Locally Grown - Availability for September 25th, 2013

Hey Local Food Lovers,

I’ve been wanting to talk about one product type on Locally Grown for weeks that is pretty new and very unique. Mushrooms.

Though we’ve had wild harvested mushrooms on Locally Grown since our very first year (2010), this year was a milestone in having a new grower that can produce mushrooms all the year round. The farm is called Orchard Valley Farm and Julius Miller is the guru that has made this all happen. Those of you who have lived around Clarkesville for awhile may know Julius as the guy who until very recently owned and ran Orchard Valley Signs. If you’ve ever driven down Clarkesville’s Main Street and thought wow, I really like how nice all the business signs are and they have just a hint of a similar quality. That would be Julius. I feel pretty certain he is one of the best sign makers you’ll ever meet. Or I should say was the best as last year he sold the business with two goals in mind. He wanted to start a youth camp for troubled youth as a way to give back, and he wanted to become a grower.

Julius is one of those people who likes to figure things out, and even before he zeroed in on mushrooms he was doing a lot of reading about different niche farm products and technology. He got fascinated with mushrooms because there aren’t many people who grow them, and it’s not the easiest thing to do. It was a challenge and a puzzle he could work to figure out.

I won’t pretend to understand his growing system well enough to explain it but I will share just a little bit of what he’s told me. Each different mushroom is unique, has its own unique likes and dislikes. It all starts with the growing medium. Shitakes as you may or may not know prefer hardwood as a medium, either a log or sawdust. Oyster mushrooms prefer straw. I’m not sure what Portobello mushrooms prefer.

A mushroom grower is more like a cheese maker than a farmer. Every little detail about how a cheese is made affects the flavor, and every little detail from moisture, to air flow, to growth medium, all effect how the mushrooms grow. It’s easy to make a mistake, get the wrong type of spores in the growth medium and boom….problems.

Julius a few weeks ago was telling me that Oyster mushrooms are his favorite because they are so fascinating….and by far the most difficult to grow. For one, they are completely different from the other mushrooms. Most mushrooms are just the fruit of the mycellium that is feeding on the organic matter of the dead wood or straw. In other words think of the mushroom cap as the tomato and meanwhile the big green plant is growing in the wood and straw. When you harvest the cap, that’s it, it is dead, just like you can’t put a tomato on the ground and it continue to grow, or form a whole new green plant. But the oyster mushroom can. When you cut an oyster mushroom it is still alive. In fact it will try and recolonize anything it thinks it can eat. Julius described how he placed some in a cardboard box and they started to send out mycellium into the box (the box of course was not nearly delicious and nutritious enough for it to live, but it was gonna give it a try).

I like that we have people in our community who not only provide a fresh food that is so incredibly good for us, while also tasting so so so much better than what you can find in the store. I also like that such people teach us about our world and the sources of our sustenance that we so rarely would be exposed to on our own. I’ve always loved mushrooms naturally, but now I feel I understand and respect them just a little more…..as I sautee them up in butter and gobble them up…..I’ll be respecting them the whole way down.

Thanks to Julius we have mushrooms. I hope you’ll try some and if you enjoy them, eat them frequently.

EAT WELL,
Justin in Habersham
and
Chuck in Rabun