A day can’t be ALL bad when it involves mushrooms

(Unless, of course, you despise mushrooms. In which case, the rest of this little note will probably cause you to need to run for the bathroom.)

My dentist warned me yesterday that today might be a little…rocky.

To which I promptly stuck my fingers in my ears and yelled, “LA LA LA CAN’T HEAR YOU EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE I’M SURE LA LA LA!!!!!”

…which in retrospect may be why I woke up this morning with my jaw a little swollen and a lot painful. I mean, talk about just kicking Fate in the eye and expecting nothing to happen, right? If I’d crawled around trembling with fear and hoping for the best but resigned to the worst, and made all kinds of Arrangements for everything and alerted the media to the potential of me feeling like death warmed over, I probably would have been fine.

Instead, I woke up at 3:35 when the alarm went off and basically went, “…moan…”, turned it off, shuffled to the bathroom for pain medication, and went back to bed.

It was what might be called a slow start today.

And I managed to put in three (3) hours working from home before the combination of owies and prescription drugs for same rendered me a drooling idiot who should never be allowed near code of any kind.

Then, just as I was becoming quite certain that there could be no redeeming value to today…guess what?

(What, Tama, we’re dying to know what snapped you out of your drug-induced haze today…wait…you did snap out of it eventually, right?)

(Yes, and I have the renewed throbbing in my jaw to prove it…why, why does dentistry always have to be so @*^&@ing painful with me? Why can I never seem to have a simple little filling that doesn’t even require an Advil, let alone a regimen of pain killers that require military-like timing?)

(Welll, sweetie, if I were to have to take a guess, I’d say it’s probably because you ignore problems in your teeth until something really awful happens, like, I dunno, your tooth splits in half vertically, and only then will you make the time necessary to have them treated.)

(OK, who asked you?!)

(You did, and furthermore…)

(OH, SHUT UP! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA LA LA LA LA!!!!!)

Ahem. Anyway. Today, I finally ordered some goodies from Fungi Perfect.

Eeeeeeee! I can’t wait to make the husband get out there and drill a bunch of mushroom plugs into a whack of oak logs…!!!!!!

I’ve been circling this for a long while now. There’s a fairly large patch of real estate in the yard that stubbornly refuses to be good for anything.

In sheerest frustration, I stood there late this summer glaring at the lack of growing going there and started smarting off about how maybe, I should just grow mushrooms in it…

And then I thought…huh, I wonder…

And then (this being me and all), I knocked the idea around for a few months. Researched and thought about it and measured the temperature and the sunlight and compared that to ideal conditions and so forth and so on.

Finally, this very afternoon, I bit the bullet. (Not literally though. Biting and me are not on speaking terms right now.)

And I have four hundred assorted mushroom plugs, for lion’s mane, pearl oyster, and shitake mushrooms coming. Plus (because I couldn’t resist it) a start-up kit for what they’re calling “Espresso Oysters” – which grow in a medium made up of guess what?

Oh. You guessed. Yeah, coffee grounds. I have lots of coffee grounds. I usually split them up between the worm composter, the regular compost and direct application for the lemon trees and acid-base berry bushes, but, you know, hey. I could definitely spare a bucket or two to grow mushrooms in. (Also, think of the Conversation Piece possibilities! “Uh…there’s a…is this…erm…did you know that whatever-this-is has mushrooms going in it?”)

I found this picture on the Red Bay Farm website – this is what my “decorator feature” should look like once they get going.

Only, uh, there’s going to be, kind of…well. More than one log like this.



I'm so excited, I almost don't care that my jaw still hurts! I sure do hope this works...it's one thing to have a book tell you that you've got the right conditions and all like that, but another thing entirely to actually end up producing food at the end of the day.