Birdhouse Gardens At The End Of The Season.
Birdhouse.farm provides programs, community outreach, synergistic partnerships, and facilitates local access to high-quality, local foods. We offer in-person and online classes, workshops, and consulting. Topics include sustainable farming and gardening, native planting to optimize wildlife habitat, mushroom cultivation, personal time management, and end-of-life planning.
Here is an overview of our gardens at the end of the summer season 2022.
The first photo is of a Wine-Cap Mushroom bed we have set up around an old stump. The purpose of this was to encourage the stump to decompose through natural means instead of using stump remover or large equipment. Some benefits the Wine Caps offer to plants are first, that they act as a sponge for moisture. The second is that they break things down into a form that plants can take nutrients from easily. You can actually buy mushroom compost for use as a soil amendment and as a base for potting soil mixtures. The ideal growing medium for these mushrooms is a mixture of several varieties and sizes of wood chips. Other plant matter such as straw or grass clippings and certain types of compost work well too. In this bed, the plants we have growing with the mushrooms are some late-planted Purple Sweet Potatoes, Walking Onions, a native species of ground cherry, and Horseradish.
The vegetable garden in the second photo is where we made a much wider wine cap bed specifically to grow Other plants in. On either side of the bed we grew corn, and are now growing a couple very productive Carolina Reaper pepper plants! Okra, Walking Onions, Banana Peppers, Milo (for the chickens), and Indian Fire Salvia for the hummingbirds.
The third picture is of a bed next to an antique hay rake. There are no mushrooms in this bed. Next to it we have Common Sunflowers, Indian Fire Salvia, Dahlias (the whole plant is edible), Purple Sweet Potatoes (Stokes Sweet Potato), and walking onions. There is lemongrass on one side of the implement, and a small herb garden on the other. More to come on them in a future post.
