Garden in any season -- even without a greenhouse

 

Winter isn’t bad: every season affords its own unique comforts.  Even for the gardener with no greenhouse!  

Though you can grow many things indoors without light, sprouts and mushrooms are some of the tastiest things that come to mind when indoor winter gardening is mentioned.

Both are very easy – even for beginner gardeners.  Sprouts are nothing more than germinated seeds.  If you can germinate seeds, you can grow sprouts!  Sprouts are typically grown in one of three mediums: potting soil (or soil from your garden), gravel or sand, or air. 

To plant your seeds in soil, get a pot full of dirt from your garden (or from a bag) and bury the seeds as you would if you were planting them.  Water them as if you were growing them outdoors – keep them moist but not wet. 

Gravel and sand dry out quickly and thereby reduces the risk of infection.  Plant the seeds as you would in soil, and take confidence that it won’t stay wet as long!

To grow in air requires either a mostly-sealed container (such as a mason jar with a screen over the top).  In this method, the seed is kept moist by the humidity of the air itself.  This is difficult to do: some gardeners will put a wet towel in the bottom of the jar, others will put in actual water and change the liquid four times per day to reduce the risks of infection. 

I always grow sprouts in soil.

To make your sprouts tastier, let their leaves open up a bit and then expose them to at least 10-15 minutes of sunlight before you harvest them.  I expose mine to an hour, and the flavor is vastly improved.  After exposure, put the cleaned, harvested sprouts in a zip lock bag and thence into the refrigerator. 

Some people like sunflower sprouts best, but I prefer mung bean sprouts.  Anything is good as a sprout though, and whether you like radish, squash, pea or even wheat sprouts, you can look forward to a crisp healthy vegetable packed with vitamins and minerals (especially if you allow it to eat real soil and sunlight).  Peruse the seed catalog of your choice (I use Johnny’s Selected Seeds (www.johnnyseeds.com) or Territorial Seeds (www.territorialseed.com)) for a unique flavor you’ve not tried yet!

But don’t think all fungus is bad...sometimes you like to grow fungus! 

Mushrooms are easier to grow than sprouts, especially with the help of “kits.”  If you like, you can sterilize manure or other growth medium through composting, but it is easier (and often cheaper) to buy precomposted growth medium.  Pay a little extra for it to be “seeded” with spores and you’ve purchased yourself a kit.

Mushroom Adventures (www.mushroomadventures.com) sells an excellent variety of mushroom kits, and offers good support for the beginning mushroom gardener.  Whether you choose to only grow them in the winter, or also plant some in the spring outdoors, mushrooms are a beautiful, easy crop that provides good nutrition and hours of enjoyment.

One of the best parts about growing mushrooms is watching how fast they grow.  Under ideal conditions, they might even bud and fruit in the same day!  Sit tight and watch them grow, by dinner they’ll be ready for your pot. 

Growing portabella, crimini and white button are easy.  Keep the room at about 65 degrees, keep the soil just dryer than you would your outside garden, and, before you harvest them, expose them to a bit of sunlight.  I expose my mushrooms to a dim amount of sunlight every day and this helps the color and flavor.

If you are seeding them from spores, you’ll want to put on a cap of calcium or silt to help retain the water beneath the soil.  If you are starting from a kit, just follow the well written step-by-step instructions on mixing in the spores and activating them.

Fungi were some of the last creatures to be domesticated by human beings.  In some places of the world, they provided a primary crop (such as in aboriginal Tierra Del Fuego), but in most places they provided either a means of preserving other foods (such as by acidifying cheese against the microorganisms that would have otherwise eaten it) or improving the digestibility of foods (such as through the fermentation of grain to make bread).  Lately, fungi have been domesticated for medicinal purposes (in penicillin, “farmicuticals,” and as herbal treatments).

The use of fungal mushrooms as a domesticated vegetable is fairly recent, most often wild mushrooms were hunted down for harvest.  However, as the wild populations diminished, demand increased encouraging their domestication.  Some of the most valuable kinds of mushrooms have yet to be domesticated (such as the truffle), but others are easily tamed: few mushrooms are better for the beginner than portabellas, crimini (immature portabellas), white buttons and oysters.

Fungi belong to the fungus Kingdom, though they used to be classified as plants.  Fungi are uninucleate or multinucleate, eukaryotic organisms with their nuclei scattered in a walled and septate mycelium (the vegetative part of the fungus).  Fungi are heterotrophic and obtain their nutrients by way of diffusion or active transport.  Fungi have no chlorophyll.  Among the fungi, there are the “true fungi.”  There are five principle divisions of true fungi.  1) Mastigomycotina, which are the aquatic or zoospore-producing fungi, which are motile or flagellate during some point of their lifecycle.  2) Zygomycotina, which are the typically asexual fungi.  3) Ascomycotina, which are the fungi that are not motile and, if they are sexual, form their ascospores inside an ascus (sac).  4) Basidiomycotina, which are the fungi that usually have no sexual state and no motile cells.  5) Deuteromycotina, which are the fungi that are usually asexual with no sexual state and no motile cells.

There are about 250,000 species of fungi.  45% of fungi are Ascomycotina, 26.8% are Deuteromycotia and 25.2% are Basidiomycotina.  Most edible fungi are Zygomycotina and Deuteromycotina.  The word mushroom applies to the fungi that can be seen by the unaided eye that have edible fruiting bodies; the word toadstool refers to fungi that can be seen by the unaided eye that have toxic fruiting bodies.  Neither mushrooms or toadstools are limited to any one group.

Egyptians are credited with first domesticating the yeasts for bread making, and breeding and improvement to the yeasts.  In Egypt, however, yeasted bread was the food of the poor—the wealthy preferred flat breads. 

In Greece, accidental mushroom poisoning was mentioned by both Euripides and Hippocrates by the 5th Century BC, and Theophrastus was familiar with truffles, puffballs and fungi.  In Rome, chefs had special vessels to cook fungi in, and the Emperor Claudius was murdered by his wife when she hid poisonous mushrooms in his favorite mushroom dish (this allowed Nero to become Emperor).  The Nordic Europeans would use mushrooms that contained hallucinogens to improve their war skills; the Vikings preferred “Thor’s Hammer” mushrooms.  Thor was the god of Thunder, and it was believed throughout Europe—by the Romans, the Vikings, and others—that mushrooms were created by thunder and lightning.  Mushroom cultivation began in the middle ages (without the use of lightning or thunder) and by the scientific enlightenment in France, Louis XIV enjoyed mushrooms cultivated from horse manure.  Within 50 years, the English came to love this variety of mushroom—this variety, the white button mushroom, is most commonly consumed in America today. 

In what is today China, the cultivation of fungus began in 900 BC.  By 26 BC, 200 edible fungi had been identified by the Chinese.  The cultivation of mushrooms is acknowledged to have been mastered by the Chinese the 1st Century AD.  In Japan, mushrooms were presented to the Emperor Ojin in 288 AD by the local chieftains in Yamato, and the Emperor Chuai was offered shiitake mushrooms by the inhabitants of Kyushu. 

The Aztecs enjoyed teonanacatl (god’s flesh) as a “sacred mushroom” to induce hallucinations.  The Aztecs also enjoyed vulgar mushrooms for food.  These nanacatl (mushrooms) were served along side quauhtlanamacatl (wild mushrooms). 

It is safest to eat domesticated mushrooms...and infinitely more convenient.  In the winter, they grow in your own home, just seconds from your lunch or dinner plate.  Domestication doesn't ruin the flavor one bit, and though hunting in the woods is good sport, it's also the most dangerous game.  Many mushrooms that are good to eat look like those which are poisonous, and the combined safety and convenience of domesticated fungi ensures their continued growth by gardeners everywhere.