Mendocino Mushroom Camp Weekend - Day 1

My cabin in the woods

The biggest annual event of MSSF (Mycological Society of San Francisco) is the 3-day Mendocino Camp in November. I am attending the camp for the first time since I joined MSSF five years ago. It's a 4-hour drive from El Cerrito to Mendocino. Since I have never attended an event like this before, I packed everything according to the "list of the things to bring" that Lou, MSSF President, emailed to all attendees.

As I enter Mendocino Woodlands Camp, it is as if I am entering a parallel universe. I am surrounded by tall trees, green moss and other vegetation. I can see mushrooms on both sides of the road as I drive further into the woods.

I arrive the camp around 2:30 PM. There are only a few early birds at the parking area. I check in shortly after and head over to my cabin, #35. The cabin in the woods looks like something out of a fairy tale. The cabin has a fire place, 4 beds, and a balcony. There is a shared bathroom with showers about 30 feet away. After I unload my stuff, I hike back to the dinning hall for the Early Bird Foray lead by Norm.

The kitchen inside of Dinning Hall

About 20 of us head over to Camp 2 with Norm in a 15-passenger van. Some people come as far as Salt Lake City and some come with their little kids. The attendees range from age 6 to 70 something (my guess). We all become fast friends as we roam in the woods. It gets dark around 4:30, so we have our mushroom ID session in the dark with flashlights. Each of us carries a flashlight as soon as the sun goes down. The forest is pitch black at night, and there is no lighting in our cabins.

Norm (wearing brown hat) IDs wild mushrooms for us

For dinner, we have wild mushroom lasagna loaded with porcini and chanterelle. After dinner, I see that Master Ken has gathered a full basket of beautiful golden chanterelle already! He is setting up his dehydrator to dry his chanterelle. I am going to follow Master Ken anywhere he goes tomorrow!

Master Ken and his basket of golden chanterelle

Devil Mountain Wholesale Nursery

Josh of Backyard Food Gardens introduced me to several places for landscape needs when his crew worked on San Village Farm. Devil Mountain Wholesale Nursery is his favorite nursery. I was curious because it is in San Ramon, and there are a few good nurseries in Berkeley area. As we existed the freeway on our way to the nursery, it seemed like we were going through a residential area. He made a U-turn and turned into a drive way, and that was when I saw pots and pots of plants as far as my eyes could see.

We started from the "Shade Area" then native plants and then sunny plants. There were a lot of plants to see. If you are looking for variety, this is the place to go. Everything is out in the open. You are not only there to shop but also get to take a walk in a park full of plants. Ideally, I would go take a hike in Mt Diablo and then stop by the nursery to pick out a few plants.

Since Devil Mountain Nursery is a wholesale nursery, you should do some homework before you go shop there. The staff is friendly in helping you with locating the one you are looking for in the sea of plants, but you shouldn't rely on them to teach you everything about gardening and plants. This is a place for gardeners who know what they want.

The place can be a little overwhelming for someone who's only been to small and cramped urban nurseries. If I had gone there by myself, I wouldn't even know where to start. It takes a while to go through everything, so give your self at least an hour to browse if you are going.  It's nice just being out and walk around all the plants that are available to take home with you.

P.S. You must be in or with someone in the landscaping or nursery business to purchase at Devil Mountain Nursery.

Sand Village Farm's Three-Day Makeover

Jonathan of Backyard Food Gardens built this beautiful new arbor

Back in August, I started looking for someone to help me with rebuilding the arbor that was falling apart. I thought it could be a project for a horticulture student or students. I received a few inquiries through permaculture department at Merritt College but couldn't find a good fit for the job. On the first day of Mushroom Cultivation class at the end of August, one of the new students in the class started a conversation with me. It turned out that he, Josh, runs a landscape business called Backyard Food Gardens. That night I emailed him to find out more about what services he provides. After looking though his website, http://www.backyardfoodgardens.com/, I arranged a time for him to come over and give me an estimate. I decided to give Sand Village Farm a makeover after learning all the options and possibilities

A few days ago, Backyard Food Gardens crew - Josh, Jonathan, Tomas, and Jose arrived with a truckload of tools and started working on getting all the weeds out, putting in an irrigation system, and building a new arbor. On the first day, they set the 4 posts for the new arbor, made wings on the top bars for the arbor, removed all the weeds, ran the tractor all over the hardened soil, and installed the valves for the irrigation system.

On day two, Josh took me to pick out new plants. During the drive to the nursery, I found out that Josh started his landscape business five years ago. When he first started, it was just himself. As the business grew and expanded, he purchased various tools and equipments to work more efficiently. Now he also has a good crew who work well together. Josh became fluent in Spanish from working with his crew everyday, and they study English during their commute to the work sites. As a multi-lingual person, I understand that learning a new language is difficult. I am extremely impressed with these hard working guys.

Sand Village Farm is now covered in mulch

On day three, Josh and Jonathan returned to finish up. Automated irrigation system is a brand new concept for me. Josh gave me a crash course on how to program the time and frequency for different stations.

My propagation table with sprinkler system

This morning, I stood in the rain to admire the work of Backyard Food Gardens.  I can't get over how beautiful it is.  With the automated irrigation system, I won't have to manually water everything or mist my seedlings with a water bottle. I love the new arbor, the propagation table, and all the new plants!

If you are looking for a landscaper, I highly recommend Backyard Food Gardens. Josh can be reached at 510-289-8712 or josh@backyardfoodgardens.com.

My Miniature Honeydew Melon

A few years ago I tried grown cantaloupe melons. I managed to harvest 2 miniature cantaloupe melons. They were the size of oranges but super sweet. I took a break of two years and decided to try growing melons again. I planted both honeydew and cantaloupe during the summer. I saw a lot of flowers but no melon was forming. Master Ken has talked about the type of weather corn and melons love - so hot that it's uncomfortable to fall to sleep at night. They thrive in that kind of weather, and we are definitely not get that here on Sand Village Farm. We hardly even had any summer this year. We had a couple heatwaves, and one came through while I was in New York. When I came back from New York, I was delighted to see a golf ball size honeydew melon.

More than a month went by, and that melon grew to the size of a tennis ball. I could see that it just wasn't going to get any bigger, and it is now fall. It's not going to get any warmer.  Today I cut it up in quarters to eat it. It smelled wonderful and tasted sweet. Would you buy miniture melons? I would because it is like a personal size melon. You can eat it all by yourself. It would be really cute to serve a scoop of gelato in a halve miniature melon. What do you think?

Dive! Living Off America's Waste

I spent my early childhood years in Asia. One of the very first things they teach you in Asia is not to waste food. Grown ups would tell little kids to finish all the food including every single grain of rice in their bowls. Why? Because every grain came from the hard work of farmers and shouldn't be wasted. Kids learn from an early age that food doesn't fall from sky. Everything we eat is the result of blood and sweet of farmers who work the land. Well, unless you go pick wild food that grow by itself.

When I first came to the Bay Area, I was shocked to see kids in school dumping their lunch into the garbage can. Why were they throwing away perfectly good food?! Didn't they know how much work it is involved to make that spaghetti and pizza? Didn't they know that chickens had to be killed in order for us to eat fried chicken? How could they just dump all that into garbage? As I got older, I became more accustomed to people throwing away food even though I do not agree and can't bring myself to do so. Some people think I have an "issue" with food because I eat leftover. A few guys that I went out on dates with thought I was starved as a kid. They thought maybe I was broke. I guess I enjoy my food much more than other girls on dates.

Later on I learned of food banks that hand out food to families that don't have enough money to buy food. I was confused again. I see food being thrown out everyday, so how could there be people without food to eat? Just last month, I saw a few articles on what Americans are putting in their garbage. It turned out a large part, 25%, of the garbage is food. By wasting food, Americans are also wasting energy - the energy that went into growing the food, processing it, packaging it and transporting it to the consumer and then to the landfill. I am well aware that some Americans simply feel it is within their rights (or blessings) to buy food and throw it away as they wish. I think that just means for the people who do care to work even harder. Here is an American who commented on one of the articles mentioned above:

"Mercurus (USA)

One of the blessings of Liberty is the right to dispose of personal property as you choose. What individuals do with their food is their business and no one elses. This article itself is a waste of time to read, and was a waste of energy to produce and publish. Merc"

Hopefully this Merc will never become poor and have no money to buy food. Perhaps only then, he will understand food doesn't always come easy for everybody. Base on his logic, he probably doesn't bother to read the recycle codes on plastic items or recycle electronic waste since they are his personal property.

A few years ago after I became involved with urban farming community, I started to feel less of an alien. Other urban farmers cherish food as much as I do, and it's not so much because we were broke or starved. We share the understanding of knowing where the food came from. Sometimes we work together in community gardens. We are not going to throw away the fruits and vegetables that we spent last five months growing. If a peach is bruised on one side, I can just cut that side off and put it in the compost pile. The compost will help the peach tree grow better. There is very little garbage around here.

Dive! will just be another one of the environmental documentaries, but it's something for the excessive Americans to think about how much we are throwing away while we complain about unemployment, lack of money, and shortage of food as a nation.