We're Growing Mushrooms - Live and Learn Farm

You read it right, we are about to be growing mushrooms! Shiitake mushrooms, that is! Since we love shiitake mushrooms and nobody I know of around here are growing them, it seems like a perfect niche for us to add to our Practical Life curriculum. For those unfamiliar with Montessori education, the “Practical Life” curriculum for middle school students involves setting up a business. It teaches them so many things about life, economics, values, priorities but it also can help the boys determine what they want to do (or not do) when they grow up!! I have learned that if you love what you do, it is not work! So, our job is to introduce our children to lots of opportunities to help them determine what they do and don’t like! (Note this is a long article, so I have chosen to use the “read more” tab below in order to shorten the articles on the home page… so if you are interested, please be sure to click the “read more” button right below the share buttons for the various social media sites).

We ordered the shiitake mushroom plugs today and hope to get our first stack of wood plugged, waxed and ready to go in about a month. I never really knew how mushrooms grew, but I never expected them to grow in logs!

There is a lot to learn, but it is perfect for a business for the boys. It also blends so well with our overall goal of growing a permaculture garden and becoming a learning farm. We will be growing the mushrooms both in the woodland area around our farm and in the greenhouse over the winter. When we start doing our Botany Camp, fungi will be one of the areas of study and we will have a living laboratory to investigate, experiment with and learn from!

Until next time…

You may also like -

Bio
Latest Posts

Trish Corlew

Founder and Author at Live and Learn Farm

Trish has been married to her best friend, David, for 16 years and they have three sons (aged 13, 12 and 9). Trish is from the coast of North Carolina, but they now live in rural West Tennessee on a 40+ acre farm. She has been homeschooling since 2009 and her homeschool style leans towards a Montessori approach with a heavy emphasis on hands-on learning. They also own a small business that Trish runs from home. Trish’s family is Messianic and they love studying the Scriptures, learning Hebrew and growing in their faith and walk daily. In her spare time, Trish loves to write, work in their garden and can regularly be found trying to learn something new, modeling that learning is indeed a life-long endeavor!