Mushrooms: small but mighty!
We're pretty small-scale - in the world of market gardening, we sit towards the 'blink and you'll miss it' end of the scale! This means we use what space we have intensively, often intercropping in order to squeeze more than one crop into each bed in order to get as much out of the garden as possible.
This is easy in summer, when you can plant tomatoes or eggplant or zucchini once and count on it to be abundant (sometimes a little TOO abundant) all summer long. But it's much harder in winter, as winter crops need much more time and things like broccoli, cabbages and cauliflower, a heck of a lot more space.
We spent a lot of anxious nights chewing over how we could supplement the things our little patch could produce in the winter and settled upon mushrooms pretty quickly. They tick such a lot of boxes - they're not just delicious and pretty darn special, but they grow surprisingly fast, can be cultivated indoors using materials that we already have on-hand, take up very little space and yield a fair amount once you've got your system downpat!
We grow our mushies in a space of about one cubic metre, in used buckets, cast-off by the good folks at Gumtree Pies and on a straw substrate. There's a trick to ensuring mushrooms, and ONLY mushrooms, grow in the buckets. We pasteurise the straw first, before mixing through mushroom spawn that has been grown on grain. The straw/spawn is packed into the buckets, which have had holes drilled in the sides, and they are stacked in a dark corner of our house for about five or six weeks, until we can see that the straw is well and truly colonised by the spawn - see below!
The first flush of mushroom growth comes poking through the holes in the sides of the bucket after five/six weeks, and it's at that stage that they must be lightly spritzed with water each day. The mushroom 'pins' double in size every day until they're ready to cut and eat. The beauty of mushroom-growing is that once you've harvested the first flush of mushrooms, you can encourage a second flush (about four weeks later) by continuing to spray the holes in the bucket with water! How's that for efficiency?!
We are never at a loss for ideas for cooking and eating mushies, however one of our fave recipes is this one, which is so delish on top of an Asian inspired rice bowl! Give it a try and let us know what you think!
Sticky sweet oyster mushrooms
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 cups mushrooms, thickly sliced and quickly dipped in water
1/4 cup cornflour
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 cloves garlic (minced)
1 inch ginger (minced)
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 tsp cornstarch (mixed with 1/2 tsp water)
1/4 cup soy sauce
Put the mushies in a bowl, pour in the 1/4 cup of cornflour and stir them around to ensure they're well covered.
Heat the vegie oil in a wok/frypan, throw in the mushrooms and fry them for four or so minutes until they're cooked through and a little crispy on the outside. Remove the mushies from the pan, and put them to one side.
Turn the heat down slightly, and use a piece of paper towel to wipe the pan clean. Pour the sesame oil into the pan, add the garlic and ginger until they're aromatic and bubbling in the oil.
Add brown sugar to the pan and stir until caramelised. Then add the cornflour, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar and stir until the sauce has thickened slightly.
Pop the cooked mushrooms back into the pan with the sauce and stir to cover in the sauce. Serve!
