Mushrooms

Last year some time I decided that growing mushrooms sounded like a fun hobby. Some permaculture site I was looking at for some reason was advertising a "home mushroom growing course", and I thought:

"Yes! I shall learn the permaculture way to grow mushrooms. That sounds like a good use of my time."

It wasn't.

If you are thinking about growing mushrooms, and wondering if forking out $400 for a fancy permaculture course means you'll have the best grounding in mushroom growing, I have this piece of advice for you:

Don't.

Your introduction to mushroom growing should involve a pre-prepared pack and short course that, all together, costs around $100 max. 

This is because growing mushrooms is more like brewing beer than growing vegetables, and you can easily blow out any budget (monetary or time) you might think you're setting for yourself, and then discover that you actually find it all a bit too much work, really, and you don't want to do it.

I just want to say that mushrooms are surprisingly hard work.

Especially if you happen to be a "stick it in the dirt and see what happens" kind of gardener, as I am.

Even the easiest, quick-and-dirty method of growing mushrooms takes more time and attention than any of the other edible things I have growing about the place, every step is fraught with peril, I never know if I've reached a point where I've failed or if I need to hold on for another few days (or if there's something else I should be doing with the slab of fungus festering in my bathroom right now)...

And then when you actually get the mushrooms, you have to find a way to eat them relatively soon or it's all for nothing. I'm currently in a "who has time to cook? I'll just make a sandwich" phase of my existence, and in the meantime I have these huge clusters of mushrooms that may be all I have to show for all the money and effort I've poured into this misguided project.

Sure, in theory I could preserve them - but if I currently can't get my act together to make a simple pasta dish, the odds that I'll work out how to sterilize a jar and make a suitable brine are slim to none.

I should have known I wouldn't get around to eating them in good time. After all, it's not long ago that I grew a bunch of sweet potatoes the size of soccer balls* because I just couldn't be bothered harvesting them, and I figured they'd be safe enough in the ground. 

They've been in my pantry for a couple of months now. I should probably do something about them...

*Size 3 soccer balls, but soccer balls nonetheless

I hate my brain

I hate my brain.

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

Is it too much to ask for a working memory that works just enough for me to feed myself?

Some days, all I want from my stupid, idiotic brain is to let me get my food into the fridge. To somehow, just keep track of the fact that this thing that I bought to eat for lunch tomorrow – and am *really* looking forward to eating – is not yet in the fridge.

But my stupid brain is no longer satisfied with forgetting what is in my bag (or that I even have a bag) by the time I get it from the car into the house. Oh, no. It’s now graduated on to letting me forget what’s in it as I unpack it. I successfully get to the fridge. I successfully unpack what I think is everything in the bag. I look at that bag over and over again that night and the next morning and think, “No, I actually remembered – I successfully put my cold stuff in the fridge. I’m sure of it.”

But NO! The thing I most wanted to eat is, in fact, still in the bag. I somehow looked directly at it while taking out the item next to it, and managed to forget it was there. It can be over a day before, I discover it – still in the bag and completely ruined.

And yes, if I just tidied the bag away after I unpacked it, I probably wouldn’t have this problem. Instead I’d have the other problem – the one where I put the item on the bench in my direct line of sight and forget it exists. Or where I find the bag a week later and realise there’s still something in it, even though I swore it was empty when I packed it away.

And this crap just keeps happening. Over and over and over again. All these quirky, “oh, ho ho, Sharon has such a silly memory” stories are funny, until you actually are Sharon and you can’t rely on your brain to let you function.

I can’t rely on my memory. I can’t rely on my perception. I can’t rely on my ability to look in a bag and see what’s there, or look at something I’ve forgotten and remember that I’ve forgotten it. Such a simple thing – to look at something and say “oh, yeah, I needed to do something with that” – that’s all I want, and I don’t have it.

I can’t rely on my brain. For anything. And that’s not funny so much as alarming. I live in constant fear that I’ve forgotten something important (like locking my door or turning something flammable off), and I’m completely incapable of saying “Oh, no, now that I’m thinking about it, I do have a reliable recollection of doing XYZ.” Because I could very well remember doing XYZ, but that doesn’t mean I actually did it.

God, I hate my brain.