When I got them, I realized I wasn’t quite sure, from Stamets’ description, what to do with them.  Like, what should the newspaper be contained in?  What do I do to prepare the newspaper – is it just a pile of old newspapers, is it shredded or crumpled?  I looked it up online and managed to find a little article with pictures.  It said to crumple the newspaper and shred it into big pieces; pasteurize it in hot water (160 degrees for some number of hours) or bleach water; mix it with spawn in an old plastic bag – I had one from CVS - and wait.  Wait for “pinheads” to appear to “initiate fruiting”.  Now what the heck are pinheads and how does one initiate fruiting?  On both questions – which seemed to me to be basic to the mushroom project – my article and the rest of the internet seemed silent.  I suppose it was common knowledge once you knew how to do it. 
 
I figured I’d find out.  Sure enough, a few weeks later, white mycelium – these are the filament-like threads part of a fungus – had covered large parts of the newspaper, and in some spots, it started to concentrate and grow tiny little white stubble.  Hm.  Stubble – those must be the pinheads!  Super!
 
Now, how to initiate the fruiting?  I did not find the answer directly but it had something to do with moisture.  To initiate fruiting on logs, submerge the logs in water for 24 hours, then set out and sprinkle twice a day.  I figured: keep the pinheads moist, so I sprayed twice a day.  Oddly, the spraying seemed like a lot more work to me than I wanted to put into little suburban farming project even if it did produce delicious oyster mushrooms!  Chalk it up to urban pigheadedness.  Result….  Oyster mushrooms grew out of the bags!   They were yummy!  But: they were not very many.  And only one bag produced mushrooms, once, the rest did nothing.   For the harvest obtained, the project was too much work. I still had half a bag each of Gray Dove and PoHo Oyster mushroom spawn in the fridge and decided to find a better way.  
 
I returned to Stamets.  There, I found descriptions of how you can remediate whole forests from one mother culture of spawn grown outside on corrugated cardboard with some woodchips (but he said you can also keep it to a smaller scale, like what I was looking for).  My I-love-recycling, looking-for-the-natural-way-to-grow-mushrooms heart was once again inspired.  When Spring came, I followed Stamets’ expert advice from chapter 9 in the book “Mycelium Running” and put the spawn in between wetted, clean pieces of old cardboard, pasteurized in hot water, with the corrugated side open to the spawn.  I made a pile with wood chips, put the pile or inoculated cardboard on it, and put it all under a bush where it would remain nice and cool and moist. It was exactly the simple type of project I was looking for!  Well, when Stamets does this kind of thing, he gets a bountiful flush of mushrooms after six weeks, and theoretically multiplies the result again and again to create 1,000,000 little colonies.  Likely because he whispers Shroom.  For me, all I got was a pile of decomposing mush and my nice spawn gone to waste.  Dang!  That took some recovery time!  So much for my budding little mushroom business.   
 
I was groping around with little guidance.  At this time, around the 2010’s, the only mushroom books easily available were the ones by Stamets.  Of these, I read “Mycelium Running” and “Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms”. Both are hundreds of pages long, and pretty dense textbooks, in which the how-to chapters were somewhat vague on the details (although there is no lack of grand vision for the role of mushrooms in saving the planet).
 
I wanted practical sources on how to grow mushrooms.  There was very little on the internet – I mentioned the little newspaper article.  You could also find short, practical descriptions on the website of Field and Forest, one of the two places in the US where you could order mushroom spawn at the time.  That’s how we knew how to inoculate those shiitake logs from the earlier letter.  The other shop was Paul Stamets’ store Fungi Perfecti in Oregon with no practical infos. 
 
Being a bit of a polyglot, I scoured the internet for mushroom growing articles and books in Dutch, German, and French.  The French language connection turned up one book, “Cultiver les champignons” which seemed practical and which I ordered, but in the end could not follow.  There was one other English language book I purchased, "Growing Mushrooms" by Arthur J. Simons from 1972.  But it turned out to be about cultivating button mushrooms in basements on horse manure.  Maybe not quite relevant... 
 
What was needed was a simple, practical book on growing mushrooms at home for the beginner.  Something along the lines of the many great gardening and vegetable growing books.  I told my husband, Mark, “I am going to write a simple book about growing mushrooms”.  He looked at me skeptically.  Really?  But you have not successfully grown any yet – which was not entirely true; I had grown that pound of oyster mushrooms on the old newspaper in a recycled CVS bag.  Well, I said, I have found a fool proof method somewhere on the internet – it is growing mushrooms on coffee grounds in a jar, and I am going to write about it. 
 
I went up to our local Starbucks and asked if they would save their coffee grounds for me.  Sure, as long as I picked them up end of the day.  Which I did.  But they had forgotten to put them aside.  Come back tomorrow.  Which I did, but too late and they had thrown them away.  Come back tomorrow.  Which I did - again.  But they could not find where they had put them.  Come back in the morning when the person who is responsible for this is back.  I came one more time, and finally got my bag of day-old coffee grounds!  At home, I mixed them up with some more mushroom spawn and made a nice little row of jars with black mix in them, covered with lids with holes.  I had even started to write the directions and made little drawings of the jars with the coffee grounds and the mycelium in them.  I was confident that here was the secret mix, and soon, I would be Queen of the Practical Mushroom Book.   
 
Boy, did I come down.  Some weeks went by, and instead of nice white mycelium growth that was supposed to happen, I saw a bit of green mold.  Oh, maybe that is a mistake; the mushroom will take over.  Then, more green mold, and more and more.  In all the jars.  One hundred percent.   The growing mushrooms on coffee grounds project was a resounding failure.  I would not have a small business and would not write the simple how-to book on growing mushrooms with whimsical drawings.  It was quite the malperformance, and it kept me quiet about mushrooms for a good while. 
 
Taking workshops on growing mushrooms – still no success.
 
But the mushrooms kept whispering and coming back to me.  In 2013, a few years after waiting for the shiitake, I was working with a wonderful young farmer named Heather Borkowski at the Needham Community Farm where I taught vegetable growing workshops. Heather and I talked about mushrooms and soon enough she had us signed up for a semi-private mushroom class and we were on our way to New Hampshire to David Wichland’s farm, Wichlandwoods.  At David’s place we saw mushroom logs he had strewn about his woods; and his log dunking tub (shiitakes like to be dunked before fruiting, but it’s not a requirement); and his quirky self-built workshop house on poles.  He gave us a tour to teach us about good log location and then we set about to inoculate our little collection of logs. After that official teaching, I says to my logs: “Haha shiitakes!  Now you will grow at my house because I took a bona fide workshop and did everything right!”.   I did not hear the small mushroom voices sing back: “Haha Babette!  We will not, we will not!  Even if you dunk us in a bucket!”.   Grrr.
 
I believe this experience with mushroom workshops is not uncommon.  Shiitake log workshops are popular.  And why not?  Shiitake are eminently desirable, and what could be simpler than leaving a log in some shady spot in your back yard for a year or two before you go out and pick off a nice little basket of beautiful round and speckled mushrooms?   If you take such a workshop, your instructor will tell you about the life cycle of mushrooms, how much of that life cycle is in the form of mycelium that grows into a substrate like logs, gradually colonizing it, and how when the log or other growth medium is fully colonized, the fungus will start to sprout fruits, which are the mushrooms that we eat.  They will explain how shiitake have traditionally been grown on inoculated hardwood logs stacked in a wooded area, and how we are now going to inoculate some logs ourselves.  Most likely, they will have spawn plugs, which are little hardwood dowels that have themselves been inoculated with mushroom spawn (by a professional mushroom growing company).   The workshop participants each get their logs and drill little holes spaced about 4 to 6 inches apart all along the log and put the plugs in.  This is typically a lot of fun since you get to use a power tool and a hammer.  You then close the holes up with molten beeswax.  That’s it!   It is possible you’ll get to make three or four logs to take home – that makes for happy workshop customers :).   Put them in a shady spot, in hot, dry weather moisten them, and wait for shiitakes.   My father’s partner did a log workshop like that and was so confident she would have shiitake soon.  I could tell she thought I had probably just done something silly. But also at her house, none came…
 
I got roped into two more log workshops. In 2018 at a permaculture course I was taking and in 2019 as part of the Applied Permaculture Series I had organized with the Boston Food Forest.  I took four oak logs home from each event.   Maple and oak are great shiitake growing wood species.  All the logs got stacked under the Green Giant arborvitae tree in our yard (a more perfect spot could not be imagined).  I faithfully checked those logs for a couple of years after rains.  And still, on the perfect logs, in the perfect spot, with workshop-led and pro-tools inoculation: no shiitakes.   I was just hoping other regular folks were having better luck than I with their shiitake logs, but I was taking a break! 
 
After all the failed attempts and dashed grandiose plans, I did kind of give up on mushrooms for short while.  In fact, I was not thinking about them at all anymore.  As we purchased land in Montague, Mass and started thinking about farming it:  no mushrooms.  In the business plan for the farm (2019), and in a vision for the farm written with the Regenerative Design Group (2019): no mushrooms.  But they came back to me.
 
A simple mushroom business plan using kits

In autumn 2020, I was on a walk around the quiet roads behind Montague Village minding my own business when I ran into two fellow travelers at a crossroad.  Since they had a dog and I had one, and since folks in the country are chatty, we got to talking and telling each other what we’re doing.  It just so happened that one of the fellows was Willie Crosby, owner of Fungi Ally, and he was about to start a zoom course on how to grow mushrooms.  It was fate. 
 
Of course, I signed up for the class, and of course Willie was brilliant and of course I took copious notes and of course I figured with all this new info there was no way the ‘shrooms could fail me again.  The course was great – despite all the reading that had gone before, I only then felt like I was beginning to understand fungi.  Plus, Willie told us about a fail-free way that folks get into the mushroom business, namely, by buying kits.  Kits are bags of mushroom spawn that are all ready to fruit.  All you need to do is to make some slits in the bag and mist the mushrooms as they grow.  Fungi Ally offers a 25% discount if you order in bulk, which came out to $24 per kit, and on average, you could get about 2 pounds of mushrooms per kit.  I figured the math and saw I could run a (small) profit by buying bulk mushroom kits, growing them out of the bags, and selling the harvest.   Bingo!
 
Here was my business plan.  Buy 10 mushroom kits per week for a cost of $240 and harvest an average of 20 lbs per week.  Sell them at $15/lb for $300 and net $60 per week.  It was small, but it was a start. 
 
In March, I ordered nine kits of nine different kinds of mushrooms: shiitake, four different kinds of oysters, lion’s mane, reishi, pioppino, and chestnut.   I wanted to try them all out and see which ones would work best in my mushroom business.  In my mind, I saw myself with lots of mushrooms asking a wonderful, approachable farmer, Meryl LaTronica who I knew from back in the Needham days, if she’d be interested in selling them at her farmers market stand.  We got the bags set up in the little garden house Mark had built, and I dutifully misted them.   Sure enough, it worked!  A few weeks later, we harvested a big flush of varied mushrooms! 
 
Excited and very nervous, I arranged them artfully in a basket and went off to Meryl’s farm, Just Roots.  I remember vividly walking around the farm on a gorgeous day, looking for someone in the just-plowed fields, and in the greenhouses bursting with seedlings, but finding nobody.   I knocked on the door of her home.  No answer.  Almost relieved, I left my basket by her door and sent an email.  “Dear Meryl, I left you these mushrooms.  Would you be interested in selling them at your farmstand?”.    Not long after, she wrote back: she’d love to sell them!  Oh my!  I was in the mushroom business!  I wrote to Willie and asked him if I could order the mushroom kits in bulk at a discount.  Yes, sure.  In May, I ordered six kits for some more testing and some other mushroom spawn (I had also had some success growing oysters from spawn that Spring). 
 
Now, recall that the business plan included harvesting about 2 pounds of mushrooms per kit.  That first flush of mushrooms, some of which went to Meryl, was only about 1-1.5 lbs per kit.  To get to the two-pound average, I needed what is called a second and third flush – this is where the mushrooms send out a new harvest after a few weeks interval.  Problem was, I had no idea how to get a second flush.  Willie just said, “wait, they will come.”  What does that mean?!  I just left the bags out without spraying them.  After a while no flushes had come; I gave up on the kits and put them away.  I thought, I can’t do this second flush thing, so this little business doesn’t make sense.  That was all.  When the newly ordered kits came, I didn’t take care of them.  They sat in the refrigerator. I never went back to Meryl with more mushrooms.  I was in a fungal funk: feeling hopeless about anything to do with mushrooms.
 
This time though, it was not the fungi that tricked me.  It was my own lack of confidence.  After a month or so, I found those tossed out kit bags, and some of them had flushed again, quite generously.  I saw that all I had needed was more patience. 
 
The methodical road to mushroom success
 
It did not feel good to leave the mushrooms there, having disappointed myself and Meryl.  I needed to come back to mushrooms again.  I had tried growing on logs through workshops and on my own; I had tried the Stamets methods with cardboard, coffee grounds, and old newspaper; I had tried mushroom kits and Willie’s methods for expanding spawn, all with zero or mediocre success.  I was an expert at growing green mold!   Perhaps it was the sheer embarrassment of it – being humiliated by a fungus, or worse, by multiple fungi.  Aren’t we supposed to be the intelligent ones?  What was needed, obviously, was a more rigorous, methodial approach.  I would create my own Mushroom Laboratory, the Big Foot MushLab.   In the MushLab I would try many different growing methods and learn which ones avoid mold and promote mushrooms.  It was extremely helpful that by 2021 the internet was positively exploding with YouTube videos and written guides with hundreds of different variations on growing mushrooms.  I enrolled in YouTube University and spent weeks looking at all of them, taking notes, comparing, and deciding which ones I would try.  Those many years while I was struggling in the mushroom wilderness, these people had figured out how to grow mushrooms profitably using the same information base I had.  I could have been envious, but it didn’t occur to me; I was so happy and grateful they had shared what they learned.
 
I wanted success, but I also wanted to adhere to my principles.  As I was checking out all the methods, I was looking for ways to: reduce buying – make, reuse, or repurpose - or buy the lowest cost technology; and minimize single-use, virgin plastic.  We all want organic of course, but we should not lose sight of reducing waste!  I still ended up buying so much stuff, including plastic, but I really wanted success.  Sigh.
 
In the end, I learned a lot.  I realized that to grow mushrooms, it helps to understand what makes it difficult. Why is it so easy to grow green mold when you are trying to grow mushrooms?  The answer is: because they are related, they both are forms of fungi.   They both like to grow in the same moist environments and on the same food.  But mold tends to be aggressive.  You have to be clever to create conditions that are conducive to fungi (mold and mushrooms) but that allow mushrooms to get ahead. 
 
Nature does this with overwhelming numbers.  A single mature mushroom releases a gazillion spores.  These float around until a few million find a good spot.  There, they germinate and start to grow mycelium.  If nobody eats them and nothing else bad happens, then, when they are ready and the conditions are right, another mushroom grows, and the cycle starts again.  Success is rare but the process is simple.
 
Humans like to control the success rate, and control, as we all know, makes things complicated. Here is what modern, human mushroom growing looks like.  In a sterile lab, a person in a hazmat suit collects mushroom spores from a mushroom.  They are extremely careful to avoid getting mold into the spores.  The spores are grown out in a petri dish in the lab.  The petri dish concoction is injected into sterile syringes.  Be careful: mold can get into the syringe.  The liquid mycelium is then injected into a bag with water-saturated grain that has been sterilized by heat.  Avoid mold getting in with the injection or being present in the grain!  If all goes well, the spores colonize the grain with mycelium – thin white strands that smell earthy.  Once the bag is colonized the person gets six or ten or twenty more bags with sterilized grain and distributes the colonized grain into these bags.  For this, they don’t need a hazmat suit, but they do use a laminar flow hood to create a mold-free workspace.  This second generation (G2) colonizes the bags.  The expansion can go on for a while if you want (G3, G4 …), but the spawn gets weaker with each generation.  To get mushrooms (the fruits of the fungus), you need to put the mycelium, also called spawn, into something with lots of cellulose, like a log, newspaper, straw, or sawdust pellets, and create conditions so that the mycelium gets ahead of the mold, colonizes the substrate, and wins the race. 
 
My MushLab was going to focus on two of these steps: expanding purchased G2 mushroom grain spawn to G3 grain spawn; and growing actual mushrooms using the G3 spawn and cellulose-rich fruiting mediums.   And, because it was a laboratory, I was getting serious, and that meant no more growing in trash bags or on old cardboard; this was going to be official.  I would also put everything into a big excel sheet and record what I learned. 
 
I still wanted to adhere to my principles of buy less and produce less waste, i.e virgin single-use plastic, but I wanted success and so, for this phase of my mushroom education, I kind of threw those principles overboard.  I’d get back to them later.  
 
Even though I hungered for success, I guessed there would be lots of failures as I was learning and that would require a fair number of spawn bags.  Spawn bags are expensive ($30 a pop).  By expanding from G2 to G3, I could make 6-8 bags of spawn (value: $180-240) out of one.  To get there, I had to buy a pressure cooker ($150), millet and rye, and single-use, virgin plastic grow bags specially for mushrooms that can withstand heat and have a small patch with tiny micron size holes for air circulation. To compensate, instead of buying an expensive laminar flow hood, I re-used some plastic lying around to jerry-rig a still air box (a 2 cubic foot transparent container with holes for your arms, inside of which you can create a clean environment).
 
I would try different growing techniques from different online sources, aiming for success and replicability. I would follow instructions of whatever YouTube video on online guide I was using to a tee, (contrary to my usual habit of trying something slightly different).
 
In November 2021 I purchased grain spawn bags (on sale) from Willie’s company, FungiAlly: Reishi, Chestnut, Pioppino, Black King Oyster, and Blue Oyster.  The idea was to expand these grain spawn bags into enough for me to play around with.
 
To start, I had to make sterilized grain bags.  Then I would need to transfer the purchased G2 grain spawn into those bags for my own G3 grain spawn bags.   Perhaps unsurprisingly, the enterprising mushroom aficionados that post on the internet have developed different methods for making sterilized grain bags.  People use a variety of grains: millet, rye, oats, even birdseed!  I tried millet, rye, and 50:50 of each.  Then, the grain needs to be hydrated.  Everyone agrees that the grain for spawn bags needs to be hydrated to just the right level – when you squeeze it tightly, just a few drops of water should come out.  Too wet or too dry weakens the mycelial growth.  This can be done with a simmer method (for 30 minutes then drain), a soak method (24 hours then drain, and a no soak no simmer (NSNS) method (mix correct ratio of grain and water). Then the grains need to be sterilized.  Everyone agrees that if you are making bags with approximately 6 cups of grain, they need to be in the pressure cooker at 15 PSI for about 2.5 hours  I found the cooker to be pretty fussy and had a number of instances of melted bags – this happens when there is too little water left and the temperature rises.  Not my favorite enterprise!
 
Once the bags are cooled, you need to transfer some of your G2 grain spawn into each bag.  You do this in a clean environment, either in front of a laminar hood, or a still air chamber.  I had made one of the latter since the laminar hood is a big investment.  You put everything inside the still air chamber, including alcohol to spray everything down.  Open your purchased G2 grain bag, and then one of your own sterilized grain bags.  Drop 1/6 or so of the G2 grain spawn into your G3 bag without touching the grain.  This is where mold contamination can creep in!   Spray down your hands as you work and close your G3 bag up quickly avoiding touching the inside of the bag before you do to the next one.  It’s all a bit nerve-wracking.  However, I made approximately six G3 bags out of each G2 bag. 
 
Then, I put them on a shelf and started to wait about four weeks until the bags would be fully colonized – that means they are pretty grown through with mycelium.  Of course, I checked them all the time!  The mycelial growth started within a few days; very exciting!   Amazingly, the overall G2 to G3 expansion results were pretty good, with two notable exceptions.   All of the Pioppino and Shiitake bags succumbed to green or black mold.  The Pioppinos are a mystery; but the Shiitake bags succumbed because we closed the bags outside the still air box.  Those mushrooms are fussy!  Of the Oyster, Chestnut, and Reishi all but two of the bags colonized successfully.  The three grain mixes and the three hydration methods all performed similarly, although it looked like some of the NSNS bags had some excess moisture on the bottom where there was no colonization. Clearly, the hydration matters.  I also noted in the next step, that the millet grain seemed to produce larger harvests. I refrained from getting giddy, and set to work on the next step, which was to put the spawn into growing containers. 
 
I had Black Oyster, Blue Oyster, Chestnut and Reishi bags to work with.  Now, how to grow mushrooms?  In all of my mushrooms adventures, I had wanted, by hook or by crook, to avoid buying single-use, virgin plastic mushroom growing bags.  I tried yoghurt containers, ball jars, old plastic shopping bags, cardboard, logs, and New York Times delivery bags.  Of these, the last was the most successful, which just proves the value of good journalism, but unfortunately, we had just gone to electronic newspaper delivery, and our supply of these bags dried up.  The most ecological and plastic-free way to grow mushrooms is on logs, for sure, but I had had very little success with this, and was in the mood for something to work.  According to all the Internet tecs, plastic seemed to be part of that equation. 
 
It was wonderful to have instructions for just about any mushroom!  What a new world!  It made it much more straightforward to grow the darn things!
 
For the Reishi, the only option seemed to be the single-use virgin mushroom grow bags (well, I’d already gone down that path with the spawn expansion).  You mix 5 cups of hardwood pellets and 6 cups of water into each mushroom bag and sterilized those in my pressure cooker for 2.5 hours at 15 PSI.  Then, into the still air box, and basically the same procedure as with the G2 to G3 bags, putting everything in the box, spraying with alcohol, working one bag at a time, not touching the grain spawn or the inside of the bag, and sealing each bag up before anything leaves the box.   This works!  We made seven bags and had a bounty of cool-looking reishi antlers!
 
For my King oyster and the Chestnut mushrooms I found it was possible to use a re-usable plastic container called a monotub.  The monotub advertises itself as a care-free self-regulating tool to grow mushrooms.  Hooray!  It’s a rectangular growing container 22.5” wide, 15.5 deep, and 12” tall with strategically placed holes.  It self-maintains the high moisture mushrooms love.  It regulates the air and moisture through the holes.  You cover the holes with paper tape during the colonization phase when the mycelium loves lots of carbon dioxide, and then cover with something air-permeable during the oxygen-loving fruiting phase.   Even though they are pricey (they were $48 a pop in 2021 with 20% off and by 2023 they cost $75 per tub!), I was so hungry for some success that I purchased eight of them!  
 
Here's what you do with a monotub.   Work quickly in a clean space to minimize contamination.  In an enormous bowl, hydrate a mix of pellets according to a recipe you find online.  You can vary the substrate (newspaper or hardwood pellets) and the additives (alfalfa or soy).   Then, spray your monotub with alcohol.  Spray your hands with alcohol.  Open your bag of spawn with alcohol-sprayed scissors.  Spray the monotub again.  Put in a layer of the hydrated pellets, a layer of spawn, pellets, spawn, pellets.  Close the monotub.  Cover the holes in the monotub with masking tape.  Done.  There is no sterilizing or pasteurizing - awesome! - you just work quickly with the pellets.
 
Then you wait for the stuff to get nicely colonized with mycelium, which you can tell when the substrate is more or less white and starts to show small dew-like drops on the top.  At that point, to initiate fruiting, remove the masking tape and put on some air permeable micropore tape to start airflow and increase oxygen in the tub but still regulate contamination.  So easy, right?  That’s why we pay the big bucks for monotubs.
 
Some sources say to case the colonized substrate with a layer of peat moss once you initiate fruiting.  I tried this, and also using hardwood pellets, and adding lime to raise the Ph, but for me all of those options led to my old friend the green mold; only un-cased newspaper pellets with one additive produced mushrooms.  Of those, it seemed like the soy pellet additive led to higher harvests than alfalfa.   When successful we harvested many pounds of really nice-looking King Oyster and Chestnut mushrooms.  The only downside was that I found the monotubs reliability to be mediocre: the Black Oyster was attacked by green mold in about half of the trials, even with newspaper pellets only.  They’re OK, but I’m not a huge fan.  I have not found another way to grow Chestnut and King Oyster though.
 
The third method for growing mushrooms was the one I loved the best: using cheap, ubiquitous 5-gallon buckets.  Buckets are good for shelf mushrooms that are pretty hardy and not finicky – basically that means oyster mushrooms (except for the upright oysters like King).  They are inexpensive and easy to obtain, and you can use ones that you have at home that have sprung a leak on the bottom.   To prepare your 5-gallon bucket for growing mushrooms, first clean it well.  Duh.  Then drill little ¼” holes in it in a diamond pattern, each about 4 inches apart and some small drainage holes in the bottom.  For the growing substrate I used straw.  Following some online directions, I filled a pillow-case with 5-gallons worth of cut straw, and put the bag in a large pot and poured boiling water over it.  The next day, I drained the straw and then layered it in the prepared 5-gallon buckets with about 1/3 of a grain spawn bag. It worked!  We had oyster mushrooms reliably sprouting out of buckets.  I did try some experiments using newspaper pellets – since they worked so nicely in the monotubs – but this did not work in the buckets.
 
Finally, thanks to all those folks who had figured it out, and shared their knowledge, and thanks to my sheer pig-headedness, my MushLab was reliably producing mushrooms! 
 
It was time for the next step, to go back to Meryl.  I sent her a blog I had written about pruning blueberries that featured her and my embarrassment about another failed attempt at market growing – namely to bring her blueberries.  She reacted so encouragingly: “I love this!  Thank you so much for sharing! I so get it--so many misses in farming, alongside all the wins!  One thing is that you never have to feel embarrassed with me!! One time a brand new greenhouse I put together blew apart only a week later. Yoder sat with me on my kitchen floor while I was a puddle of mush and failure.  but I got up and built it again! (with help from all the other farmers I knew).”  Wow!  Meryl is an amazing farmer.  With this warm reaction all the shame and frustration washed away.  Yes, I had failed a million times.  But I did keep getting up to try again – a little differently.  I followed up by asking her if she would trust me to bring her mushrooms this season, after flaking out on her the year before.  YES.  And so it went.  All that summer, we brought small batches of mushroom pints to the Just Roots farmstand at the Greenfield Farmer’s Market on Saturdays.  We did it again in 2023 and are doing it again in 2024.  This year, I added Rise Above bakery to my clients - they get the mushrooms for their Friday pizzas.  Maybe I’ll try some restaurants next.  The mushroom field has gotten pretty crowded, but with a beautiful product and good relationships, I think you can still make some sales. 

Those shiitake logs had a coda of their own.  By chance, in 2022, at the end of my first summer with Just Roots, I met a wonderful woman who grows shiitake on logs.  Ellena Baum was at that time the Land and Community Education Manager at Grow Food in Northampton and she overheard me talking about shiitake while a group of us was harvesting hazelnuts at Nutwood Farm in Cummington.  She said she had had luck growing shiitake, right from the beginning.  Naturally, I was all ears, and wanted to know the all the details of her process, which she generously shared.  Here is what she told me to do. In April, get about 40 hardwood logs.  Oak best, then sugar maple, but other maples and birch also work.  Ash – which my father-in-law had brought those many years ago – is not a good shiitake wood.  Cut logs that are about 6-inch diameter and 3-4 feet long.  As soon as your schedule allows (don’t wait two weeks), inoculate them with shiitake sawdust spawn, cover holes with wax, and stack them in a forest area.  She also has hers covered with a shade cloth.  The following year, in June, after some rainy days, soak for 24 hours, and set them vertically.  A week or two weeks later you’ll have your first flush.  You can get a second flush 8-12 weeks later.  The second and third years are the best, while output tapers off in the fourth and fifth years.  I thought I would definitely have to try that!  Maybe the colony of dozens of logs would do the trick….
 
Ellena came to our farm a few weeks later and we scoped out a good spot for the mushroom logs.  We have some mixed woods out back with white pines, and there was a good little area underneath a group of those that seemed perfect.  Then I had to wait all winter.  I can’t believe I was even still believing!  Finally in April 2023, I went out with a friend, Peter, and my brand new, battery-operated chainsaw to cut down some small oak trees that had volunteered in our blueberry patch.  We managed to get 35 logs before the chainsaw ran out (I was a little disappointed at its performance).   We inoculated them within a few days and laid them out in a crisscross pile underneath the pines, 5 rows of 7 logs each. It was a wet summer, so there was no need to water the logs.  In fact, I was so confident, that even before seeing whether this first batch was going to produce, I just went ahead the next year in April, recruited my husband Mark to go out with me, and got another batch of 45 logs with me (he fixed the chainsaw – someone named Babette had put the chain on backwards the year before…).  We inoculated all of those and laid them out in their own pile next to the logs from 2023.
 
June, 2024 came around.  It was time to get the first batch of shiitake logs out from the woods, and to shock them into fruiting.  I made a soaking tub by cutting a rectangle out of the side of a 55-gallon drum and laying it on its side.  We put the logs in for 24 hours, and the next day, put them upright under the table that has the oyster mushroom buckets.   I then casually walked by daily, not letting the logs know I was checking on them (you never know - watched pot doesn’t boil and all that…).  And… drumroll… yes!  A little flush of shiitake appeared!  Maybe two or three pints worth. OMG!  In fact, through June and July we did four more flushes of 7 logs each, with the last two flushes each providing more than 3 pounds of the best shiitake I have had in my life. What. A. Rush.  It was so simple in the end.  All the shiitake needed was the right wood (oak), lots of companions and a bit of evergreen forest.
 
In the future, I hope to grow more mushrooms on logs or on woodchips outdoors, scaling back even the re-usable plastic bucket use.  I feel like that is where they really belong and like to be – even if they oblige us by growing out of plastic bags and plastic buckets.  But that is a story for a future date. 

​​One of the things that became clear to me in planning the chicken food forest is that one must think carefully about what happens to the chicken poop, because too much of it can cause the whole food forest to go quickly off the rails (photo: a fresh item of the topic of discussion).

People extoll the benefits of chicken manure as a compost ingredient – lots of nutrients to enrich your vegetable and flower gardens!  Yet, when you see a chicken yard, it’s a place where nothing grows – it’s just bare, dead dirt.  The photo here shows what chickens were able to do to the three sisters garden area in just four weeks.  So I guess chicken poop can be really good or really bad.  We don’t want the chicken food forest to become a dead chicken yard; we want it to be rich in vegetables, flowers, trees, and shrubs.   It turns out you need to get the chicken poop - nitrogen cycle just right: the right amount of chicken poo leads to an awesome garden; too much chicken poo leads to chicken yard desolation.   And just because nothing is simple, the “just right” amount can vary by a lot, depending on what you’re growing, your soil type, how much rain you’re getting, the season of the year, status of the solar eclipse…. (ok, not the eclipse).
 
Chicken manure is obviously complex stuff with lots of different materials in it, but an important one is nitrogen.  The nitrogen carries sizeable weight in both the benefits of chicken manure, and in its destructive potential.  Nitrogen is a critical nutrient for plant growth, and too little of it leads to stunting, weakness, and eventually death; but too much of it overwhelms plant roots, also leading to death.  Realizing this, I saw that I would have to make a detour to understanding the nitrogen cycle as it relates to chickens, their poop, and the chicken food forest.

Nitrogen Travels
Nitrogen (N) is a basic element, and it cycles around so many forms it makes my head spin.  Arghh!  Below is the sense that I was able to make of it from a multitude of online sources (listed below).
 
Nitrogen goes from the atmosphere into the soil!
Nitrogen makes up 78% of the atmosphere in the form of the element N2 (two nitrogen atoms together).  In this form, it can benefit neither plants nor animals.  It needs to get into the soil first.  It can enter the soil from the air when lightning causes the formation of nitrates (NO3) and transfers those molecules into the ground (kaboom!), but most of it enters the soil when nitrogen-fixing bacteria pull N2 from the air and convert it to NO3.   We tend to think of nitrogen-fixing bacteria as those that live in symbiosis with certain plants (peas, beans), but there are also free-living N-fixing bacteria (motto: live free and fix nitrogen!).
 
Nitrogen in the soil gets taken up by plants!
Plants can uptake the nitrates (NO3) directly through their roots and when they do, plant life happens.  Yippee!   In the plants, the nitrates are transformed and used in the formation of important complex organic compounds, like:
- chlorophyl, the stuff that makes photosynthesis possible.
- proteins, which can be part of the plant’s structural organs or enzymes.
- nucleic acids that are part of DNA.
- metabolic compounds used for energy transfers. 
 
Nitrogen goes from plants into animals!
Some plants are eaten by animals, like chickens, and in animals’ bodies, the nitrogen atoms are used to make proteins, components of RNA and DNA, and metabolic compounds – same as in plants!
 
Nitrogen goes from animals into pee and poo!
Aha! We have arrived at the chicken manure.  Nitrogen is part of every animal’s food – whether in the form of plant or meat or mushroom.  Animals will use some of the nitrogen in their food to repair or grow their bodies, but the rest is excreted in urea, feces, or in the case of chickens, combo-packets called chicken poo.   Chicken poo contains nitrogen in the form of ammonium NH4 (10-50 percent, average 25 percent) or in the organic compounds in the poo. 
 
Nitrogen from pee-poo goes back into plants!
If the chicken poo gets into the soil (say by chicken scratching or by rain) the ammonium can become available right away to plants growing nearby.  The nitrogen in the organic compounds will need get broken down by decomposers. Some of the decomposers turn the nitrogen within the organic compounds into ammonium (NH4) and some of that NH4 can be taken up by a new plant; but most of it is converted to nitrates (NO3) by other microscopic soil friends, which can also be taken up by a new plant. It’s not entirely clear to me if rain and chicken scratching are enough to get most of the chicken poo into the soil. or do some decomposers come to the soil surface to get it?  In any case, I would think that having soil rich in organic soil life would enhance the decomposition rates.  Certainly, some farmers spread raw chicken manure on the fields, and it helps with plant growth even if some of it dries up and blows away.  Other farmers till the manure into the soil.  In our chicken food forest, we would like not to have to rely on hard work like tilling, and my permaculture hero Sean Dembrowsky certainly lets poo lie where it falls, so I think that’s what we will do and see where it leads.
 
Nitrogen in dead plants and animals goes back into the atmosphere or into new plants!
When a plant or an animal dies, the same things happen to the bodies as with the organic compounds in poo: they get converted to ammonium or nitrates, some of which get taken up by new plants.  But a lot of the nitrates end up being converted some more and released back into the atmosphere as N2.   There is a constant loss of nitrogen to the air, so in any given system, it needs to be constantly replenished.
 
Life to life nitrogen cycle! 
Reading between the lines above, you can see that there is a large N cycle that involves the atmosphere, soil, plants, animals, and back into the air, but there is also a small cycle where the nitrogen just cycles around and around near the earth - in the soil and plant and animal bodies.  In the small cycle, nitrogen in the plants is taken up by plants, which are eaten by animals, which produce pee and poo, which is turned back into nitrogen that can be taken up by plants.  One could imagine a system where the cycles are turbo-charged – the nitrogen feeding rapid plant growth, which feeds lots of animal life, which creates lots of excreta, which can be used again by the plants; or, lots of soil life cycles the nitrogen back and forth between the air (N2) and the soil (NO3 and ammonium).

​Replenishing nitrogen
As mentioned, nitrogen is constantly being lost back into the air.  In many ecosystems, the “nitrogen fixing” plants compensate for that (parentheses because it’s the bacteria that do the fixing; the plants are hosts).  In permaculture designs we intentionally include such plants.  But with chickens, we usually bring in outside food to supplement what the chickens can get from scratching around, and this input is a human-created inflow of new nitrogen.  With a lot of chickens and a lot of human-induced nitrogen inflow, we need to consider that we’re not overloading the system with nitrogen. 
 
Too much nitrogen and collapse.
We have to watch the nitrogen because when there is too much coming in, it overwhelms the soil life, ammonia accumulates, the soil Ph drops, and you get a dead chicken yard situation: the collapse scenario.   We want to avoid the collapse scenario. 
 
Summary insights
What I took away from this academic excursion is:

• In any given space, the nitrogen cycle is open.  Nitrogen is lost to the atmosphere, and it must be replenished from the outside by nitrogen fixing bacteria, or by the farmer doing something to bring it in.
• A healthy nitrogen cycle includes: enough plants to take up nitrogen and turn it into complex organic compounds; micro-organisms in the soil to return nitrogen in organic compounds into ammonium and nitrates which plants can take up again, or which can dissipate to the air; a decent carbon-nitrogen ratio in the soil for those micro-organisms as well as a good mix of other micronutrients.  The cycle can include animals.
• Chickens can be the input source of nitrogen for a healthy cycle but need to be planned well in order to avoid long-term over-nitrification and system collapse.

 
Designing a chicken food forest that can use all the chicken poo.
 
Collapse is a real danger in the chicken food forest because even with the chickens grazing on the berries, grains, and grubs produced in the forest, we will bring in outside food (and nitrogen!).  According to the estimates made in the previous letter on overall chicken food forest design, the hens will be able to get between a quarter to a maximum of half of their food from the food forest in productive months.  So, we need to ensure the design creates a balance between the input of outside nitrogen, rates of nitrogen use by soil life, and possibly removal (harvest) of materials that have nitrogen stored in them. 
 
Being a geek, I found out that you can calculate how many pounds of nitrogen your chickens are going to produce (it’s all online).   Each hen produces 130 lbs. of fresh manure every year, 1.6% of which is the element nitrogen (N), or 2 lbs. of pure nitrogen per hen.  Wowsie!  We have a flock of roughly 100 hens, who together excrete about 200 lbs. of pure nitrogen per year.   A refinement of the equation is how much of that is going to land in the c
hicken food forest.   The chickens will be in the food forest 8 months of the year – during which time they produce around 140 lbs. of pure N.  In addition, they will spend the nights in the barn. Chickens poop during the night, and while I was not able to find information about exactly what percentage of their manure production is while they are asleep, a reasonable assumption is that production is constant through the 24-hour cycle.   They are in the barn about 12 hours (from 8 PM to 8 AM) so that leaves 70 lbs. of pure N deposited in the chicken food forest per annum. 
 
On the other side of the equation is the size of the chicken food forest – which is 1/3 acre.  That means the hens will deposit the equivalent of 210 lbs. of nitrogen per acre. 
 
This level is twice as high as what Robert Plamodon, an authoritative source on chicken pasturing says: “At a stocking density of 50 hens per acre, the hens will add 2.5 tons of manure per acre per year, equivalent to 106 pounds of nitrogen, 30 pounds of phosphorus, and 61 pounds of potassium. That’s about as much as most chicken yards can absorb unless you go to a lot of extra effort.”  But of course, Plamodon is talking about maintaining chickens on a pasture of grass; whereas a chicken food forest is quite a different ecosystem. 
If you look up purely the nitrogen needs of grass pasture, lo and behold, it’s about 100 lbs. per acre, so Plamodon’s 50 chickens are hitting the sweet spot for his setup.  Other crops, however, can have higher nitrogen needs.  Here is a small list:

• Corn: 200-250 lbs/acre.
• Tomatoes: 200 lbs/acre.
• Winter wheat: 100-300 lbs/acre.
• Spring wheat: 130-180 lbs/acre.
• Barley: 120-240 lbs/acre.
• Fruit trees: gradually increase N per tree from 0 in the planting year to 1 lb. per tree by year 8 and going forward.
• Raspberries: 4-5 lbs per 100’ row.
• Elderberry plants: up to 1 lb per mature plant.
• Comfrey: benefits from direct manure application (!) and can use up to 100 lbs of nitrogen per acre. 

Our chicken food forest is planned to contain 60 fruit trees and 150’ of raspberry rows, as well as 100 comfrey plants and various ground covers, all of which should sop up most of the 70 lbs of nitrogen by year 8 when mature.  While the trees are still young, we planned to sow barley in section A of the chicken food forest (1/6 acre, good for about 30 lbs. of nitrogen absorption), and a double crop of winter wheat and fast-growing millet in section B (1/6 acre, good for about 33 lbs for the wheat plus a smidge for the millet).   
 
These calculations suggest we could be just perfect on the nitrogen front, but that it’s a little on the edge.  Too much nitrogen can result in a drop in soil Ph so we’ll have to watch that and add lime if the Ph gets too low; and, as soon as we start to smell ammonia (indication of too much poo), add a thick layer of carbon (leaves, wood chips) to help decompose the manures.  Or, we might also do well to throw in a bunch of tomato and corn seeds and let them do their nitrogen absorption thing!
 
That was a long excursion, but I feel much more confident about the chicken food forest project now. 

​Babette’s favorite activity: making dream images.  Here is a dream image of the chicken food forest.  A thicket of shrubs laden with berries and an overstory of fruiting trees, dropping pears, persimmons, mulberries at different times of year.  Chickens scratching the ground for the fallen fruit and hopping on branches to pick fruit themselves.  Some areas with dense green undergrowth like comfrey and other herbs, but also mulchy areas under the trees breeding tasty little bugs.   Lots of contented cackling and clucking.   Chicken owner managing the forest but definitely not spending a lot of time on it once established.  Hopefully chickens still laying their eggs in their nest boxes!

Our dream chicken food forest is full of perennials.  One of the first plants to enter the chicken food forest design was the perennial comfrey.  Comfrey is an awesome chicken plant.  For one, it has very high-protein leaves (over 20%) - in fact, it can adequately supply chickens with protein, an odd idea.   A permaculture blogger who has inspired me in many ways, Sean Dembrowsky, has a couple of videos about feeding comfrey to his chickens.  Another great characteristic of comfrey is its rapid growth – you can cut it to the ground multiple times in one season and feed all those leaves to your chickens.   You could possibly feed a summer flock just on comfrey.
 
Sean Dembrowsky cuts the comfrey and brings it to the chickens in a big wheelbarrow.  But I wouldn’t mind if the chickens harvested it themselves.   There is a problem though.  If the chickens have access to the comfrey, how does it have a chance to regrow?   I mulled this over for a while, and from this mulling came the idea of splitting the chicken food forest into two parts.  Chickens spend time in part A eating all the comfrey to the ground; meanwhile comfrey in part B grows tall and lush.  Next we move chickens to part B for a couple of months, and now the comfrey in part A can recover and regrow.   Then the chickens move back to part A.   Comfrey can be cut back to the ground up to five times per season, so two months should be ample time to grow back. 
 
The next plants to enter the chicken food forest design were fruiting bushes and trees, ideally a mix with a long fruiting season.   I scoured my permaculture books, chicken books, the internet and came up with a pretty good list that included the following: June fruits - juneberry and haskap; July and August fruits - mulberry, brambles, elderberry, blueberry; September and October fruits - crabapple and other apple, seaberry, autumn berry; and there are even very late fruits for November and December – persimmon, advent pear, and winter apples.   With the chickens see-sawing between parts A and B of the food forest, the fruits will be arranged across the two parts in such a way that they ripen when the chickens are there to harvest them.   I ended up with the following two-month system: mulberries, brambles and blueberries in part A for July and August; crabapple, seaberry, and autumn berry in part B for September and October; persimmon, advent pear and winter apple in part A for November and December.   I decided to skip June-bearing berries for now.
 
A problem with the chickens’ scratching and eating of greenery, is that it might be difficult to get small trees and shrubs established.   Once the shrubs and trees are bigger, the chickens will leave the hardened stems alone and focus on leaves and on fruits as they ripen.  A solution proposed by Sean Dembrowsky is to put rocks around little seedlings. Genius.  He also puts sticks around the seedlings so that the chickens have a harder time eating all the leaves (a plant is always happy to donate some of its leaves).  
 
Another fun thing we can do with the see-saw method is grow some worms.  If there is a compost pile where the chickens are, the chickens eat the baby worms so they can’t get big and tasty.  But if we have two compost piles, one in part A and one in part B, the worms and bugs and worms have two months at a time to grow chicken-free.   Say the chickens start in part B in May and June.  We feed the compost pile in part A and get some early worm growth.  On chicken moving day at the end of June, we take some good shovel-full of compost A, hopefully with a fair number of worm eggs and worms of all ages, and inoculate compost pile B.  In July and August, the chickens are in part A and scratch through compost there.  Meanwhile, in compost B, worms and bugs are growing undisturbed for two months while we add new compost to the pile.  End of August is moving day again.  We inoculate compost A with a shovelful from compost B, and move the chickens to part B.  I’m not sure if this cycle is too short – worms need about 6 weeks to hatch and 8 weeks to mature.  It will be an experiment (another favorite Babette activity).
 
This design so far leaves six months with no food in the chicken food forest.   I decided it might be worth trying some winter grains, sown in part B in November.  They would start to come up in March and by May, they would be tall and full of nutrients for the chickens to eat – even if not ripe with grain.  Nettles and other early greens that come up in April before the chickens come out, could also provide eating in May and June.  That would get us up to eight months, not too bad.  The rest of the time, January – April, the chickens will be in their barn and run.  Maybe we can get a couple of late winter bearing apples and pears going in the barn?...
 
I measured out how much area we could devote to the chicken food forest, given that there are already so many other things planted – and found an area of around 1/3 of an acre around their barns.  This was much less than the acre I had envisioned, but we can still make good use of it.   
 
A potential problem with this size of chicken food forest is over-nitrification.  Chickens poop lots of nitrogen-dense packets, and these packets are one of the reasons that chicken yards tends to be fields of Mordor-like desolation.   The soil just has too much nitrogen for plants to grow in it.  According to people who have experimented with this, you can have up to 100 chickens per acre, but we will have 100 chickens on 1/3 acre.   In the next letter, we think about how to address this problem. 
 
Putting it all together, here is a drawing of the design.  The barn and chicken run, which will house the chickens at night and contain their egg boxes, goes through the middle of the chicken food forest.  Part A is in the northern half because it will contain the tallest trees – the mulberries and persimmons.  Part B goes along the bottom of the barn and run and makes up the southern half of the food forest.   The design does not include a lot of detail on herbs and ground cover, except for the comfrey and the winter grains, but that will come by and by.   I also added sowing of grains to the design – another experiment.  

Below is a table that shows the see-saw and what’s happening in each half of the chicken food forest as well as the chicken barn-run by season.  If nothing else, this is sure to be an interesting experiment where we make lots of mistakes and we learn a lot about what to do and what not to do when you raise chickens in a natural system. :)

​Being an optimist, I computed how much food this food forest is going to produce.  I computed how many pounds we could expect from the fruit trees, the bushes, and the brambles, and estimated how many calories would be in that.  This gives a high end of what the food forest might produce (although it does exclude grubs and worms, which will certainly also be around).   I then used those numbers to give an optimistic estimate of how much of their food intake the chickens might get from the chicken food forest during each rotation.  I figure that each hen needs about 400 calories per day, so for 100 hens during a 60-day rotation period, the total calorie requirement is 2.4 million calories. 

​The bottom table shows how many fruit trees and shrubs we'll plant, the production per species of fruits, and the percentage of the 2.4 million calories.  The table does not include calories and nutrients from comfrey, other ground cover plants, or soil grubs, but, on the other hand, the fruit estimates are optimistic, so maybe on balance the table is a reasonable guestimate of how much the food forest might cover chicken food needs in a given time period.  It looks like the greatest coverage is in section B in September/October (48%), with lower rates in section A in July/August (27%) and November/December (33%).  Mulberries and crabapples come out as champion feeders. 
​

August 21
Shiitake flushes; grain expansion for snow oyster no report
- We had a fantastic shiitake flush - about 8 pounds from 5 logs within a week of soaking.  Perfect weather: 70-80 degrees and plenty of rain.  Going to try again this week.
- Expanding grain for snow oyster this week.  Trying the soak for 24 hours method to reduce energy used for heating up water in NSNS method done on Aug 11 (boiling the water was not required, but seemed like a good idea to get the grain to expand inside the closed bags before sterilizing).   Made a bucket with 32 cups of millet and 16 cups of water.



August 13, 2024
Shiitake flushes, spent straw use, almond agaricus info
- We had three successful shiitake flushes, a couple with multiple pounds.  Maybe better in later summer?
- Most of our Oyster buckets inoculated all of June got severely contaminated and moldy by early August.   Some buckets were fine.  Most buckets fruited but by early August at a lower level that expected.  Trying to figure out what is going on.  Possibly: we went to letting the straw drain excess water quickly on a table with 1/2" hardware cloth and we did not let it drain out enough so the buckets were too wet.   Some of the buckets also had gnats in them, so possibly gnats are getting in and eating the mycelium and then the buckets start to mold.  Both of these hypotheses are consistent with some buckets being OK.  For now, we have started to do two things: squeeze the straw before putting it into the buckets (often, a lot of water comes out!), re-taping holes after a fruiting (the micropore tape comes off when you harvest).
- We have been putting good white myceliated straw from buckets that are done (after 8 weeks) in the tall grass of the 3-sisters garden, next to the Garden House (nice and shady, but we can keep an eye on it).  They have been giving us a nice extra flush.  
-- After the extra flush, we're going to compost the oyster straw and any shiitake blocks (any sawdust blocks?) and then...
-NEXT YEAR - order almond agaricus and grow it in this compost!  Resources: video on planting bed and caring for the bed and  article on growing under vegetables. For more super infos, do a YouTube search for "almond agaricus field and forest".
-- Monotub update: we did the 10  lime-water soak for newspaper pellets for chestnuts and wood pellets for King Oyster on July 23.  August 13 so far no contamination, white substrate seems to be growing.
-- I also went back to grain expansion - poured X cups boiling hot water into bags with Y cups millet.  Let it soak up water for 30 minutes then sterilized at 17 PSI for 90 minutes.  August 11 inoculated in Still air box from Northspore.  2 days later - many spots of white mycelium fuzz in the bags!   However, forgot to note the ratio of water to millet.  According to notes from Aug 1 this may be the recipe:
A no soak no cook (NSNC) recipe for millet from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuRUYt25j-A
This also includes recipe for oats and bird seed (more water than millet)
Recipe:
300 ml millet and 150 ml water basically 2:1 ratio.

Shiitake logs, buckets, and chestnuts, June 17, 2024
- Shiitake logs that are smallest in diameter (2") did not fruit after soaking.  Maybe too small and dried up?
- Pioppino from last year in straw was totally dead (as expected).
- OYSTERS IN BUCKETS are consistently pretty successful.
- KING oyster does not work in buckets - the small babies fall off, they can't hold on to the small holes that they fruit out of.  Also did not colonize very well.  
- Snow oysters started April 10 in buckets gave a nice harvest of 15 pints (all three buckets) on May 21 and another one pint June 8, but probably these need to be started earlier.  
- Pink oysters fruit 3 weeks after inoculation!  
- CHESTNUTS in monotub with newspaper pellets - substrate seemed to be too wet.  We did experiments with just adding water to the newspaper pellets and not letting it soak, just putting the pellets right into the bins (to reduce time that the pellets were in the open air).   One set (put in pellets, pour water over) there was complete failure.  In another set (mix pellets very briefly before putting into monotub we do get fruiting, but it looks kind of slimy.  not very apetizing.  First flush tossed out for chicken food.  I am going to try an experiment with adding lime water to the pellets and letting them do the regular 10 minute soak to get properly hydrated, and then putting into monotub.  



Mushroom logs, March 31
- We cut logs from oak for shiitake mushroom inoculation.  Another wood that would work well is alder, of which we have a lot.  For oyster, we could use our willows, down the line.  Northspore.com has a great overview chart.  
- For the spawn plugs next time, remember to USE SAWDUST and the matching tools: the angle grinder adapter, a 12mm drill bit, and a thumb-press log inoculation tool.   I forgot that we had these tools, and instead we got wooden plugs, and used a regular drill to make the holes.  It took two days of labor to inoculate 36 logs; with the sawdust tools it would take half of that time.
- We used one of our little saucepans to melt the wax, which resulted in a long and painful clean-up.  Ella said one of her mushroom growing friends uses a small crockpot, dedicated just to wax melting.  You can even save left-over wax in it, and pick one up from Goodwill or something for $5.  Good tip.
- To daub on the wax, we don't need wax daubers because we can make a better one at home.  Grab a bit of clean sheep wool, some twine, and a 12" stick.  Wrap the sheep wool around the end of the stick so it's the size of a ping-pong ball and secure with the twine.

​My sister Sabine and her partner Lowie have 15 old-fashioned chickens.  They scratch around in their half-acre garden, among woods, debris, grass, and flowers (grr!), munching bugs and greens    Sabine and Lowie don’t feed them except the occasional food scrap bin; the garden sustains them just fine, even in the winter (they live in Belgium).  
 
If these were modern chickens, each chicken would be getting 1/4 lbs of grain every day, or about 1,500 lbs of chicken feed per year for the flock.   It requires modern agriculture about half an acre to grow 1,500 lbs of dry grain and soy.  
 
But wait, that’s impossible!  Our hyper-productive, advanced agriculture system needs as much land to grow food for 15 chickens (with lots of fossil fuel input), as those chickens get just scrounging around and feeding themselves in a garden?!  Somebody must be joking! 

​I visited my sister’s flock just as I had seriously begun to question our own chicken grain-feeding at Big Foot Food Forest.  It started with a terrible realization.  We order a 1000-pound delivery of chicken feed for our 100 hens (and some roosters) from the local farmers coop every five weeks.  On the terrible realization day, I figured out those deliveries add up to 10,000 pounds per year! I had never computed this before. Isn’t it funny how we can overlook the obvious?  10,000 pounds.  My gut told me something was very wrong here. 
 
Are we feeding too much? Last year, we had about 100 chickens, meaning each chicken got around 100 pounds of feed that year. This jives with what chicken literature says online and in books: laying hens eat about 1/4 pound of grains per day, times 365 days equals about 100 pounds. OK, so that seems right, maybe a little much. Then I asked myself how many eggs we’re getting out of that. Of the 100 chickens about 90 (it’s hard to count them) are laying hens. Last year, we produced nearly 1000 dozen eggs, or 12,000 individual eggs, 133 per laying chicken. Hm. We have heirloom chickens, not super-layers, but still, we’d like to be closer to 150 per hen. Something to investigate. In terms of food, 10,000 pounds resulted in 12,000 eggs, a little more than .8 pounds (13 ounces) for one egg. An egg weighs 2 ounces ounces, so the weight conversion of feed to egg is 6.5:1.  Not great, but it gets worse. An egg is mostly made of water and water has no food value. What we really want is a calorie conversion. Grains are dense in calories. Chicken feed has about 1400 calories per pound. One egg has about 55 calories. Even before doing the math, I could see it was pretty bad, but here is the math: we feed.83 pounds per egg, equivalent to 1200 feed calories to produce 55 egg calories, or, 21 feed calories are converted to one egg calorie! I truly don’t want to become vegan, but obviously, there is a real problem here.

Our farm has some hefty inefficiencies - we have heirloom chickens, not super-layers; we let our hens live longer and that includes less productive years; we leave them their laying rest period during darker winter-months, we have roosters, and I am sure we could improve. Say we had 100 hens laying 300 eggs a year (industrial farm factory numbers). We would get 30,000 eggs, or one-third pound of feed per egg. That works out about 500 feed calories per 55 egg calories, a ratio of 9:1.  Even that is far from great. When you’re that far off, you need more than tweaks; you need a wholesale turnaround. I started thinking (not the first time!) about non-feed options for feeding chickens. 

Food scraps
When we lived in Needham, we raised four chickens without purchased feed and wrote a series of blog posts about it (see earlier Chicken Letters).  We learned about food scrap-based feeding from Karl Hammer at the Vermont Composting Company.  He has 600 chickens, and he inspired our Needham system.  Our four chickens lived on the food scraps from our household and four neighbors.  An average household bucket was half full (about 10 pounds) so our chickens would get about 50 pounds of scraps per week.  This converts to almost two pounds of scraps per hen per day – they ate the scraps directly plus grubs and worms growing in their left-overs and left plenty.   Their laying was terrific (four eggs almost every day for the first year).  When we moved to the farm, we were not able to scale this system up.  To fully feed our 100 chickens, I think we would need the food scraps from about 70 households.  Even if we had 20-25 households, it would make a big dent in our imported grain purchases.  Plan: send out direct mailing postcards to neighbors in our village asking if they will join our food-scrap pickup route.

​Pasture grazing
A more common way to reduce feed needs is to move chickens around on pasture, especially following larger livestock like cows and sheep. The hens sleep and lay in a mobile coop that the farmer moves around, and their daily pasture is enclosed with an electric fence. They eat some grass, grubs and bugs in the grass, and grubs in the livestock poops. They fertilize the fields as they go along. I have read that this can provide hens with up to 30 percent of their food needs.  Now guess what: we happen to have built a chicksaw last year for 30-40 hens just last summer!  Hence, plan: to move the chicksaw around behind the sheep for at least a few months this summer and see how pasture grazing works for us.

Chicken food forest,
A third option is to grow food for chickens on the farm – a planned, intentional version of what Sabine and Lowie have in Belgium. We could grow fruits, vegetables, greens, worms and grubs. I’ve not pursued growing feed up to now because as it’s described in online blogs of homesteading books, it’s focused on annual grains and seems like a lot of work. But if we put on our permaculture hats and focus on trees like mulberries, which produce copiously year after year with little care once they are established, it gets more interesting.  What about, other tree fruits, berries, and perennials like comfrey?  Thinking it through and poking around the web, there is a lot of potential here.  Now it’s getting interesting…. The idea of the chicken food forest was born.  We would have to figure out what plants provide the most food, and protect the plants and soil to deal with chickens’ tendency for destruction (usually chicken yards are desolate), but it will be fun.  Plan: design and implement a chicken food forest.

​Spent brewer’s grain
Just as I was writing this, Charlotte (our daughter) sent me a note that a local brewery, Brick and Feather, was looking for a new farmer to pick up their spent grain.  What a happy coincidence! I jumped on the opportunity thinking we could do away with purchased feed and just use supply brewer’s grain.  I arranged to pick up grains every week or every other week.  We will be getting about 100 gallons of spent grain weekly, about 400 pounds.  Hooray!  In somewhat typical fashion, after making this arrangement I started doing research on what to do with it.  Disappointingly, you cannot just substitute spent grain for all your feed.  It is high in protein and fiber and can be used to substitute for the soy in chicken feed and, according to research, it can be up to 20 percent of the total chicken diet.   By itself it spoils very quickly; to create a stable product you have to ferment it.  Not quite as simple as I had thought!  Still, 20 percent is good, fermenting is doable, and also, mixed with carbon, spent grain composts very quickly and can be used to produce worms and little chicken tid-bits, with super-valuable fertilizer as an extra by-product.  So, it will be useful to us, and we will figure out a way to use it.  Plan: figure out a plan! 
 
I’m glad to be getting back to this and grateful for the 10,000 pound wake-up call.  Stay tuned for updates as we go… Hopefully not too many crashes. 

First, let me elaborate a bit on what we’re talking about here. A scrum board is comprehensive, nuts and bolts planning tool that reaches from a top-level project overview, to intermediate parts or stages of the project, all the way down to concrete, executable tasks.

To create a scrum board, first start with a high-level list of project parts. Ours are topics like: chickens, sheep, new blueberry field, nut tree planting, three sisters garden. If you miss a broad topic even as you get quite far in planning, no problem. There is no hierarchy here, so you can just add it in. For example, this year, I forgot “mushrooms” until the scrum board was almost done. I just added it in and continued planning. These big topics are called the epics in scrum jargon.
 
Next comes a more focused level (but still not tasks) - these are called stories in scrumese. Within sheep we have: lambing, sheep registration, summer grazing, winter feed/hay. Within the nut tree planting we have: wood chip circles, planting trees, planting supportive herbs, summer care. Although the stories are hierarchically below epics, within a particular epic there is no hierarchy or time sequence for the stories, no first this, then that. So again - forgot something? Just add it in.
 
Thirdly, we come to the level of specific, executable tasks. These are things we can actually DO. For example, in winter feed/hay, we might have: call John for hay pickup date; reserve U-Haul van; pick up van and hay; stack hay in barn. All of this is in an excel workbook, which I share with you here: 2024 scrum board

This excel sheet is quite large and not handy to use. The next genius part of this tool is how tasks are presented to the team/workers and how you decide on which tasks to do when: with the use of post-it stickies and weekly/daily team-scrum meetings.
​
When the scrum plan in the computer workbook is done, all the tasks are made concrete and visible by writing them down on post-it stickies and putting the stickies up on some highly visible surface - a wall, a door, or, in our case, the fridge downstairs in the farm kitchen. It’s quite exciting, at the beginning of the season, to see the whole fridge covered in colorful squares. I organize them loosely by epic (sheep-related stickies all together) and roughly in order of the season (spring tasks at the top, fall tasks at the bottom). If we have done our scrum planning perfectly (which we never do), then completing all the stickie tasks means we have done everything in our 2024 plan.


With the stickies up, we can start work. At the start of each week (after animal chores!) the team gathers round the fridge and we decide which of the stickie tasks we’re going to work on that week. We talk about where we are overall and what the broad goals of this period are (“last week we finished making all the wood chip piles; looks like this week is going to be hot; we want to make some progress on the chicken food forest”) and people get to give preferences (“I really want to do some planting”). From there, we select what we think is a doable number of tasks for the week and move those post-it notes up to a special place on the fridge for ONGOING tasks. It’s fun to move the notes, and gets the work started with a little micro-action. I will say we are almost invariably over-optimistic about what we can accomplish!

From there, you start work! As the week goes on, there are quick check-ins, to see what is done, and what we can do next. Finally, the best part, when a task is complete, the person(s) who finished it get to take that stickie note and paste it on the other side of the fridge in the DONE area! Big dopamine rush, seriously!

If you have parsed your tasks well, each stickie moves from the ONGOING to the DONE part of the scrum board reasonably quickly, say in a few days or at the most over the course of two weeks. And, if you’ve done a good job of overall planning, then, right at the end of the season, the very last of the stickies move into the DONE area and you are complete. On our farm, I’ll admit there have been stickies that have taken literally months to complete when I completely missed how much work was involved in that task. Or, we have had to remove a whole group of stickies if it turned out that we were not going to be able to get to a particular epic at all. Or we have had to add a whole new set of stickies when we totally overlooked some bigger project. Over the years, I’ve gotten slightly better (operative word being slightly), as measured by faster stickie movement from ONGONG to DONE and being able to stick with more of the initial stickies.

As you may have noted, scrum board planning does not include (necessarily) estimated time or date to complete each task, nor is there a fixed order. It mimics real life: things can take longer or move more quickly, and the order of tasks emerges from regular conversations and assessments of where you are. This feature is awesome because you don’t need to break your head over getting timing, dates, and order just right - a completely impossible job as anyone who has ever planned anything knows.
​
Having said that, I will say that I do make estimates of the number of days each task will take and approximately when it will be done, and try to remember to write down the actual time needed and dates we worked on it. The idea here is to plan for a reasonable workload and spread of work-days over the months, given our anticipated crew size, and to improve my estimates over time by comparing my initial expectations with the actual outcomes.

So, what is planned for 2024? Like last year, we have our chickens, mushrooms, and our sheep, and we are continuing to put nut trees and berries in the fields.
The chickens are a flock of 100 heirlooms that lay rainbow eggs we sell at the Greenfield and Turners Fall markets and via a very small CSA. The mushrooms we will grow for the farmer’s markets like last year, but maybe we will get some shiitake from our mushroom logs (this would mark a 15-year success! See the mushroom saga letters), and we’ll start some new logs. The sheep will hopefully give us some pretty lambs to sell to homesteaders and will rotate around the fields cutting the grass and depositing their fertilizer.

This year, hopefully, will mark the last year that we ordered nut tree seedlings - another 100 mixed chestnuts from a new, local nursery, Yellowbud. There are approximately 100 walnut trees and 100 pecan family trees in the nursery that will remain there until we plant them out in the fall season. At that point, we will have about 400 nut trees planted out on 4-5 acres, all growing in fertility islands with plenty of organic material and family of supportive green perennials - comfrey, peppermint, geranium, chamomile, chives, garlics …. 

We will also hope to make a good dent towards completing the berry plantings, with 600 small blueberry bushes coming to add to our new blueberry field behind the house, and seeing if we can start goji berries from seeds and seaberries from cuttings - all in baby care nurseries.

Last year was the first year we planted a three-sister garden, the traditional native-American mix of corn, beans, and squash. It provided us with beauty all summer, and plenty of dried beans, but sadly the corn was eaten by rodents, and the squash never quite got off the ground. This year, I am going to see if I can find some good rodent deterrent (coyote urine?) and start the squash in the greenhouse before planting it to see if that helps. I mean really, squash is supposed to grow like a weed!

One of the most exciting new projects - to me - is the chicken food forest. When we had chickens in our back yard in Needham, we did not buy any grains for them.  We gave  them food scraps from us and a few neighbors, and they at those plus the bugs growing in the food scrap pile. I had hoped to continue this system on the farm, but instead, have been buying nearly all the chicken food in the form of grain. I hate this approach— growing chicken feed is a very inefficient use of resources to produce eggs (more on that in a next letter). So, we’re going to try to get 20-30 families on our food scrap pick up route, which should provide about a third of the chicken’s food needs. For the remaining food needs we’re going to plant a one-acre chicken food forest with berries, herbs, greens, and bugs that chickens love, all geared to maximum calorie and nutrient production. This year, we can put in all the plants, and over time, as they grow, we’ll see if we can eliminate the grain purchases for 100% local, sustainable, egg production! :)