Wood Chips/Mushrooms/Weather = Regenerative/Rich/Healthy Soil

By Sue Van Hook

When life is mushrooming as it is for me, a thirty year member of MFFC, I look for opportunities to incorporate mycelium wherever possible into working landscapes. This spring I reached out to Ecovative Design, the mushroom packaging company where I was the mycologist for nine years (and that MFFC has used for packaging to to ship its maple syrup), to ask if I could use their spent oyster mushroom substrate in a pilot project to create healthy soil adjacent to Merck Forest’s parking lot garden.

The pilot project at MFFC is testing a myco-restoration protocol developed by mushroom guru, Paul Stamets, for future reclamation of unused roadbeds and trails. In a carefully timed effort between Ecovative and MFFC, I drove the farm’s pickup truck to Green Island, NY on June 1st to collect the spent substrate off the conveyor belt at Ecovative’s AtLast clearing overhanging branches from the forest roads and grinding them into fresh wood chips.

The following day, MFFC staff made a wood chip sandwich -- layering wood chips, spent mushroom substrate, and more wood chips. The rains did bless the installation with a regular periodicity to soak the wood chips, allowing the mycelium to colonize them. But enough rain already! In the past week, daily showers have brought forth the oyster mushrooms themselves. These fruiting bodies will deposit their spores adding more points of inoculation to the wood chips and ensuring a steady conversion of wood chips to microbially rich soil. A mushroom’s life cycle is vital and benevolent.

Save The Date

Merck Forest will be holding a Project Learning Tree training on Saturday, October 2nd. Project Learning Tree is an award-winning environmental education program designed for teachers and other educators, parents, and community leaders working with youth from preschool through grade 12. The program features activities and resources to engage children in learning about the environment through the lens of trees and forests. Details to be announced. If interested, contact Chris at christine@merckforest.org.