Winter is a time for slowing down

Many farmers slow down in the winter, but they don’t stop. Growing up on a dairy farm, where the work never stops, we still slowed in the winter. At Hudson Valley Mushrooms, we’ve spent our winter planning for our next grow season and taking the time to continue learning.
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New York State recently required all sellers of wild mushrooms to be licensed. This winter forest farmer Tamara took the certification course with Mushroom Mountain and became officially licensed. Mushroom Mountain is currently the only place to receive this certification in the country. As part of this certification Hudson Valley Mushrooms plans to offer a wider variety of mushrooms to our CSA members and customers. This winter we’ve also taken many webinars on CSA management and conferences including the Thriving Farmer Summit. We also continue to take part in webinars offered by the Cornell Small Farm Program. Their Specialty Mushroom Project offers free monthly webinars on mushroom growing—we’ve included two of the upcoming events below. Sign up if you can.

In December we marketed and sold our inoculated logs for the holidays. Along with their inoculated log, each customer received a set of our beautifully designed recipe cards and log care instructions. So grateful to all who purchased—please be sure to care for your log and happy fruiting. You can still buy individual logs or for those who are ready to set up their own mushroom operation, we are here to help with our Grow at Home packages.
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January has been all about planning for 2021. We’ve ordered our 2021 set of bolts. Our bolts (also known as a log) will mostly consist of oak and will be harvested locally in Putnam County this February—all bolts will be 36 – 40” long and 4” – 8” in diameter. After they are cut, our bolts will rest for a month and we’ll start inoculation in March—more on that soon! We’ve also been planning our CSA and having conversations with other farms to include our shiitakes as an add-on for 2021. We’ll have more details on all this soon.