top of page

Root of Renewal: Forest Regeneration, Mushroom Cultivation, and Rethinking Regenerative Agriculture

Rishona Hines

By Rishona Hines


The author with maitake mushroom
The author with maitake mushroom

We should never exhaust the possibility of learning something new each time we observe the world around us. This applies to every aspect of life, as there is always more to learn and understand. 


Nature herself, embodied by Bucky, the squirrel, taught me this invaluable lesson. Bucky, a gray and white nut muncher, became one of my greatest forest teachers, revealing the power of observation in agroforestry and land stewardship and showing me how not to be confined by the human tendency to think we fully understand the complexities of forest ecosystems.


My relationship with Bucky began during the pandemic on an ¼ acre backyard garden plot in Town Plot, Waterbury, CT, where my urban gardening journey took root over 20 years ago. Initially, I saw Bucky as a pest, digging up bulbs and stealing seeds and nuts I had meticulously seeded and transplanted in garden beds inoculated with Red Wine Cap (Stropharia rugosoannulata) wood chips. They are a great outdoor-loving mushroom to co-plant in and around vegetable gardens. Red Wine Caps improve organic matter in the soil and create nutrient-dense garden beds in our post-industrial urban and rural environments. Wine cap mycelium penetrates deep into the soil layers, giving access to more nutrients like phosphorus and carbon, improving soil aeration, and contributing significantly to soil bioremediation.


From another perspective, Bucky was a guerilla gardener, a genius in forestry, and a gluttonous optimist who imparted lessons in patience, perseverance, and kinship that are repeatedly demonstrated in nature and the ecosystems we share. 


During the pandemic, I embarked on a regenerative agroforestry project on our family Christmas tree farm and slowly began to re-imagine what regenerative agriculture could look like. I envisioned a system where native tree seedlings could be planted in the understory of decaying conifer while inoculating the wood with fast-growing mushrooms trained to break down Christmas trees. Our two-fold goal was to rebuild soils exposed to monoculture forest-agriculture and produce food and medicine for the Greater Waterbury region, which faces significant food insecurity. I used our Waterbury garden as a nursery for tree seedlings and for spawn production to inoculate ½ an acre of Christmas trees with oyster and turkey tail mushrooms. 


Growing mushrooms in forests is an ancient practice among Indigenous communities and is now recognized in modern agroforestry as a valuable Non-Timber Forest Product (NTFP). Agroforestry, which leverages traditional ecological knowledge, supports forest conservation and fosters a deep sense of stewardship. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel; rather, I aim to address the limitations of conventional agriculture by drawing on research and the lived experiences of agroforestry practitioners from the Northeast and Lower Appalachia, with whom I have directly engaged.


I embarked on my initial regenerative forestry plan by procuring 100 chestnut, walnut, and oak trees by seed. But I quickly worried that Bucky would be delighted to feast on these carefully nurtured hardwood nut seedlings. We decided to use a save-a-heart trap to catch Bucky in action. The next morning, Bucky the squirrel was sitting in our trap, well-fed and looking nervous. We relocated Bucky to our favorite part of the temperate hardwood forests of Woodbury, CT - the site of our ongoing mushroom and forest restoration project - and set him free to have acres and acres of pristine wildlife. We believed Bucky was getting a major upgrade from the urban sprawl of Waterbury, where nearly 10% of all the air pollution in Connecticut comes from one zip code, 06706 - the South End of Waterbury, where Bucky grew up. 


After Bucky moved, we bundled our sacred tree seedlings into the refrigerator for cold stratification, mimicking the cold, wet winter weather that supports optimal nut seed sprouting. When we opened the stored bag of seeds the following spring, only 10 out of 50 seedlings had sprouted. These were transplanted into 5-gallon containers. Meanwhile, to our surprise, hundreds of chestnuts and black walnut seedlings emerged in our garden, which Bucky and other resident squirrels had planted. 


Unbeknownst to us, Bucky was the greatest tree planter ever. The season that Bucky and I coexisted in Waterbury, he planted over 50 seedlings of black walnut in our garden, many of which I replanted in the Woodbury forest. The seedlings we transplanted from the garden had a much better success rate than the ones we cold-stratified, demonstrating my limited perspective of forest regeneration.


Squirrels like Bucky are vital in forest regeneration and mushroom inoculation. Squirrels don't forget where they buried their nuts and they plant more than they need, ensuring some of their supply will sprout into robust and fruitful nut trees for the next generations. Bucky is a mycophagist, an animal that eats and disperses mushrooms and spores through their digestive tract. Many mushrooms require squirrels and other rodents, birds and insects for spore dispersal, like the coveted underground black and white truffles. Squirrels are unrivaled in their ability to disperse seeds and are a significant catalyst in the cycle of forest regeneration. 


Years have passed since that first backyard garden in Waterbury. This season brought some bigger challenges, such as breaking ground on infrastructure, slugs, and shifting weather patterns with heavier rains that significantly set our time-frames to a much slower pace. As I work toward restoring 12 acres of our family’s Christmas tree farm into a perennial hardwood forest mushroom farm, I am blending permaculture theories with Afro-Indigenous land stewardship, agroforestry, and a large dose of perseverance.  


With support from the New CT Farmers Alliance and a Climate Smart Agriculture grant, we aim to build infrastructure for outdoor mushroom production to produce nutrient-dense food that builds soils, feeds people, protects soil structure, locks up carbon and increases our local biodiversity. Our mission is to see if we can reframe how we manage our forests — using mushrooms to break down monocropped forest waste and potentially clean up polluted waterways and reduce agricultural run-off. By changing our perspectives of land, we may view our forests, lands, and backyards as microcosms of a much larger ecosystem that supports all life here on Earth. 


Permaculturist Geoff Lawton once stated that all of the world's problems can be solved in a garden, but I would add that the world's problems can be solved in forest gardens and ocean farms. Our ideas of agriculture, regenerative practices, and even personal consumption are littered with ideas and theories holding us back from real solutions. By repairing our relationship with our local soils and ecosystems, we can become healthier and more resilient members of this plentiful earth. By forging multiplistic relationships with people, places, and communities, we can enhance an area’s ecosystem to become more robust, diverse, and holistic, but not without the ability to listen, observe, and apply new perspectives gained from the intricate web of possibility and abundance that surrounds us. Maybe the greatest lesson I learned from Bucky was an optimistic perspective of land stewardship: that perhaps this dream seed of a mushroom farm on an old Christmas tree forest could become a mutually beneficial act of kindness and restoration that amplifies our love for mushrooms and the forest and the communities we co-exist in. 


“A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees.”

― Amelia Earhart


Rishona (she/they) is exploring relationships with forests and mushrooms on unceded Potatuck land in Woodbury, CT. They can be found on IG @microalliance or via email: microalliance@protonmail.com.

0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


Photo Credit: Whole Systems Design, VT

Contact Us

To contact TNF’s Editor, Elizabeth Gabriel, use the form below. Advertising/billing address: 54 Nedsland Ave. Titusville, NJ 08560-1714

Thanks for submitting!

© 2022 The Natural Farmer. Site Design by Jenn Bassman.

Back to Top

bottom of page