We didn’t grow the shiitakes, but our friends Al and Christl did.
Christl, who grew up in a community in southern Germany where bartering was common practice, called a couple of days ago to make a deal. She offered to trade me five different tomato plants, which she was nurturing to viability in the safety of her greenhouse, for a peck of clams.
Deal! Kevin and I were all over it. We went out, harvested the clams, and took them over. The tomatoes weren’t ready to be adopted yet, but Crystal gave me a flat of six kale seedlings as a bonus. I was delighted. We had excellent luck with kale last year, and were planning to grow it again.
But that wasn’t all. Al showed me the shiitake set-up he was using our logs for (we had previously bartered oak logs for blackberry bushes), and sliced me off a few samples of a previous year’s growth. Those mushrooms, combined with vegetables we had in the house and about a quarter-pound of bison leftover from bison burgers, made an excellent stir-fry.
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