In following review of last year of Farming with Fungi we give a full picture of what we were up to in 2023, where we are now and looking ahead to 2024.
Winter 2022:
After exploring a few options for potential growing sites we agreed a 2 acre site on The National Botanic Garden of Wales (NBGW) estate. The former Growing the Future permaculture garden most of the field has been kept as a meadow with a small forest garden, willow bed/structures and a small pagoda field shelter.
Application forms for the Small to Medium Scale Farming enterprise (SMSFE) mushroom cultivation diversification scheme went out with great success, and over 40 interested applicants, much more than expected.
The farm management at the NBGW delivered 130 spent Silage bales to use as mulch. An extraordinary amount of organic matter! We used this alongside 160 tonnes of municipal compost to mulch the 4 22x12m blocks in the main growing area. We still have plenty of the silage bales left! We gained a wealth of experience in using silage as a mulch and recorded the species of fungi we’ve seen growing on this substrate (a silage blog to follow soon).
Spring 2023:
We finally finished spreading the silage and compost mulch partly via digger and dumper, partly by hand and followed this by sowing a summer green manure mix.
We gathered an indigenous microorganism culture from local semi-ancient woodland and leaf litter around the growing site. With the help of volunteers from the Eden Project we mixed this with wheat bran and molasses in a fermentation bucket. This has been expanded to bulk up this culture for use in our biofertilisers
Similarly, we sourced our initial Arbuscular Mychorrhizal Fungi (AMF) inoculum taking the roots and soil is the rootzone from plants around the growing and Gardens. This was mixed with sand and grown on with symbiotic grasses in nursery trays before being transplanted into a 4:1 mix of vermiculite and compost. More about theses methods can be read here. This inoculum will be ready to use when we start propagating crops for all the test and control beds.
We put up a small greenhouse and created a 20x10m test veg plot (alongside the main growing area) to experiment with the growing conditions on site, start saving seed, and begin building a relationship with the Caffi Botanica in the Gardens, a fortunate aspect of the site is the potential to supply the Caffi directly with fresh produce grown at the Gardens. (picture of caffi statement)
A full planning application was drawn up and submitted. The first three of our fungi-trials with horticultural enterprises went ahead, and we can thoroughly recommend you check out our blog post on the website to read all the fascinating details of how our first mushroom grow trials went!.
This project was in part inspired by the work of Shumei Natural Agriculture, involved from the beginning as partners and consultants. They kindly proposed to send one of their growers Tomoyao Useka to help with the project and meticulously attend to the Shumei test block in the growing area. We eventually found accommodation in the Botanic Gardens estate Tomoya was able to move here in March
Summer 2023:
Summer was a lot colder and wetter than expected. Our test beds have had a very challenging year – a month of rain in April, followed by a month and a half of no rain in May and June, followed by a sodden summer. We began supplying the Caffi Botanica in the Botanic Gardens, and have been supplying a limited quantity of salad and vegetables since July. Many thanks to Tomayo, our resident Shumei grower and Stu and Dana for carefully tending these crops and looking after the site over the year.
We made contact with another Carbon Innovation funded scheme, the Perennial Green Manure Project run by Cloe and Tilly in Machynlleth and incorporated elements of their approach in our cropping scheme.
Autumn 2023:
Our planning permission was granted subject to a sustainable drainage scheme (SuDs). The whole process has been challenging and expensive. Clearly this is an obstacle for more small to medium scale horticultural enterprise with the policies disproportionately applied to this scale of development with little support or room for discretion. As such we participated in the recent consultation on the planning system in relation to SMSFE development and will publish the outcome here. All in all well done to Jo for sticking with this and getting the application through.
We incorporated our rich summer green manure, and prepared the beds for winter.
Winter 2023:
By a stroke of good fortune Carmarthen County Council have initiated a project in the neighbouring village of Llanarthne to develop a former county farm. There will be a showcase organic market garden and examples of integrated agroforestry systems at field scale. As part of this initiative a county horticultural machinery co-operative has been founded with the first meeting in November. We have offered our chisel plough and are helping to formulate the process whereby we can share tools and machinery, such as implements for BCS two wheel tractors, a woodchipper and biochar kiln.
Our shed was finally erected, it has been constructed with sawn timber from Coed Talylan, cladding from Simon at Dinefwr Gates in Llandeilo and roofing sheets from AdClad in Llanwdra.
The year ahead…
We will be finishing the infrastructure on the Myco Market Garden site. This will involve installing the rainwater harvesting and irrigation systems, putting up the two polytunnels and setting up the two mushroom growrooms. All in preparation for starting our trials of the full growing area in Spring.
We are finalising our cropping plan alongside the test methodology and monitoring systems ready for the spring.
James is off to the Oxford Real Farming Conference to take part in a panel discussion Ferility in the Landscape ( 5th January 2 – 3:30pm) organised by Tilly of the PMG’s project. He will be presenting the project alongside Clo Ward and her work on Perennial Green Manures project and Ben Raskin of the Soil Association and his work (and recent publication) on the use of woodchip in farming systems.
In March and April we will be continuing our support for Market Gardens and CSA’s around Cymru. There’s also some upcoming workshops in March on the mushroom cultivation diversification schemes we are promoting for those SMSFE’s that didn’t manage to get a place for the trials.
If you would like to get involved from February, we will have weekly volunteer days every Thursday and a monthly volunteer day the last Saturday of each month.
Just get in touch if you would like to join us and sign up to our newsletter for more updates.
