Lessons from a pair of straw-bale mushrooms

Two large mushrooms just sprouted on a straw bale in my garden. Their 5-inch-wide caps look like those wide-brimmed, floppy-edged sun hats that young women wore in the 1970s.

These fungi are an encouraging development, but about nine months too late, in my estimation. However, nature operates on its own schedule and is not intimidated into hurrying because of my impatience.

We’ve lived on this country property, surrounded by grass fields, for 25 years. Little by little, I had built up the soil in my vegetable garden, hauling in dirt and manure, pulling weeds before they went to seed, plowing green bean plants under, and eliminating toxic sprays.

Four years ago, all my hard work disappeared in a day when a large yellow machine, digging a trench from the newly built red barn to the septic system, popped a line that carried water for our heat-exchange furnace in a large circle around the property, 8 feet underground.

To make the broken hose accessible for repair, the yellow-machine men dug a hole in the garden big enough for a single-family basement. They fixed the broken line and shoved the dirt back into the hole, willy-nilly, leaving a chunky light brown Play-Doh on top where my dark and fruitful garden used to be.

I had to start over.

It felt symbolic of so many other tragedies and life changes, of abrupt endings and sudden turns when there was no clear path forward, disorienting, disappointing, and disturbing. Mostly, it reminded me of how our lives had changed a year earlier when my husband, Paul, had a catastrophic fall that resulted in multiple broken bones and a brain injury, requiring months of intense care and recovery.

What now? How does one regroup and move forward when the landscape suddenly shifts?

Nature’s way is a slow but steady rebuilding, mostly unseen.

I decided to try a straw bale garden, the best way I knew to replenish the soil in the shortest time. Our daughter Amy had done this one year, planting squash and radishes directly into the bales. The resulting soil in her little garden bed by the chicken shed, when we tilled the rotten bales into the dirt the next year, was the richest and crumbliest I’d ever seen.

We bought bales of straw, lined them up across the rocky dirt clods of the garden, and followed instructions to pour on fertilizer by the cupful and water by the bucketful.

In great faith, we planted tomatoes and radishes in their warm depths.

Nothing grew.

Eventually we found that they had been sprayed with a herbicide known for killing everything but grasses for seven years, so potent that even when it’s ingested by livestock and returned to the field as manure, it still kills every leafy plant it touches.

Frustrated and disappointed, we spread the bales near the fence on the far side of the barn. Last spring, we tried again, buying wheat straw from a trusted farmer.

The fertilizer-and-water process accelerates decomposition deep inside the bale, the gardening websites assured me. And the surest sign of this is mushrooms sprouting from the top. So I followed instructions, waited, and hoped for mushrooms.

The rebuilding process requires trust in the experts, endless patience, and faith in nature’s competence even when it follows its own schedule.

Even though I fertilized and watered, the wheat straw was in no mood to decay into the warm, dark humus that makes the best base for beets and potatoes. I planted anyhow, harvesting kale and potatoes but not lettuce or radishes. Then I left the still-golden bales to cogitate all fall and winter.

My husband’s healing had been slow but steady, healthy cells gradually replacing the ripped and broken, seeming to take forever but with sudden awareness of new skills and restored bones. He worked hard at therapy, and we took good care of him, but his body and mind decided how and when they would heal. 

The lessons from that experience translate to straw-bale gardens and a hundred other disappointments. Do what you know to do. Wait. Trust the process. When the time is right, the wind shifts, the bones heal, the straw inside the tight bale slowly turns warm and gray and sends a cheerful sun-hatted mushroom up into the daylight.