There are Mushrooms and There are Morels

I’d heard people talk excitedly about hunting ‘morels,’ but never shared that experience. The only mushrooms I gather and eat are the shiitake we grow on logs here at the farm. When Holly, one of our farm workers, approached me in the orchard, and said, “What are those mushrooms under the trees?” I immediately went over to look.

Holly had been straightening out the irrigation drip lines, pulling them close to the trunks in the tree rows, so that when we mow they won’t get snagged. I had been weeding around young trees, putting cardboard down to suppress the weeds, and covering the cardboard with bark mulch. I followed Holly down one of the rows as she looked for a mushroom to show me. “Morels,” I said, instinctively, peering under the canopy of a large tree. I recognized the morels without really knowing I was familiar with them.

When I returned to the house I looked up morels, just to be sure. One photograph was all that was required. Sure enough, morels love growing under old apple trees. Morels have a distinctive shape, eerily similar to brain coral in surface, with elfin-like rounded turrets that poke up out of the ground, leaning this way and that.

Photo credit: Thinkstock

Photo credit: Thinkstock

Morels particularly like apple trees, poplar, and elm, but can be found just about anywhere. The challenge is to spot them. Sometimes you have to walk by a site several times, but once you notice one, you will usually see many more. Morels like days of sixty degrees and nights of forty degrees, and, of course, moisture — just the conditions we’ve had all spring. So perhaps we have had morels before, but so few that I didn’t notice. This is a bumper year for morels, they are calling out to be harvested. Otherwise, the mushrooms will dry up in a few days, resembling dark rice paper that will melt back into the ground. It did occur to me that I probably shouldn't be writing this blog—morel seekers guard their favorite gathering locations with religious fervor!

When I decided to collect the morels, I read about the best way to harvest them. Some aficionados claim that you should cut them just at ground level; others, that pulling with just a slight tug releases the mushroom with a little knob covered in dirt. The ones who favor cutting say that plucking may damage the mycelia threads and reduce future harvests. I decided to try both techniques. I went back to the orchard with a basket and pocket knife. Pulling them seemed so easy, as if they simply released willingly into your hand. It didn’t feel like I was doing any damage. Cutting them off is neat and clean, but left a hole in the hollow stem open to the air. After trying both approaches, I found myself preferring the pluck method, and harvested enough for lunch.

Blase and the day’s workers, Kevin, Mike, and Holly, were already in the kitchen. I sliced up the morels and added a few shiitake. In a heavy frying pan, I poured a little olive oil and a generous tad of butter. When the pan was hot and the butter melted, in went the mushrooms. While they were cooking, I added a little salt, a little rice bran oil with a very small amount of shoyu, and balsamic vinegar. We shared the exquisite, rich taste. I couldn’t imagine they would ever taste this good again. Two days later, my daughter, Ariel, and I went hunting, and brought home another basket full.  I cooked them again, and they were scrumptious.

Morels with a couple of small shiitake.

Morels with a couple of small shiitake.

Natural Farming — Part 2 (continuation from last Sunday's blog)

The comfrey I planted throughout the orchard did not spread as I had been warned. We experienced our area’s driest summer in history. We don’t have clay soil like the Japanese farmer, Fukuoka, but quite the opposite; our orchard soil is classified as Hinckley, an exceedingly rocky, fast-draining soil. It is definitely not choice soil for an orchard. The young trees struggled just like the comfrey. Only the older trees, with deep roots, tapped into water. I realized that if I wanted to plant more herbs and wildflowers, and create a natural environment like Fukuoka, I would need to have some way of delivering water to all the trees.

We applied to the Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) for a grant to put in an irrigation system, and our grant was accepted. They knew that with our Hinckley soils, the apple trees would surely benefit from irrigation. We installed the system ourselves, pumping the water from the surrounding wetlands. Now I could plant all kinds of beneficial and medicinal plants in the orchard—plants that would be good for our soil, and that might help with pest management.

The beauty of the orchard delighted me as the summer progressed. Sunflowers, rudbeckia, mountain mint, asters, goldenrod, bee balm, and echinacea flowered and fed the pollinators. When Blase asked if he should mow in the orchard, I replied, “Not yet, no.” The Jerusalem artichoke flowers were six feet tall, and the valerian stalks were covered with delicate white flowers. A few weeks later, he said, “I really should mow the orchard.” Again, I said, “No mowing. Not yet.”

The orchard was beginning to feel like a natural woodland. The trees were loaded with fruit, and it seemed like an abundant crop. I finally asked Blase to mow between the apple tree rows to accommodate the pickers, but we left all the wildflowers and natural growth between and under the trees. We had a great harvest season, the farm quieted, and Blase and I turned to other pursuits.

Heavy snow fell during the month of January. The drifts were over three feet high, burying the lowest apple limbs. In early February, warmer temperatures brought a thaw, and I went for a walk among the trees. Snow melts first around the trunks, and my eye caught sight of gnawed wood close to the ground. It glowed a bright orange color. Shocked, I reached down and brushed more snow away. The gnawed wood went deeper.

Voles! They had scampered across the crust of the deep snow, climbed over the 18-inch high hardware cloth fence that encircles every trunk, and dropped down between the trunk and the protective screen. There they made soft, grassy nests, and ate and lived in the safety of their cozy burrows with a pantry of food close by. In tree after tree, especially in the back of the orchard, these rodents had eaten the bark, chewing their way around the base of the trees and down to the roots. Many trees were completely girdled. Girdling, when it is complete, kills the tree by cutting off the sap flow between the roots and the crown.  

Voles girdled this tree.

Voles girdled this tree.

Voles even ate the lower branches because of the height of the hard packed snow!

Voles even ate the lower branches because of the height of the hard packed snow!

I panicked and called in reinforcements. With a couple of friends, we started shoveling the snow away from every trunk.

Gabi White tirelessly shoveling snow.

Gabi White tirelessly shoveling snow.

It was exhausting work. There was no way we could remove that much snow from around every tree. When we were too tired to shovel, we stomped the snow down with snowshoes. It felt like a war zone. Our hats, coats, shirts, and gloves were scattered everywhere.

Gabi White — resting!

Gabi White — resting!

After a short break, we got back to work, shoveled more snow, heated up and stripped to tank tops, but it was too late. The damage was done.

Paige O’Brien, one of our farm workers, made a detailed map of all the injured trees and numbered them on a scale of one to four. One was one-quarter girdled, two was halfway, three was three-quarters, and four was completely girdled. We cut down the threes and fours, because they would either die or struggle mightily. A weak tree would attract more disease and pests. In all, fifty trees out of three hundred needed to be cut down. A saw blade to each trunk, and the task was done. Such quick work compared to years of cultivating growth.

Later, I learned it had been a bumper year for voles. Nature is like that—a bumper year for acorns, for apples, and now, for voles. Commercial growers knock down the vole population every fall with pellet poison. I had done the opposite. I had created a perfect vole habitat by growing delicious herbaceous perennials and cultivating long grasses and flowering plants. Following the irrigation drip lines, the voles had scampered freely from tree to tree.

So much for a wild orchard. I would have to rethink my approach and mow down all the perennials in the fall. Now, we mow several times throughout the season to dissuade the vole population from even considering making the orchard their home, but we leave patches of herbs and wildflowers growing between the trees. In preparation for winter, even these plants get mowed down to the ground. We also pull the drip lines away from the trees. In the spring, the hardy plants come back. I can already see the healing herbs like comfrey, valerian, and mountain mint unfolding their leaves. The orchard is not wild, but it’s not a monoculture either. We are trying to live peaceably with the other creatures who make their home nearby — definitely not offering them apples trees to chew — but encouraging a diversity and abundance of nature.

The challenge remains, however.  I check on trees that aren't growing as well as I would expect and discover they are partially girdled, and two days ago I cut down a Crimson Crisp, a three-year-old ready to take off, but completely eaten around the graft. I'm discouraged. Then I smile at a dove sitting on  a young tree as a blue heron flies by. I see pink buds on almost every branch of some eighty varieties of apples. I am blessed.

 

Natural Farming — Part 1

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, 
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go, 
we have begun our real journey. 
            —Wendell Berry, Farmer, Poet, and Writer

In 2006, the once abandoned orchard at Old Frog Pond Farm received organic certification. But that didn’t mean I understood what I was doing as an orchardist. An experienced farmer tends the earth for years, season after season, noticing, altering her approach, and trying new ideas. I was following an instruction sheet that I only partially understood. In my search to improve my orchard practices, I came upon the writings of Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008), a Japanese rice and citrus grower, who discovered a way to farm that was in harmony with nature. His book, One Straw Revolution, published in English in 1978, became an underground manifesto for a new approach to agriculture: one that did no harm, that did not depend on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or mountains of compost — one that emphasized ease.  

As a young man, Fukuoka worked for the Customs Bureau’s Plant Inspection Division, having studied plant pathology at the university. His long hours led to a bout of acute pneumonia and hospitalization. He lay for days in his hospital room where a broken window let in cold and snow. He recounts that a nurse checked his temperature from time to time, but that was all. In the midst of this icy solitude, he started to fear death approaching. When he was finally released from the hospital, he fell into a terrible depression. The work that had fascinated him seemed useless. He could not sleep or focus on anything. One night on a hill overlooking the harbor, he collapsed with exhaustion. He woke the next morning at dawn, gazing over the water.  “Everything I had held in firm conviction,” he wrote, “everything upon which I had ordinarily relied, was swept away with the wind. I felt that I understood nothing.” The next day he handed in his resignation and began wandering, trying to explain to people he met what he had experienced. “I challenged a lot of people with my conviction that everything is meaningless and of no value, that everything returns to nothingness. But this was too much, or too little, for the everyday world to conceive.” He returned to his father’s farm resolved to live a simple life.  

I settled myself on the mountain and everything went well up until the time my father entrusted me with the richly bearing trees in the orchard. . . . My conviction was that crops grow themselves and should not have to be grown. I had acted in the belief that everything should be left to take its natural course, but I found that if you apply that way of thinking all at once, before long things do not go so well.

Fukuoka ruined the citrus crop and his father insisted that he leave and get a job and come back when his mind was right. Fukuoka left, and found a job as Head Researcher at a nearby agricultural research center. It was just when Japan was preparing for war and for the next eight years Fukuoka did research devoted to increasing the wartime food supply. Throughout this time, he was always pondering the idea of a natural approach to farming.  

Fukuoka returned to his father’s farm, convinced that a grower could trust nature and not use any chemicals. On a clay hillside above the farm, he decided he would grow an orchard of mikan, a Japanese clementine. “The red clay was so hard you could not stick a shovel into it,” he wrote. People had previously grown potatoes there, exhausted the soil, and abandoned the fields. His father thought he was crazy.

To improve the soil, Fukuoka first tried digging holes in the compacted soil and adding organic matter, a physically demanding effort that led nowhere. Then he tried burying straw and ferns that he had carried on his back from higher up on the mountain. But hauling ninety pound loads and digging trenches was exhausting. The trenches eventually caved in, and there was barely any organic matter. He thought of building organic matter in the soil with decomposed wood, but it wasn’t available nearby. This was his “aha” moment — he could grow the wood himself.

Among his citrus trees, he planted pine, cedar, pear, loquats, cherries, and other native trees. On the bare ground under them, he sowed white clover and alfalfa. After several years, the clover grew and blanketed the hillside. He planted daikon, the large white Japanese radish. With its deep taproot, the daikon opened the way for water and air to circulate through the dense clay.  The radish reseeded, softening the hard clay soil, and, after a few seasons, Fukuoka could plant root crops like potatoes and eventually more tender vegetables. He continued to sow clover, a nitrogen-fixing plant that returned more nitrogen to the soil than it used. The orchard soil became rich and dark, and the tall trees provided a windbreak protecting the smaller citrus trees. With the ground cover of nitrogen-producing plants, the orchard naturally had all the fertilizer necessary. With the diversity of plants and trees, insect pressure decreased, and he had no need for pesticides. 

In Japan, after World War II, there was a great rush to emulate the West and use modern methods, specifically chemicals for farming. At first these new introductions from the West meant less work for the farmers, but it took only one generation before the minerals in the soil were depleted and the crops became dependent on chemical nutrients. Fukuoka knew intuitively that there must be another way.  

Over the over the next decades, Fukuoka refined his approach to agriculture and called it natural farming (different from 'do-nothing' farming that had destroyed his father's citrus crop). He believed that farming should be pleasurable and in harmony with nature, not such oppressively hard work that the farmer is left with no time for other pursuits. “There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song,” he would grumble. Fukuoka always sold his crops for less than chemically treated produce, because he felt natural food should be less expensive. “After all, natural food [is] easier to grow, even though it [is] more nutritious and tasty.” When Fukuoka learned that a distributor in Tokyo was selling his mikan for a high price, he immediately stopped selling to him.

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.                     —Masanobu Fukuoka

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.  
                   —Masanobu Fukuoka

I aspired to Fukuoka’s ease and trust of nature. Having no idea what I would do, for several weeks, I carried around his book, as if the spirit contained within it would infuse the farm. My first real step was to plant comfrey throughout the orchard, a plant that also has a long taproot. People told me that I was really foolish, because comfrey spreads its seeds and will take over gardens, fields, and even orchards. The comfrey didn’t turn out to be a problem, because the deer kept it in check. But what happened next in my desire to create a natural orchard in the spirit of Fukuoka was devastating.

                                               Natural Farming: Part 2 will follow next Sunday.