Laueana Growing

Category: general cultivation

  • Regenerative gardening: winter schemes for spring dreams!

    A small pile of Sacre Bleu kidney beans. They are dark indigo in color. Beans are very important for regenerative gardening systems.

    Sacre Bleu kidney beans

    I haven’t started, let alone finished, my final vegetable review (but you can read part 1 and part 2). Yet, I started planning for some regenerative gardening this spring months ago! The months this frigid winter passed slowly and quickly all at once. I have wonderful news, at the end of it all: I’ve got my first client! He has me planning a multi-year garden installation, complete with annuals, perennials, and trees. With his permission, I am writing about my garden plans for him, and I will try to write about my own later. We aim to construct and plant the bed this spring. However, it is possible we will miss the timeline for spring planting, and only be able to do fall crops this year. We are planning on two garden beds, one with corn, squash, melons, and beans, and the other with peppers, potatoes, tomato, German chamomile, and Mexican mint marigold.

    The role of the “milpa,” or “three sisters,” in regenerative gardening

    I am planning on building a milpa, also known as “three sisters agriculture,” in my friend’s garden. This is a highly intelligent agriculture strategy designed by Native American people, which optimizes the harvest of three mutually beneficial crops: corn, squash, and beans. The catch is that a milpa cannot be machine harvested. Thus, it is not suitable for mass-scale industrial agriculture. “It takes five people four days to pick the beans and harvest the maize” (Landzettel, 2026).

    However, it is a sustainable and productive system that deserves a resurgence. The milpa has high value for food security gardening, because it increases the odds of survival of your crops under harsh conditions.

    Pungo Creek Butcher Dent Corn seed packet from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. The seed packet has illustrations of yellow, orange, and red cobs of corn.

    Pungo Creek Butcher Dent Corn seed packet from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

    In the milpa, each plant plays a role. The beans “fix” nitrogen from the air into the soil, where they and other plants use it as a macronutrient. The corn provides a pole for the beans to climb, and the squash shades the soil and reduces water evaporation with its large leaves (Landzettel, 2026;Kruse-Peeples & Marinaro 2016). These mutually beneficial interactions are what make the milpa so wildly resilient!

    A milpa can be built in multiple styles, using mounds or rows. Kruse-Peeples & Marinaro (2016) report that the traditional Iroquoian way to build a milpa is by making mounds, which we will emulate.

    There are also “other sisters” important to southwestern Native cultures, which can be grown in a milpa (Kruse-Peeples & Marinaro, 2016). For example, we will grow melons alongside our squash.

    Using lasagna mulching to build soil

    No-till and low-till techniques are important in regenerative gardening. We will use modified lasagna mulching to create two beds with 9 mounds each, in a square array. Lasagna mulching is layering carbon-rich and nitrogen-rich composting materials on top of existing soil (Rauter & Sherp, 2025). For our purposes, we will use finished compost between cardboard layers to create a mound scaffold. On top of this we will add a layer of coir-compost mixture so we can (hopefully) plant this year. We will also be inoculating the cardboard with oyster mushroom grain spawn to break down the cardboard more efficiently, and we will get a crop of lovely gourmet mushrooms out of it as well!

    Oyster mushroom grain spawn in a quart sized wide mouth mason jar. White oyster mushroom mycelium grows as a fuzz over rye grains.

    Oyster mushroom grain spawn

    Bibliography

    Landzettel, M. (2026, February 13). Milpa. How an Ancient Farming System Helps Small Farmers in Today’s Mexico. Slow Food. https://www.slowfood.com/blog-and-news/milpa-ancient-farming-system-mexico/

    Kruse-Peeples, M. & Marinaro, L. (2016, May 27). How to Grow a Three Sisters Garden. Native Seeds/SEARCH. Native Seeds/SEARCH. https://www.nativeseeds.org/blogs/blog-news/how-to-grow-a-three-sisters-garden

    Rauter, S. & Sherp, L. (2025). Sheet mulching and lasagna composting with cardboard. Oregon State University Extension Service. https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/em-9559-sheet-mulching-lasagna-composting-cardboard

  • Mycology updates

    I went on an accidental mushroom foraging expedition on some recent walks through the woods. I also have a brief update on my Chicken of the Woods experiments.

    COTW update

    Mold contaminated my COTW grow bag and it did not form a full fruit unfortunately. Still, I learned something very important: shocking the mycelium with cold water causes growth through the filter.

    DIY home made liquid culture for mushroom cultivation. A mason jar filled with home made mushroom liquid culture made of corn syrup and water. It is golden in color and has chunks of solid agar in it and mycelium growing in it in a hazy clump.
    DIY home made potato starch dextrose agar for growing mushrooms. A mason jar shown from the bottom containing potato starch dextrose agar with an agar wedge transfer on it. Mycelium grows from the wedge transfer out into the fresh agar.

    I have successfully grown chicken of the woods mycelium on my homemade potato starch dextrose agar jars (recipe). I also successfully made my own liquid culture using corn syrup and grew chicken of the woods mycelium in that. The mycelium is not very picky, it is just difficult to get it to fruit.

    Accidental Foraging Expedition

    I was walking in the woods recently, and I found three edible wild mushrooms! Mushroom foraging is great fun, but I am always more successful when I am not trying! I found lion’s mane, pinkish-white oyster mushrooms growing on a beech log, and some hairy-topped brown woodear mushrooms.

    Riparian woodland ecosystem in Eastern North America. This is a good mushroom foraging location. If you are asking "where to forage for mushrooms" the answer is a place like this. Similar habitats occur in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and southern New York state.

    The exact species of each is uncertain at the moment, because oysters, woodears, and lion’s mane have many species. However, all are generally edible.

    Oyster mushroom foraging. Mushroom foraging. Foraging in the woods. Oyster mushrooms growing on a hardwood beech log. Found in Rockville, Maryland, USA. Eastern North American Woodland ecosystem.

    I identified the oyster mushrooms by color (whitish/blush pink surface and white flesh), decurrent gills running partway down the stem, gregarious (grouped) shelf growing habit, and white spore print (Field Guide to Common Macrofungi, Oyster Mushroom ID Guide, Oyster Mushroom Description).

    Mushroom foraging. Foraging wood ear mushrooms. Foraging in the forests of Eastern North America. Wood ear mushrooms growing on a log in a forest in Eastern North America. They are dark brown with a smooth underside and velvet like top. Foraged in Rockville, Maryland, USA.

    I identified the woodears (AKA Tree Ears, Auricularia species) by shape (cup-like shelves), texture (rubbery flesh, tomentose/hairy upper surface, smooth underside), color (dark brown), and white spore print (Tree Ear Description, Auricularia Wikipedia)

    Mushroom foraging. Foraging lions mane mushrooms. Foraging in Eastern North American woodlands. A lion's mane mushroom growing on a log in a forest. It is white and spherical or circular with pointy spikes or teeth.

    Lion’s mane (AKA Satyr’s Beard, Bearded Tooth) is extremely easy to identify, at least at the genus level. Hercium species tend to have spiky, icicle looking “teeth.” This one was white and very dense and spherical. The spore print was white (Satyr’s Beard Description, Bearded Tooth ID)

    Foraged forest product. Foraged lions mane. A lions mane mushroom in hand, forager is wearing flannel, background is the asphalt of a road with some painted lines.

    All of the mushrooms I found are saprotrophic (grow on decaying things) instead of mycorrhizal (grow in a complex relationship with trees). They are wood lovers, although oysters will grow on almost anything.

    Because I took spore prints (spore print how-to) to help with identification, I can now grow these in captivity!