IMG_6910Back in 2008, or maybe 2007, we really can’t remember, Deanna and I had a phone conversation that was the jumping off point for this website. As I recall, we took the common blogger recommendation to stockpile a few posts before we went “live” to make it look like we’d been at this for longer than a minute when the first few people happened to click on us.

Once we had a respectable number of posts, maybe four or five! we started publishing. It was very exciting. We checked Site Meter obsessively those first few days and weeks, and were amazed when we got 100 hits in one day. Imagine! 100 people reading our words! It was a kick.

All that is to say, drumroll, please:

This is our one thousandth post.

Deanna, we should really get together and read them all in a marathon session. How about matching 1000 Posts t-shirts? I’d settle for girls’ lunch out.

That said, our 1000th post can’t be about just that. It should be about something we talked about in that seminal phone conversation: Remember how we both realized we wanted to grow mushrooms? See that fallen giant oak in the picture?

Tired of carefully inoculating logs with mushroom spawn one day (it’s hard work!), I took some leftover spawn and just rubbed it all over that tree trunk. I tucked it in cracks and crevices and basically forgot about it. It was the mushrooming equivalent of a hail mary pass. I really didn’t think any of it would take hold.

IMG_5418I was wrong.

IMG_5424Wonderfully wrong.

IMG_5408Six-and-a-half pounds of fresh Reishi, (Ganoderma lucidum) wrong.

It took two years for the stump to fruit, but it was a very nice surprise.

This blog has been such a nice surprise for us, too. Deanna and I are grateful for all of our readers. Thank you for taking time out of your busy days to read, to comment, to join in as we muddle through, make do, and sometimes just hurl one blindly in the general direction of the end zone.

Deanna, I raise a cup of reishi tea to you in salute and thanks for being there though a thousand posts, a thousand technical glitches, and a thousand (at least) phone calls and strange experiments.

Here’s to another thousand posts!

xoxo

Daisy