Li-Sun Exotic Mushrooms

NOEL Arrold could have ended up in wheat. Or in the classroom.

As a microbiology student in the late 1960s, he was on his way to a career as a teacher when his professor casually mentioned there was money available for a PhD student who might want to postpone teaching qualifications to pursue something more research-based.

The choice was a diploma of education, wheat diseases . . . or mushrooms.

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Deep in the Southern Highlands, the conditions are perfect for growing exotic mushrooms. An abandoned railway tunnel running beneath Mount Gibraltar consistently offers the cool temperatures and high humidity needed to grow Asian mushrooms. shiitake, shimejii, wood ear and oyster mushrooms (originally found in the mountainous regions of Japan, Korea and China) are now happily growing in a tunnel which replicates their homeland conditions.

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You don’t need a garden to grow your own fruit and veg. If you’re a budding horticulturalist with no space to swing a trowel, here are some creative – and some bizarre – ideas from around the world.

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From the Ecologist, 29 September 2010 by Helen Babbs

By the second half of the 19^th Century, in the colony of New South Wales, the Great Southern Railway that ran from Sydney to Picton had become totally inadequate. Settlement was spreading south beyond Goulburn and valuable natural resources such as marble and sandstone, coal and shale, as well as timber and farm produce had to be carted to Sydney by bullock wagons over difficult terrain on roads that were at times barely passable. For people travelling the journey was tedious, slow, uncomfortable and often downright dangerous.

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