Wow, mushrooms are magical — and not in the ‘make the walls start undulating’ way….but really magical….like in the save the world sort of way. 

I’ve recently become obsessed with soil (you’d think as a gardener this might have happened a long time ago) but I mean really, really obsessed.  I read Dan Barber’s  The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food* while on vacation and now I want to get a spectrometer to measure the sugars in my carrots and graph that against the levels of trace elements in my soil.

*You must read it. It is excellent.

Between contemplating every aspect of my own soil, and all the things I have learned while gathering of information for a story I am working on (for Issue #1 of PITH + VIGOR) about designing a mushroom garden; without ingesting anything illegal my mind has been completely blown.

The networks that mycorrhizal fungi create in soil are amazing (I had no idea) and this Ted Talk by Paul Stamets lays out some of the most interesting potential uses.  It is worth the time to watch.

-Rochelle