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mainecampus.com
Monday, February 28, 2022
Vol. 138, No. 15
News
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Department of Agriculture hosts mushroom cultivation lecture
Anika Chamberlain Contributor
Opinion
A3
Forced to flee or determined to fight: Ukrainians need our urgent support
Culture
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Bangor Public Library features ‘Our Changing Landscapes’ exhibition
Sports
A8
Men’s basketball falls in thriller to Albany
Department of Agriculture hosts mushroom cultivation lecture
On Friday Feb. 25 the University of Maine Department of Agriculture hosted a webinar titled “Spring Has Spawned: Getting Your Garden Ready for Mushroom Cultivation” on Zoom. Pamela Hargest, a horticulture professional at the UMaine Cumberland County Cooperative Extension, hosted the lecture and invited Louis Giller, the education and events coordinator for North Spore in Westbrook, as a guest speaker. North Spore sells premium mushroom growing supplies and
kits and focuses heavily on education and outreach to the mushroom growing community. The company’s website has plenty of educational materials and blog posts about growing mushrooms. “Spring Has Spawned” was the first webinar in a fivepart spring gardening webinar series offered through April for Maine gardeners. Giller walked audience members through the process of incorporating mushrooms into their gardens. Mushrooms are full of vitamins, minerals, fiber and protein and have medicinal properties as well. Stud-
ies have shown that mushrooms have antiviral, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. Additionally, they digest things in soil like lignin and cellulose and make those properties more bioavailable. When mushrooms themselves degrade, they enrich the soil and support surrounding plants. On top of these qualities, mushrooms grow in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors. “That’s a huge aesthetic factor,” Giller said. After explaining the benefits of adding mushrooms to a garden, Giller gave a very in-depth introduction
to basic fungal biology and growing methods. Gardeners may already be familiar with beginning a seedling in a pot or otherwise contained area, sometimes inside, before moving the budding plant outside to flourish. Giller explained that the best way to begin growing mushrooms, through spawning is by using a log of wood in a process called log cultivation. Mushrooms can take 12-24 months to “fruit.” Giller went over the necessary tools to spawn mushrooms and growing care for multiple mushroom species. Every species is slightly different and all need
different treatment to thrive. Along with the aesthetic benefits of growing a variety of mushrooms, each mushroom also helps its ecosystem in a different way. Tickets for this webinar, and the upcoming webinars in the spring gardening series, were sold for an optional sliding scale fee. Attendees could choose how much they could afford to pay, and some tickets were free for those who couldn’t afford them. The next webinar in the series is called “How Not to Kill Your Houseplants” and will be hosted by Karen Ramsey on March 4
at noon. “Propagating Trees and Shrubs in the Winter” is on March 7 at 6 p.m. House gardeners can learn about starting vegetable and flower seedlings indoors on March 25 at “Seed Starting at Home.” The last webinar in the UMaine spring gardening series will be on April 1 at noon, “Preventing Wildlife Damage to Home Gardens.” To attend these webinars, you may register here: https:// extension.umaine.edu/ gardening/webinar-series/.
Microbes and Social Equity Speaker Series hosts Jake Robinson
Graphic by Christiana Mosca.
Samantha Sudol Contributor On Feb. 23, the Microbes and Social Equity (MSE) Speaker Series 2022 continued online as Dr. Jake Robinson, an ecologist and researcher, discussed his interests in microbial ecology, ecosystem restoration and social research. His presentation, “20 Important Questions in Microbial Exposure and Social Equity [and] Recent Work on Urban Greenspace Microbiomes” further established the importance of microbes and how they shape our lives
and the world around us. “I explored integrated strategies that take into account this environment microbiome human health relationship and tried to understand some of the co-benefits of these integrated strategies, said Robinson. “So these could include things like nature engagement, activities also known as green prescriptions, or understanding the design and restoration of green spaces and how these affect human health.” There were several themes and research
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questions that were investigated by Robinson and his team to set the agenda for future research in the area of Microbes and Social Equity. These include socio-cultural interactions, indigenous community health and wellbeing, humans, urban ecosystems and environmental processes, human psychology and mental health, the microbiome and infectious diseases, human health and food security and microbiome related planning, policy and outreach. Robinson continued by explaining the importance of a diversity
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of microbiomes in the community and how it helps our immune system. In a diagram, he presented declines in biodiversity would lead to microbial deprivation, followed by microbial imbalance and/ or disturbed immune response, which would conclude to a high risk of inflammatory diseases. This biodiversity/old friend hypothesis stresses just how important our microbes are to us and our environment. “Diversity was associated with a reduced risk of acutely fibroastic leukemia, 35%, which is quite aston-
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ishing from a massive study of 899,000,” said Robinson. “Ecosystem restoration fails because we typically address composition/diversity, when we need to understand interactions and functional traits that provide stability and resilience.” Robinson later presented a graph that illustrates how foraging environments have a high human microbiome community diversity, whereas urban industrial landscapes have a low human microbiome community diversity. “Our skin essentially has the same immune
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system, and microbes play a key role. Pollution can also affect the microbial communities on the skin which could potentially have important health implications,” said Robinson. “So we shouldn’t just be focusing on the gut microbiome, and these are factors to consider in the realm of social equity, particularly if you think about certain social groups that may, you know, living in higher areas of high deprivation, may be more exposed to different kinds of pollution.”
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