Plumeria, Great! I can send you some of each of golden yellow oyster and phoenix oyster mushroom for your 30 plants right away. These are pure culture of mushroom, not just spore, so it's very easy to grow and quite expensive to buy. Have to check if I have other kinds ready. Have you grown edible mushroom before? What kind of substrate/place you want to grow them in (in logs/stumps or in sawdust/wood chips/straw/paper/coffee ground and compost, etc). That way I know which kind is good for you. Please email me directy it will be easier. Or leave me your email address. Thanks!

The best I can find out about this product is that it is not a soil but a soilless mix of material. While OMRI certified it does have restrictions. " Kellogg Garden Organics Raised Bed & Potting Mix Crop Fertilizers and Soil Amendments Fertilizers, Blended with micronutrients Fertilizers, Blended with uncomposted manure Allowed With Restrictions Kellogg Garden Products Kellogg Garden Organics Raised Bed & Potting Mix Restriction: May be used only in cases where soil or plant nutrient deficiency for the synthetic micronutrients being applied is documented by soil or tissue testing. May be (i) applied to land used for a crop not intended for human consumption; (ii) incorporated into the soil not less than 120 days prior to the harvest of a product whose edible portion has direct contact with the soil surface or soil particles; or (iii) incorporated into the soil not less than 90 days prior to the harvest of a product whose edible portion does not have direct contact with the soil surface or soil particles. Material: Fertilizers, Blended with micronutrients Fertilizers, Blended with uncomposted manure Organic: false Not for use in the U.S.: false Related Organization(s): Kellogg Garden Products" What I see is that this should be mixed with soil, not used alone.

I have a 1.25 acre lot and have been creating hundreds if not thousands of square feet of new garden beds via an assortment of lasagne and smothering schemes since the fall of 06. I have also dug many more hundreds by hand, before I discovered lasagne (still dig sometimes). I've also had major tree work done in the yard (Fall 05 and Fall 07) and have two BIG piles of wood chips, so I've worked with lots of chips. Tell your friend you would love some wood chips. Have him dump them in a pile on your lot to age for at least 6 months, up to 2 or 3 years is better. Think carefully about where you want them dumped, because they are unsightly, but it must be convenient to a large dump truck and to you with your wheel barrow. When they've age in a pile they stay nice and moist, start to break down a bit, turn darker, and will make an attractive mulch for your garden and especially pathways - once your beds are defined. Personally I find them a pain to garden around before that. Because I transplant stuff around A LOT, they get in the way, get mixed in soil, and have to be neatened again. They also break down very sloooooowly. The trees in your picnic area are probably maples. Gorgeous trees, but notorious for thirsty surface roots that dry out the soil and they are difficult to grow under. Go ahead and use the fresh chips in your area under the trees - no cardboard or plastic necessary, but you could lay down cardboard for additional weed suppression. For the future garden beds, definitely DO NOT USE black plastic or landscape fabric. I tried both years ago to suppress weeds and ditto the problems already outlined on this thread. They are nothing but a future headache. Also, part of the way lasagne works is that the worms, other soil critters, and the freezing/thawing that occurs in cold climates help to work the decomposing lasagne bed into the existing soil. For the new beds, the easiest albeit slowest way to go is lasagne. I always start with a paper layer. Newspapers work, but they are a bit of pain - they blow around easily, are fussy to spread, and when they break down, they break into peices which can become visible with shallow lasagne beds. Cardboard is easier to spread and tidier. I collect cardboard from everywhere, and it's pretty easy to find. Pizza boxes work great too. Remove all plastic tape and plastic labels and put the brown side up - looks prettier if part of the cardboard pokes through the mulch. If you have decent topsoil already, you don't need a deep lasagne bed! I have successfully killed weeds with two inches of organic matter. My pathways through the gardens are usually terribly weedy by the time I've gotten around to mulching them. I use cardboard and just enough wood chips to cover the cardboard. Voila! Sorry for the novella, but what can I say, I'm addicted to gardening, and to garden you need garden beds! Hehe. Here's some pics. Lasagne bed in process - first layer cardboard, next coffee grounds and kitchen scraps, then topped with leaves. This one will sit for about 1 year. Garden path being mulched. Note that this is crabgrass growing in the path. Important note - don't wait until your crabgrass has gotten big and gone to seed. I had to mow and trim the edges because of all shoots going out sideways with lots of seedheads! Laid down cardboard - Then aged wood chips -

Shiitakes are also supposed to like coffee grounds. I'm planning to give it a try soon; I got the idea from seeing shiitake kits to which you're supposed to add your daily grounds. (I'd like to try on a larger and more cost-effective scale with spawn and the grounds I can get from the local coffee shop.) A company in my area called BTTR Ventures does a good business growing both oyster & shiitake mushrooms in coffee grounds (at least, I *think* they're still growing mushrooms as well as the grow-your-own kits that are their latest big thing). I've yet to try doing this myself (just came to poke around the forums and see where people recommend ordering spawn), so I don't know how easy it is. From the web, it certainly seems that oysters are the most popular to grow this way, which might indicate that they're the easiest. I could generalize from there and speculate that since shiitakes usually like a wood substrate, other mushrooms that like a wood substrate might also like a coffee ground substrate, but I don't know--might be a good starting idea for research, though.