So this year has been the worst I can recall for the amount of torrential downpours happening on daily bases. Almost everything in our garden rotted. That is IF it germinated at all. It has been absolute disaster for all of our tomatos and cucubrits. And not much better for any other of our crops, which yielded barely enough to sustain us through the Summer, with nothing to harvest or preserve for Fall/Winter.

As disasterous gardening years go, this one could not have happened at a worst time. With both of us being unemployed for many months now, and trying desperately not to go under, every bit helps. But, there is no point in crying over rotten turnips, so we tried to come up with some other crop to supplement our poor yields.

After much brain racking, I suggested mushrooms and kefir. Well, technically, the mushrooms were supposed to be foraged for, but after we found massive quantities of poisonous mushrooms, and virtually none of the edible ones that I am familiar with, I thought it may be simpler to grow them.

We settled on oyster mushrooms, because they are easier to propagate than others, and because we could purchase a large “kit” locally for only $20 with no shipping necessary (which is quite inexpensive for a grow-your-own-mushrooms kit. Our reasoning is that we can propagate new kits from the mycelium in this kit and/or from a spore print taken from one of the mushrooms once they appear, which happily seems to be imminenet.

The kefir is (suprisingly) proving more challenging. So far I have not been able to produce an acceptable batch from the kefir grains I was able to get, but I understand that this may take a few weeks, so we shall see.

I do hope that our efforts pay off, as we are struggling financially at the moment, and besides, it would be nice to have at least some small success to show for the year.