Week 4, Spring 2023
Hello everyone!
Another week is wrapping up here at ZA, and what a week it was! We have 2 extra guests staying with us this week, Ruby- a beautiful cat who tends to keep to herself, and Max- an adorable senior dog who loves to be pet (and maybe keep us up at night), they have been wonderful additions to our community and we will be sad to see them go on Sunday!
This week started with our classic mushroom spawning procedure - chopping up bales of straw then soaking bags of it in giant buckets of water and lime in order to pasteurize it. After around 12 hours we take the straw out and it’s ready to be put into smaller buckets with mushroom spawn! In around 4 weeks we are going to have more mushrooms than we know what to do with. We also started a new online class called “Counting The Omer” which we will continue for the next 7 weeks leading up to the holiday of Shavuot.
Finishing up the work we needed to do in the strawberry patch was a big to do list item this week. We put the last rows of rockwool paths in and covered them with straw, and then moved onto the huge task of weeding everything!
On Wednesday we were able to plant a second row of potatoes in one of the gardens and tuck them into a nice blanket of a little dirt and a lot of straw. We also began the giant task of getting the basement ready to be taken over by mushrooms on an even larger scale than we have been doing in the past. We have a whole new mushroom tent that we set up (even though we had to take it apart a few times to fit it through some doorways) and we are ready in around 3 weeks to put all our lovely mushroom buckets into the tents so that the mushrooms can fruit. Shout out to Felix who banged his head on things in the basement no less than 15 times #tallpeopleproblems. Since we have 2 tents now instead of just the 1, we are also in the process of modifying our homemade humidifier and air duct so that they can be used for both!
Now as we close out the work week, we are working on planning and cleaning for the upcoming holiday of Passover which will be on Wednesday. It’s a dreary day here with lots of intermittent rain showers and strong gusts of wind so we have chosen to hunker down in the house to get some work done (except for a brave few mixing up some soil before the real rain starts). We are excited to go into a weekend that will involve lots of rest, and also tons of planning for the holiday ahead.