Let's get our Shiitakes together!

Mushrooms Anyone?

 

 Me and my friends at Symbiosis are going to be growing lots and lots of mushrooms!

Shiitakes are an amazing way to turn dead hardwood into incredible living delicious and nutritious food. The mushrooms we grow will be used not only to sustain us but also to serve up at our beautiful little traveling cafe - 'The Peasant's Lunchbox'.

We're looking for volunteers who'd like to come and lend a hand in our project, inoculating oak, birch, beech and alder logs from our beautiful woodland in Mid-Devon. We'll be working over the next couple of weeks - until mid January, and we will try to arrange work parties at weekends.

In exchange for a fun day's work you will receive a delicious homemade vegan lunch, everything you need to know about growing your own mushrooms on logs (the same techniques can be applied to growing Oyster Mushrooms, Lion's Mane etc.) and your very own mushroom log to take home with you! (These are often sold for up to £20 each!)

The work will consist of collecting logs from the woodland, drilling, inserting spawn and waxing the logs. All ages are welcome and any help at all is greatly appreciated.

Of course forest garden plants will also be available from the nursery for donations as well. 

If you'd like to come along, please get in touch via symbiosisnursery@gmail.com or give Charlie a call on 07935906932.

Many Thanks and we look forward to meeting you soon on the farm...

Shiitakes are also being researched for anti-cancer medicinal properties

Regeneration, Us as Part of Nature

This afternoon, spending time with my inspiring friend Sagara of East Devon Forest Garden, we rode a wave of conversation that led us to clarity over our motivation in what we are doing for ourselves, for others, for nature, our planet.

We understood why we are still caught in the grip of fear, parallelised to proceed with what we know is so important. We understood that the task in front of us is so large that we prefer to cower and hide our eyes from what is really happening out there. We understood that great courage is now needed from all of us to face the size of this challenge with resolute Spirit and Will to Succeed. We can do it.

Regeneration is a scary word for humans. In our awkwardness and lack of confidence we prefer to compromise our goal with words like sustainability or even low impact. Is that really the best we can do?? Sustain a critically sick planet for as long as we can? or even trying to only kill her slowly rather than fast? Somehow we seem to have lost faith to our deeper calling to heal the wounds of Mother Earth, and to repair her desperately damaged systems of balance, harmony and symbiosis.

Is this task really beyond us? Like a self fulfilling prophecy we will surely fulfill our collective response to this critical question... At the moment our answer is painfully clear: we have no faith is ourselves whatsoever. Whilst all around us, signs of the Earth's distress become more and more alarming, our natural call to heed is ignored, to instead destroy her at an ever faster rate.

Our apparent suicide mission is so desperate, that, seen clearly, all who participate in it must not be labeled as bad or evil, but merely unwell and unconscious. If our reaction to somebody who is unwell is to anger and to humiliate, we must also realise ourselves to be unwell, and needing the same loving kindness to restore our sanity.

Nobody who is in their right mind would destroy their home, and anyone seen trying to would surely only invite compassion for the terrible sickness they must be suffering from.

Those of us who see the damage done to our home must surely seek to repair it if we'd like to continue to dwell there.

And so it goes, it is time to make this choice, and time to act upon it, right here and now, before the walls come crumbling down on us and our beloved family.

Let's find the courage to act now. To follow our natural inclination towards that which is good and right and whole. To repair the wounds in our Hearts and in the fabric of our Beloved Mother, whom we call The Earth.