With the weather warming up and the seasons changing here in Colorado, I gladly get to start outlining mushroom projects for the coming outdoor season. One big change I’ve been developing in my head is converting my garden boxes in the front yard into hügelkultur hills. I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to achieve it this year, but I will be at least collecting supplies to start it next year. Over the winter I’ve been doing a bunch of research, and while not at all necessary to the hügelkultur technique, there are numerous places in the system where anyone could introduce mushroom inoculum and receive harvests of delicious gourmet/choice edible mushrooms straight from your garden throughout the season. If you’ll reference my crude drawing you can see the main components of a good hill are- soil, organic material, logs/tree branches.
Logs are an important part of this technique because they act as a sponge, absorbing and retaining water, which helps to keep the soil moist and nourished. As the logs decompose, they release nutrients into the soil, which is beneficial for plant growth. Additionally, as the wood decomposes, it creates heat, which helps to extend the growing season by keeping the soil warmer for longer. The logs also provide aeration to the soil, which helps the roots of plants to grow deeper and stronger. If incorporated into a bed properly, you could simply inoculate the logs with one or more types of edibles depending on climate, oysters, shiitake and many varieties of reishi or turkey tail. You could even do oysters (white rot) and shiitake (brown rot) on the same log and possibly fruit both, as shiitake largely consume lignin and oysters consume both lignin and cellulose. The branches properly placed provide structure and help violate the angle of repose, which is the desired goal for a hügelkultur hill. A final point to make regarding wood- While wood chips are also made from organic material, they are not the best option for hügelkultur beds. This is because they can cause nutrient lockout. Wood chips contain high amounts of carbon, which means they require a lot of nitrogen to break down. When you add wood chips to your garden beds, the soil's microorganisms use up the nitrogen to break down the carbon, causing a decrease in the available nitrogen in the soil. This can lead to a condition called "nitrogen lockout" or "nitrogen deficiency," where the plants are unable to absorb the nitrogen they need to grow, resulting in poor plant growth and yellowing of leaves. This can be detrimental to the health of the plants and overall productivity of the garden. One way to still use wood chips in your hill would be to ferment them first and inoculate with a fungus such as king stropharia or even a psilocybe species like cyanescens if one were so inclined.
Organic material should include things like compost, manure, leaves, grass clippings, straw, hay, eggshells, coffee grounds, fruit and vegetable scraps. You can use wood chips here but as noted above you’ll want to inoculate them with something first. All of this organic material will decompose fine on its own, but if you wanted to you could probably introduce some agaricus sp. Spawn to the compost, though I see no reason to do that as it offers more to your garden with its own plethora of beneficial microbes and nutrients/metabolites. The biggest opportunity I see here is to inoculate all of your manure with shaggy mane (coprinus comatus, or even panaeolus sp.) and spread it over your whole garden. Shaggy mane is one of my favorite edibles due to how delicate it is and its trademark dramatic deliquescence stage. Harvested at the right time, I’ve heard of squid ink pasta being made with the black spore discharge. The most important part of this stage of your hill is NOT evenly distributing your organic material. You are trying to get as much biodiversity into your hill as possible, not lay your logs in straight lines and evenly spread everything out. Your objective is similar pockets of original content, like how a family is related but everyone is different. This way when you go to plant your seeds you can plant some of everything everywhere and let your garden’s varying conditions cull out the weak.
Soil is the last on our list, but definitely the most important part of the show. First, I can’t stress how important it is to get your soil tested for contaminants. With the train wrecks of the last week, and just living in a time post industrial revolution, not to mention the Colorado specific threats of large-scale contaminations such as the Gold King Mine or Rocky Flats, testing your soil for contaminants and heavy metals is not to be ignored. Aside from that, leaving your soil as undisturbed as possible is CRITICAL to the health of the current mycosphere of your soil biome. The point has been beaten to death numerous times like Kenny in South Park, but it bears repeating- tilling your soil is on par with genocide. If you’re not convinced there’s plenty of articles about how many crop seasons are supposedly left in the US because we’ve obliterated our topsoil by tilling and monocropping. Treat your arbuscular mycorrhizae with compassion, they’re there to help you too. That said, when building your hills, do as much as you can to leave the native system alone. Used mushroom bricks are a great organic material filler and attract earthworms because they’re high in protein and nitrogen. Earthworms feed on the mycelium and the organic matter it decomposes, and their digestive process helps to break down the nutrients in the soil, making them more available to plants, and they play a crucial role in aerating the soil and improving soil structure. In this way, the mycelium in used mushroom bricks and earthworms have a symbiotic relationship that benefits the soil and the plants growing in it.
I’ll be working on some drawings of ideas I’ve been kicking around for different systems, like building borders with inoculated hay bales that could even hold plants themselves while providing flushes of oysters and retaining water. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that you only have your space to work in with the resources you have. I think if properly planned and built I could optimize my front yard into a low water hügelkultur system that will produce great food and be an enjoyable place to be, and so could yours.
Now, keeping all of this in mind, I want to air out some of the dirty laundry behind the mushroom sensationalism going around. First, you don’t NEED to add any of this to your garden. Anyone selling you compost inoculum or starter or claiming you need to add this or that myco-tea is just trying to sell you something. Your garden will thrive with the wildly available local microbiome of life already in your garden. My only hope here is to add some inoculum to my garden to further reduce what I have to buy and increase the biological efficiency of my garden. Second, don't fall for the mushroom seeds scam on most selling platforms. If you’re interested in possibly adding a specific mushroom to your garden, do a quick google or YouTube search on whether or not the particular mushroom has been cultivated at scale, and if so, how. Too many people are buying “morel seeds” and trying defunct slurry tek’s that yield no results, because of the huge number of hucksters on these resale sites selling defunct products. There's no shortage of Facebook groups and YouTube pages full of people with boots on the ground experience that can save you time, money and frustration.
To conclude, I thought the most helpful thing I could do would be to offer some citations and resources for hügelkultur information and reliable spawn and genetics. Thanks for the read.
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