Building Soil Health with Mushroom Compost

Learn about Woven Roots Farm’s no-till, hand-scale, growing, composting, mulching, and harvesting practices, and how mushroom substrate is being incorporated into their farming practices. Spend the day on the farm looking into the living world of soil and mycelium. This experience will allow you to sense into a practice of integrating spent mushroom substrate into home and small-scale farm composting systems. 

What is mushroom substrate? 

Substrate is a medium (hay, leaves, woodchips and compost are all examples) which lets mycelium – the vegetative part of a fungus  – establish itself.  The substrate offers the habitat, along with the nutrition, and moisture that mushrooms need to grow. Using mushroom substrate increases the bioactivity of compost, making soil that's rich and allowing nutrients to be more accessible to plants. 

We will be looking at compost at all stages: mixing it ourselves, observing a well-inoculated sample, and spreading compost on our beds. We’ll also…