17 Nov Winter Garden and Some Unexpected Guests!
Riverstone has a pretty cool club of students that meets weekly at lunch- the Vegetarian Club. They bring in vegetarian potluck-style dishes and share a meal together. This year we invited the Vege Club to partake in the spoils of the summer garden and invited them to plant a winter garden so they can reap the benefits of the garden throughout the school year as well!
The garden was unfortunately raided by raccoons (the first unexpected guests!) the weekend before the feast and we lost some of the promised veggies to the wildlife, but the Vege Club members readily adapted and still had plenty of ideas for dishes to make with what the raccoons didn’t steal.
The second unexpected guest was the lovely blue oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus var. columbinus). I love mushroom hunting, so it followed that I eventually learned to grow them. This batch I take particular pride in – it is grown on recycled and repurposed waste: garden clippings, spent coffee grounds, pizza boxes and home recycling to name a few of the ingredients in the substrate mixture.
I delivered one of my mushroom buckets to school to inspire the diversion of our waste stream to beneficial uses and to donate some delicious mushrooms to the feast. I was unable to attend the feast as I was out of town but I am told that everything was delicious as usual! And now I have a bucket of mushrooms living at school…the next step is to divert from the school’s waste stream and create even more food for interested students and gastronomics alike.