CIVILIZATIONS AND GENERATIONS—and lots of tomatoes—can fail when we neglect our soil. Geomorphologists, who study natural formation of land, say it takes about 7000 years for natural processes to build a single inch of topsoil. Typical, entrenched gardening, landscaping, construction, and farming styles, especially tilling, can destroy soil in many ways—and quickly. Even in a small vegetable garden or an intensively planted annual area, tilling the ground chops up and kills microorganisms, and stops the natural cycling of nutrients. For initial preparations, tilling and adding loads of compost is an expensive, cumbersome way to build soil.
Our environment can’t afford the soil loss, the dirty streams and rivers. And in a tiny garden or a giant farm, we can’t afford the loss of nutrients. Tilling contributes to infertile soils by disrupting natural nutrient cycles. And when we then try to remedy the problem by adding fertilizers, they too are environmentally expensive, and synthetic fertilizers often cannot provide the same types of nutrients as the natural cycles. For flower gardening, this may seem like something of a philosophical distinction, but in vegetable gardening, it’s critical to our bodies, society, and economy.
This one-year-old garden, made on hard, rocky clay, has never been tilled.
Unfortunately, people just love to till. Take my mother, for example. She’s heard my preaching many times, but remains addicted to the satisfying purr of the rototiller and the rewarding view of a cleanly tilled bed. And we all know a tiller guy, too, with tiller toys in every shape and size. Want a new flowerbed at the mailbox? Weeds coming up around the tomatoes? Creating a whole new landscape around your house, store, or fire station? Going back to your roots and becoming a farmer? Tilling became a default starting point for any of these processes. There is some logic to this, as tilling introduces lots of oxygen to the soil, stimulating some soil life and making things easy for roots. But it’s a short-term and addictive process; longer-term cycles are broken. I also see it as a psychological dilemma; tilling is satisfying, easy, and rewarding. It just feels like the best place to start.
It seems like tilling became an easy answer only after oil became less expensive, though this wasn’t exactly the case. It did become really easy at that point, but with draft animals and plowing, we’ve managed to till for centuries. We’ve ruined soil all over the world. One of the main drivers of the expansion of the Roman Empire was the need for new dirt. They literally wore out their soils, and then moved on. At the end of the nineteenth century, we even had tractors powered by steam engines. But it was gasoline that made tilling an easy, weekly task. And that allows us to weaken soil more quickly than ever before.
Today, more than ever before, we understand exactly why overtilling reduces the soil’s water- and nutrient-holding capacity. We understand that overtilling results in serious, though often unseen, erosion problems. Worms and microscopic life, especially fungi, are literally chopped to pieces by frequent tilling. Remember that it’s their bodies and secretions that hold your soil together. They can’t repair themselves before the next tiller chops them up again, and as a result, we’re left with soil that does little more than hold plants in place. We now understand how to landscape, grow vegetables and flowers, and feed the world without ever breaking out the tiller. The more you know about what it takes for healthy soil, the more no-till gardening just makes sense.
Frequent tilling is too commonly practiced in gardening; it overaerates soil, eventually killing off the soil food web with which plants have symbiotic relationships. Here, Tom Hall does the dirty work of keeping my mother’s small tiller operating.
But while most farmers have by now embraced no-till growing, gardeners and landscapers have been slower to give up the tines. In my gardening practice, tillers, plows, and double digging went the way of the mule. Engines frustrate me; I’d rather be barefoot and quiet. I’d rather smell the dirt and be one with it than fight with cords and fumes. Tillers annoy me and scare the dogs. In all sorts of gardening, farming, and landscaping projects, I’ve learned to work without them. I’ve learned to care for and harness the power of the huge team of microbes, mushrooms, and worms that build soil and make our gardens beautiful.
If you’re starting a new garden or even just planting a few containers, you’ll save yourself both time and money by avoiding the tiller as you get started. And if you have an existing garden, you can still change your ways. Home gardeners and large landscapers and farmers alike are converting to no-till gardening. In all my experience as a professional gardener and nursery manager and as a home gardener, no-till works in every situation.
The Teachers
LINDA PROFFITT AND TRADD COTTER
In a natural system, mushrooms and worms are amazingly successful when it comes to adding fertility to the soil—beautiful, slimy creatures that work together to feed our plant roots. Old country gardeners often use a practice that I always thought might be a kind of witchcraft. When planting a new tree, say a dogwood, they’d go into the woods and get a bucket of duff from around the same sort of tree, which they would then spread around the new tree in the yard. My teachers here are well aware of how this process works, how it actually innoculates the new tree, which had been grown in sterile nursery potting soil, with all sorts of spores and microorganisms that help it thrive. Linda Proffitt is a worm expert and Tradd Cotter specializes in mushrooms, and while both are practically youngsters, they’re masters at using old tricks in new, mindboggling ways to build soil.
Linda Proffitt is constantly telling you what she’s thinking, dreaming, and scheming, all while she shows you some wrinkled plans she’s drawn up, talking with great enthusiasm about changing the world; you might wonder if she’s a visionary or just a romantic. A year later, she’s done it all; her dream of a giant, urban worm composting site and non-profit community center serving thousands is in full flower and all over the news. And the base of her success is a rich field of topsoil that she created over an asphalt parking lot.
Linda Proffitt gets donations of woodchips from tree crews that she and her worms turn into acres of rich dirt.
Linda lives and gardens in Indianapolis, Indiana, and she and her beagle, Pearl, took me on a tour and showed me parts of that city that were really unsettling. She took me to once sturdy, elegant neighborhoods, now almost entirely boarded up and abandoned. She showed me around her own neighborhood, where even today, arsonists target homes that people are trying to rebuild and bring back to life. It’s both frustrating and sad to think about why so many people would abandon and leave these once warm neighborhoods. But in between the hopelessness, on empty lots and corners, Linda pointed out vegetable gardens, soil that she’d reclaimed by encouraging people, by helping them find resources and hope. In her red truck, Pearl in tow, we drive by gardens peeking out from behind parks, churches, and schools.
Paul uses the cut off tops of buckets to create pockets of topsoil in compacted, urban soil that he otherwise cannot garden.
Eventually, we stop at a giant parking lot surrounded by a few run-down, white warehouses. This is where she pulled out wrinkled plans for the headquarters and soil-building facility that she planned to call Peaceful Grounds. It’s a nonprofit based on the belief that unless people’s most basic needs are met first, we will not be able to address any of our other problems. Then, the place seemed desolate and hopeless, but in the years since, Linda has already built up two feet of topsoil. On that former parking lot, she is planting vegetable gardens and mushrooms. More importantly, she’s sharing the secrets of how she got there, of that new dirt, with teenagers from all over the world. Linda’s ultimate message is that you can do it, too—in a yard or in a square foot on your balcony. I ask Linda if I can refer to her as a vermiculturist. She rolls her eyes and corrects me:
Just say I’m an old hippy. In the 1968 Earth Day Parade, I won an award for decorating my bike. That’s the kind of thing that changes your life. My grandfather, father, and uncle were preachers and gardeners. My uncle grew a garden and took food to shut-ins. I started out making gardens on abandoned lots to feed the homeless, and now, I make topsoil that will make more food. And, shoveling it around with kids lets us talk about how much soil we lose every year, and how much we all need to be resilient, to keep up some knowledge of food growing in case there comes a food emergency.
Besides being a garden, Peaceful Grounds is actually a massive topsoil production operation—and it costs next to nothing. Linda works with local tree companies who deliver and dump waste woodchips, covering the parking lot. She then adds compost inoculated with worms and worm eggs on top. Then she finds people to help her turn it, speeding up the soil-building process. Through a national network of people who share and admire Linda’s vision, students come to Peaceful Grounds to work, learn, contribute, and turn all those woodchips by hand. In the first year alone, she had 2092 volunteer students from around the world who’ve donated 18,000 hours of their time. She worries about how we no longer pass down our gardening knowledge from generation to generation—but she’s doing her part. And these volunteers do other community service while in Indianapolis. They garden, paint, haul dirt, and offer their services to churches, community groups, and others who are working to restore the city’s warmth. At Peaceful Grounds, with little more than worms and woodchips, they’ve helped to achieve a dream. Linda gives this topsoil to people in the community who want to grow their own vegetables at home or in urban community gardens.
Virtually all life depends on the carbon cycle. In gardens, we can mimic and enhance the cycle by adding extra carbon from woodchips or newspapers, which soil organisms can turn into fertile soil.
Linda’s techniques translate easily to vegetable and flower gardens, landscapes, and small yards. A square yard of woodchips, with a little compost and worms, is all you’ll need. Well, that and some sun, water, and air, and you’ll need to turn the stuff a few times—everything that converts woodchips to dirt is alive, and they will need a little help to stay that way. As Linda puts it, “This is biomimicry, we’re doing what nature does, speeding it up and using it.”
In any new landscape, on your own driveway, or even in a huge container, you can use Linda’s techniques, too. And not just with woodchips—you can stimulate worms with any cheap carbon source. Carbon is one of the four building blocks of life; it connects things. Nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen all love to bond with it, making up the structures of many different cells. Wood chips, bags of raked leaves, cardboard boxes, and piles of old magazines—these are all great sources of carbon, and we are constantly throwing them away. We are wasting the basis of great topsoil.
The cycling of carbon is absolutely critical to all life, and the carbon cycle can be manipulated to provide nutrients to plants. Plants absorb carbon from the air during photosynthesis. That carbon becomes, through photosynthesis and respiration, leaves, trunks, roots, and flowers. When any part of the plant falls to the ground, or when plants die, microorganisms in the soil go to work deconstructing the plant material. Some nutrients go into soil, and some go into fungi bodies and become rich organic matter and humus. In the initial phases of this decomposition process, organic matter is easily oxidized and carbon is released back into the air. The whole process continues, in a cycle.
When we interrupt the cycle, the worms, bugs, and tilth quickly go away. The soil then becomes compacted, and then we break out the tiller or the plow, which is part of its own vicious cycle that ultimately leaves us with lifeless soil. In a small garden, lifeless soil is frustrating to work with, and in a landscape, plants will look weak and malnourished. In large agricultural fields, rain and wind carry the dirt away with stunning, but often imperceptible, speed. Linda says, “The lesson I teach, while we’re turning chips and worm colonies with pitchforks in our little garden, is that Indiana loses a trainload of topsoil every minute.” It’s a message that we have to keep passing down; we simply can’t afford to lose that topsoil in any situation. Through her work, Linda is equipping our youth with the knowledge that former generations carried with them.
Besides plants and worms (and ourselves), fungi are also a crucial part of the soil building cycle—saprophytic fungi (think the mushrooms that we eat), to be precise. Tradd Cotter is a sapro-entrepreneur whose company is Mushroom Mountain. Down a wooded lane in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills, Tradd and his wife, Olga, might at first appear to be just a couple of young hippies experimenting in their own wooded garden. And they are, of course, but they’re also leaders of this new movement of harvesting the power of mushrooms for food, medicine, remediation, and creating topsoil. He finds, grows, and even “trains” mushrooms for soil remediation. For example, for a soil that’s suffered an herbicide spill, Tradd might train a mushroom to clean it up by exposing hundreds of mushrooms to the chemical toxins and then waiting to see which ones die and which one literally eats the toxin. That mushroom can then be used to clean the contaminated soil, making it safe and inviting for worms and other soil builders. Tradd says: “Feed them a little cellulose, and they are like the guest who brings wine to dinner. They make it easier, quicker, and more fun for all the living things needed to make topsoil. Once they colonize, they exude enzymes that taste sweet to worms.”
In the South, that meant pine trees, kudzu, and sea oats. Kudzu’s massive root system held our abused soils in place. Its ability to fix nitrogen helped rejuvenate nutrition in the soils. While its invasiveness has become a problem, I tend to think we’re hard on it. We brought it in, we enjoyed the benefits, and we still depend on the soil it stabilizes.
In the Midwest, to fight the dustbowl, shelterbelts of Osage orange trees were planted for miles to catch windblown soil. Sometimes these plantings stay put for decades; other times, they are cut and replaced after their work is done. Other plants can literally clean the soil of toxins. Ragweed, for example, can be used to pull lead from the soil, though in order to detoxify a site, a ragweed crop may have to be grown and harvested (and removed) for years. Fungi can serve the same purpose. Remediation can indeed work on a large scale, but it can be slow, and therefore difficult to write it into a government contracts, which tend to require defined timelines.
Mushrooms can be grown in and around plants to help turn carbon sources such as woodchips into nutrients that plants can use.
I know that some people are still turned off by the sight of mushrooms in their garden; this process isn’t yet for everyone. But, inspired by Tradd, I’ve been experimenting with ways to help people see their charms and beauty. I’ve been trying to pair them with perennials—color echoes, textural contrast, and other garden design tactics using mushrooms. It’s all really new, but this year, I did love the coffee-colored skin of king stropharia mushrooms against the blue-gray leaves of elephant garlic. And I like the contrast in form of the almost perfectly circular disc of the mushrooms against the strappy leaves of our crinum lilies. Given that the mushrooms last only a few days, the beauty is fleeting, but that makes it all the more special.
Saprophytic fungi are the mushrooms we most commonly eat. They grow in organic, carbon-filled material like old logs, piles of leaves, hay, or sawdust. What we see aboveground are the reproductive structures. One single mushroom body can cover hundreds of square feet underground. As we’ve already discussed, these are terrific soil builders.
Mycorrhizal fungi form a partnership with plant roots, and we rarely see them. They wrap their hyphae into and around rootlets. Even under a microscope, it’s tough to tell the root from mycorrhizal fungus. Roots supply the fungus with moisture and carbohydrates. The fungus becomes an extension of the roots, supplying roots with minerals and water that are physically or chemically beyond the plant’s reach. In gardening, we use mycorrhizal fungi to help plants grow better.
Of course, the real reason I’m growing mushrooms with flowers is to build soil fertility for the perennials. In one area of our crinum lily fields, the roots from nearby pecan trees encroach, leaving the soil dry and depleted of nutrients. Our crinum lilies grow more slowly there, so we’re testing a huge mushroom bed in that spot as a way to keep the soil fertile. We ordered king stopharia mushroom spores from Tradd, which arrived in the mail, mixed into a block of moist sawdust. Following the instructions, we spread that over the ground, then layered woodchips, more spores, and newspaper and soaked it all down. We watered every day that it didn’t rain. Within a week, white hairs—called hyphae—had spread into the paper and wood chips. Watching this process was an amazing, sublime experience, like watching leaves on a new plant unfurl. In just under three months, the stunning, wine- and coffee-colored mushrooms—the reproductive structures—erupted. We used them in our omelets.
What more could you want than something that lives in your garden, making rich soil from paper, while being both beautiful and tasty.
You’ve probably seen the work of colonizing mushroom hyphae already. It looks like a mass of cotton candy or tiny strands of a spider web. You’ll see it under mulch, woodchips, straw—even pine straw—or in an old leaf pile. Mostly, though, it’s underground and unseen. Eventually, the fungus reproduces, sending up mushrooms. Then it dies, too, becoming a part of the recycling of nutrients.
Often in new gardens or new suburbs, you’ll see an outbreak or bloom of mushrooms. It is especially noticeable when they pop up in lawns, forcing most homeowners to try and figure out how to get rid of them. But we should learn to love and embrace them, as they are the beginning of soil building. The roots of trees that used to be there and the buried construction trash have become food for the growing body of fungi. When it reaches a certain mass, it sends up mushrooms. This is a good thing. This is the first sign that your soil is coming back to life.
For millennia, fungi have been doing exactly what we need them to do: eating dead wood and turning it into living topsoil. But as much of our soil has been ruined, and the carbon sources have been removed, the population of saprophytic fungi dwindled. The mushrooms can’t create topsoil by themselves. You can’t just scatter mushroom spores onto compacted soil to get dirt—they need to eat. And to eat, they have to have some helpers. Therefore, you need all sorts of other things like worms to build soil. As Tradd says, mushrooms get the party started and attract all the worms and other important soil builders. But if the saphos do the initial colonization, their sweet enzymes attract other soil workers.
Organically grown Bermuda hay is often cut and harvested before it goes to seed. Hence, it makes for a clean mulch for Crinum ‘Sangria’ in our fields.
Since these clay soils could absolutely not be tilled, we planted grasses as plugs. After only two months, they have become a meadow.
Linda and Tradd are shining examples of how to take basic knowledge and combine it with the latest in scientific research to move forward and make better soil. Through their work, they’re helping to create new businesses and new lives for people by accelerating the creation of topsoil. We can do this, too; we can stop the tilling and support landscapers, farmers, and new businesses that strive to garden with the web of life.
Updates and Adaptations
On the edge of our little crinum farm, you can see and step down a startling 8-inch drop-off. It’s the line that divides our farm from our neighbor’s. That’s 8 inches of topsoil—soil that took the earth millennia to build—gone, lost to wind and water erosion. In the face of this glaring evidence, our neighbor has recently made the conversion to no-till agriculture. And for the first time in my life, I don’t see clouds of beautiful red dust drifting from his fields over to mine.
For this meadow planting, all grasses were presoaked in a mycorrhizal inoculant.
Our farm hasn’t been tilled in more than thirty years. That was when my father turned it into Bermuda pasture. Not because he had a vision of till-free farming, but because he had limited resources. Bermuda hay production doesn’t take lots of tractors, giant tillers, or other equipment. As Tom and I have needed more space for our field nursery, however, we’ve had to convert that Bermuda grass pasture into growing fields. Bermuda’s tenacious roots go deep; they propagate from even the tiniest living bits of roots, even parts covered by inches of soil. It even withstands the toughest of synthetic chemicals. But it does make a great mulch; and even if there are seeds, we mulch so heavily that they get smothered.
Complete conversion from pasture to usable garden soil takes about a year, but it takes even longer to build a rich, friable topsoil. The techniques that we use can be used on any existing lawn. In late winter, we cut the grass as close to the ground as possible, and then lay compost and woodchips over it. Any newspaper, magazines, or cardboard that we can get our hands on gets put down, too. We don’t even shred it. We top everything with dry Bermuda hay, which is our main carbon source. For the most part, that’s it—that sits all summer. If green grass peeks through, we cover it. Sometimes, we make little planting holes and seed in gourds or running beans. This gets roots growing in the soil, helps shade out weeds, and gives us a place to plant fun things like giant gourds. Normally, after doing this for a year, we can start planting perennial crinums, which are strong, tough bulbs with lots of foliage that help shade the ground.
I’ve been designing gardens since the 1980s. Each garden or landscape depended on maintaining or building great, healthy dirt. I’ve built topsoil on rocky red clay at the Riverbanks Botanical Garden. I’ve planted a pleasure garden in Managua, Nicaragua, on pulverized, compacted volcanic stuff that looked like crumbled asphalt. I’ve worked on ashtray-like sand dunes in Florida, on limestone bluffs, and on my sandhill garden. I’ve worked on mucky clay near Puddin’ Swamp, South Carolina (the name says it all), and in my own field nursery. In each, and in many more, I invited earthworms.
We should, however, recognize that worms don’t benefit every situation. Keep in mind that many earthworms were introduced to America by Europeans, and new species still arrive. They adapt to urbanized soils better than insects, and they change soil structure—which isn’t always a good thing. They changed our forest and may threaten wildlife. As much as we need their tilling in some places, many forest and landscape types, such as arid gardens, do not need worms.
After a construction project on our barn, the soil was compacted and lifeless. Here, volunteers add worms to exposed red clay, which the worms will soon turn into topsoil.
Warm-season grasses in meadow gardens look sparse in spring, so I overseeded this meadow with spring ephemerals like these Chinese toadflax (Linaria maroccana). As the grasses grow in with coming heat, these delicate flowers dry up and fade away.
I take these soil-building lessons off the farm, too. In my garden design work, no-till gardening solved the problems of some of the most challenging, hard-packed, rocky soil I’ve ever dealt with. Just outside the gates of the famed Augusta National Golf Club in a traditional neighborhood of brick walks, azaleas, and zoysia lawns kept perfectly edged, I was asked to design a wild meadow—complete with sheep.
The soil was no more than a quarter inch of red clay over rock. Other landscapers had started and abandoned the job. Half of an irrigation system was installed, but in some places, pipe was literally laid on top of the ground. There were lots of challenges around this newly built home, but the biggest was the lack of soil. You simply couldn’t dig a hole for a landscape plant. A typical till approach would have been impossible.
Fortunately, no-till gardening worked beautifully. With mattocks and short-handle spades, we dug holes 2 inches deep—and sometimes we couldn’t even get that deep. In those divots, we planted thousands of plugs of ornamental grasses. Their 2-inch root balls sometimes had to be split and formed around rocks. Each grass was soaked in a vat of water and soluble mycorrhizal inoculant. Once planted and watered in, we tied up the grasses and topped it all with a very light leaf compost that was full of earthworms. A few months later, we followed up with another top dressing of compost made of vegetable matter and woodchips, along with a second inoculation of mycorrhizal fungi.
Essentially, we replicated the natural process of soil building. Now, the roots of the grasses, the underground fungi and bacteria, the mushrooms, and the bugs stay busy breaking down the heavy clay, opening it up and storing organic matter and nutrients in the soil. In just six months, our work grew into an elegant, flowing garden. A friend described the stone house on the property as floating on a pillow of grasses. Three different evergreens—bullrush, cordgrass, and lyme grass—make up the mass of the planting. Interspersed, winter-dormant sweet grass, love grass, and a few others add multiseasonal interest. Gray leaves repeat throughout. The other plants, including a few shrubs, are all edibles: pomegranate, olives, pineapple guava, and the camellia that is used to make camellia oil. The walkway is interplanted with creeping mint, oregano, and blue flowering mazus. We’ve even planted annual salvia with tickseed mixed in. But overall, the look is of grassland—a wild meadow, manicured around the edges.
In this meadow, we included elements to help “frame” the wildness, to let people know that this look is intentional. Formal stone walks, sheered hedges, stiff, evergreen plants, and bits of mown lawn accomplished this.
Why do it this way? A landscaper stopped by to look around and give unsolicited advice: “You should have just brought in 18 inches of compost and topsoil over the entire site…. They can afford it.” Maybe, but I can’t, and in the long run, none of us can. The way I look at it, I saved everyone a lot of money—and not just in the cost of soil or the equipment required to scarify the clay and to spread and till the soil. No-till saves all that, but it also saves the cost of fuel to do all that. And in this case, it saved a ton in the cost of chemical weed suppressant.
Tilling often creates weed problems by exposing to light weed seeds that are deep in the ground and dormant. All soils have a seed bank. Tilling opens the door to that bank. Bringing in and adding topsoil often does the same thing. Where do you think that topsoil comes from? It comes from places where someone is digging a basement or clearing land to build tract homes, and it often brings along its own bank of weed seeds.
We also saved the cost of repairing erosion issues on this sloping lot. There simply was no way to completely integrate a new layer of soil with the existing soil. The new topsoil would have floated on top, and our heavy summer rains would have gradually washed it down to the bottom of the slope, leaving little canyons, damage that would have to be fixed after each and every rain with costly, repetitive, frustrating hours of shoveling.
I call this sort of walk from the meadow a goat-cart path, as it reminds me of places without cars, where animals pull carts on little tracks. This minimal hardscape allows for rainwater penetration and makes a place to grow mat-forming plants.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, in this tidy and conventionally landscaped neighborhood, our work with conservation and soil building has not pleased all of the neighbors. The meadow stands in solitary and stark contrast to all the golf course–like gardens that surround it. To my eyes, the contrast between the meadow and the wooded neighborhood is beautiful, much like a glade growing in the forest, where a ray of light snuck in. Here, gray-leafed grasses catch sun and wind. In midsummer, gray-white flower heads of love grass mix with a few little sparkles of red salvia and yellow cosmos. Later in the fall, sweet grass makes a mauve mist. Into that mist, on a rainy fall day, we sow the seeds of blue larkspur, white clover, and pastel toadflax. These germinate and grow under the grass and erupt into a spring show, just a little more organized than a natural meadow.
This kind of soil building can be a tough sell. Asking a homeowner to wait a year while some fungi bodies grow underground is quite a challenge. Writing contracts, for clients or a government agency, that specify mushrooms, massive seed-in projects, and slow soil building is very difficult—but not impossible. The typical ways we attempt to change soils, by adding loads of stuff and tilling it in, when repeated, are counterproductive. My daddy used to say, “That kind of thing is make-work,” by which he meant, a never-ending cycle of creating a problem, then offering the solution. No-till vegetable gardening, landscaping, and farming works. Ironically, no-till farming has been commandeered by the chemical industry and has the reputation of being pesticide intensive. It doesn’t have to be. If you learn to feed the living organisms that make up your soil, from worms to bacteria to fungi, you’ll gain access to a joyful, hidden world and find a quiet, slow, and soulful way to love your dirt.
Helen Yoest, author of Gardening with Confidence: 50 Ways to Add Style for Personal Creativity, gives solid advice to gardeners based on her hands-on experience trying and testing in her own North Carolina garden. Helen tells the story of her interest in mushrooms:
Today, my attention turns toward accelerating this natural process by adding [inoculated] fungi into the soil. An added bonus will be a crop of harvestable mushrooms! Going beyond improving the soil’s tilth, fungi are also being used to degrade a wide range of soil pollutants, including herbicides. I’ve selected the native king stropharia (Stropharia rugosoannulata) for my garden because it’s a good edible and easily identified. It’s a beautiful fungus, with dark burgundy-colored caps and white stems.
King stropharia mushrooms are also called garden giants and spores are available from Tradd Cotter’s online store, shop.mushroommountain.com.
