September 24, 2000

Firstly it is important to understand that this is no ordinary form of compost. This stuff has, in the modern idiom, "attitude". It is the gardeners "Holy Grail" and reported (by me) to be used by Cleopatra as a preparatory rubbing stuff before bathing in asses milk. What she smelled like after the asses milk and mushroom compost makes the bind moggle! But I digress... mushroom compost (MC), the raw product, is produced from seed. Really! You sow barley seed in large fields and after time passes it grows, flowers and produces barley stalks and grain. These commodities are of equal importance. The grain is harvested, milled, mixed with other stuff and sold as stock feed. The stalks are also harvested (at the same time as the grain), bundled up and stored for later use. Later the straw is used as litter, that is it is littered all over the floor of stables, wherein dwelleth horses.

Ah horses! Yes, the real engines to the mushroom compost story. Horses are kept in their thousands in close confinement in order to produce the first stage of spent mushroom compost. They eat the barley grain (though usually oats), process it and deposit it carefully and with equinenimity (couldn't resist it, sorry) on the straw litter in the stables. Now, if this all sounds like horse shit to you then you are on the right track! Once the horses have finished sitting on the straw, some very kind, and very poorly paid people, remove the straw and the horsy additives (raw horse muck, or RHM) onto a lorry (quaint English word for a truck) and transport it to a mushroom farm.

At the M (International shorthand for mushroom farm) the RHM is composted in large heaps. Once the interior of the stacks of RHM reach temperatures sufficient to kill all known forms of life, the MF (mushroom farmer) fiendishly turns them inside out. This of course kills all unknown forms of life too... and results in MC. The sterile MC (no, no, not a vasectomised compere) is then prepared in any one of a number of different ways (bedded and lined with clay, stacked in trays etc), impregnated with MS (mushroom spawn) and left in the dark (this is why it is sometimes referred to as "The Electorate").

Time passes.. mushrooms grow, are harvested and sold. Now the mushroom is a delicacy enjoyed by folk from all walks of life, stations and classes, from the very incredibly poor (VIPs) to the theoretically rather flush (The Royal Family). It matters not one iota, not a skerrick nor even a tad, who buys the confounded mushrooms because they are merely a by-product in the wondrous adventure towards the production of gardeners gold.. SMC (Spent Mushroom Compost). Their job was merely to assist in the extraction of heat.

It may seem cruel to use a poor fungus in this way, locking it up in a musty room devoid of light, cutting off it's fruiting bodies before adolescence corrupts it, and then, as a final insult simply discarding it and throwing it on the garden but wait! Watch the garden. You will have luscious growth, beautiful leaf and flower colour, healthy plants and, if you are lucky and creep out quietly, on full moon, in August, and look very closely, you may just see the beginnings of next weeks breakfast too.

Footnote:

MC (mushroom compost) is very good in it's own right, after all it grows excellent mushrooms, so why spend it? It is of course spent to buy straw for the stables!

Cheers

Terry Dowdeswell