Michigan Camp Meeting 2025: He Must Increase

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Health and Harvest: Grow Your Own Nutrient-Dense Food

Melissa Clayton

01 Cultivating and Using Garlic and Herbs

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camping, held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

So I'm Melissa Clayton, as Mike already introduced, and Harley, this is my sister.

He unfortunately was unable to make it, so Harley decided to step in.

Do you wanna just tell us a little bit about yourself, Harley?

And just tell us who you are, maybe about what year you are in school, and a little bit about what you do on my farm, and then you could also talk about what you do for Cedar Lake growers here in the greenhouse.

So as Shirdi said, my name is Harley, and I'm her younger sister, the youngest of 4.

I go to GLAW, and this would be my sophomore year next year.

I've been doing it for a couple of years now, mostly because my mom forced me.

And then she started paying me, so I guess I'll stick around.

My job title is anything that needs to be done.

Most years I'm planting, but since I started school I can't help plant.

So I have here, this is a picture of my family.

We're not this orange, it's the projector.

If you do know him, feel free to call him and harass him about not being here.

Gavin will be 9 next month and Noah is 6.

We started in 2017 and we planted 25 pounds of garlic and since then we have just been reinvesting all of our profits from everything back into the farm and growing to where we are today.

This year we're growing about an acre and a half of garlic.

We also grow herbs and we make seasonings with our garlic and our herb blends.

We grow microgreens for markets and for some restaurants, and we grow shiitake mushrooms as well.

So before I get too deep into this, I just kind of want to get a little feel for what you guys do, kind of what you're looking for in the presentation.

If you're not comfortable answering questions, don't.

But is there anyone here who is kind of looking to their homesteading or farming and looking to make money off of what they're doing?

And then I'm assuming everyone else kind of falls into a home gardener category.

So the in-depth garlic information can be a lot.

I'm gonna kind of cater it to the home gardener and not get into super depth and then I'm gonna leave a lot of time at the end, hopefully, for some questions.

And feel free to ask me any kinds of questions.

It can be anything gardening, homesteading.

I have been gardening most of my life, really all, since I was like that, I was in the garden.

And Mike is here too somewhere and he can help us answer questions as well.

So yeah well with that we'll just get started.

So aside from all there's a lot of health benefits to garlic.

Garlic has a sulfur component in it called allicin, and that allicin is where you're really going to get your health benefits.

And here in Michigan, I'm going to talk about the types of garlic you can grow, but the type of garlic you would grow here is called hardneck garlic, and hardneck garlic specifically has significantly more health benefits than the softneck garlic that you would find in the grocery store.

So a really good reason to grow your own garlic is is the health benefit.

It also saves you money because if you're buying local garlic, if you've done it, you know it can be quite expensive.

Maybe not an acre and a half of it, but if you're growing a family size plot, It's fairly low maintenance.

We already talked about the health benefits.

And then you're reducing your carbon footprint.

A lot of your grocery store garlic is imported either from China or some of it from California.

We do grow a lot of garlic in California as well.

But the closer your food is to home, the better it is for you and the better it is for the environment.

So I want to talk just a few minutes about types of garlic.

I kind of alluded to this already, but there's soft neck garlic and hard neck garlic.

So soft neck, all garlic started out as hard neck and it has kind of been bred to be softneck garlic because softneck garlic is easier to mechanize.

Whereas hardneck garlic, there's now starting to be some ways to mechanize it, but it has largely been a crop that is planted and harvested by hand.

So your softneck garlic is probably what you're familiar with, where you you open it up and there's layer after layer of cloves and they're small.

You'll see there's a hard stem in the middle of each garlic plant and then there's a layer, usually 1, sometimes 2 layers of cloves around that hard, it's a hard woody stem.

And then within the hardnecks, there's rock and bull, purple stripe, and porcelain.

So I'm just going to tell you if you are a home grower, I highly recommend a hardneck porcelain variety for you.

Music and Georgian Fire are some of the most common.

You're looking at very large cloves and just a good flavor.

Alright, so where would you get garlic seed?

I highly recommend not ordering garlic seed from a catalog.

The first thing is garlic should be planted in the fall, not in the spring.

And so when you're ordering your seeds and they have garlic in there, can you plant it?

But you're never going to get the same size and the same quality as garlic that's planted in the fall.

So I highly recommend looking for someone in your region who grows hardneck garlic.

Yeah, I will have my contact information at the end.

And then go to farmers markets and find a farmer.

The closer you can get it to your home, the better it's going to grow because your seeds take time to adapt to your environment and so if you can find it from a neighbor or a farmer in your community, they're going to have the environment the closest to what you have and you're going to have the best results.

The other thing to look for is that there are not a lot of issues with garlic, not a lot of pests, most things don't like it, not a lot of diseases, but there are a few and if you get them it's really bad.

But a lot of growers will test their seed.

So you can ask if you're looking to grow a large amount of garlic, garlic seed can be very pricey.

And so I'll get more into saving seeds and creating your own stock later, but if you're just starting out, you may want to ask, have you ever tested your garlic?

What you're looking for, there's something called garlic bloat nematode.

That's really your biggest problem and a lot of farmers will send in samples of garlic just to test for it to make sure that they don't have it.

02 Mushroom Production

You're about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2025 Michigan Conference Camp, held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

So if you weren't here yesterday, again, my name is Melissa.

My husband, Chet, he's an ER nurse and a farmer.

It's just outside of Charlevoix, if you know where Charlevoix is, about an hour north of Traverse City.

But today we are going to talk about shiitake mushrooms.

I chose a log that didn't have a lot of fruit on it to bring as a demonstration because it had to travel a long ways and go through a lot to get here.

These mushrooms are a little bit dried out, but at least it's something, right?

They are native to East Asia, specifically Japan and China, but they're fairly simple to cultivate and they can be grown in logs the way we're growing them and the way I'm gonna teach you to grow them.

They can also be grown in a substrate like a soda substrate in bags.

I don't have any experience growing that way.

My preference is to grow them in logs because they have more nutrients this way.

This is the natural way that they would grow and my personal opinion is that they taste better because they're grown the way they naturally grow.

So we are going to just quickly kind of go through why grow shiitake, choosing your logs, when to harvest your log, how to do it, and then for those of you who are interested, I only have about 12 tools so we can team up and if we can just get these logs knocked out.

These are the logs for Mike, for the Cedar Lake growers.

So we're kind of double teaming it here and we're getting some hands-on experience and helping the greenhouse out a little bit.

I'm obviously not a medical professional but these are these are some of the mostly agreed-upon benefits of mushrooms.

So they boost your immune system by boosting your white blood cell production.

They can help fight cancer because of a high antioxidant properties.

They're good sources of B vitamins, vitamin D, magnesium, fiber.

They can help improve gut health and reduce inflammation.

So before we get started too much, I wanted to give some helpful terminology.

All of this is in the e-book too, if you are interested in all of these things.

So spores, this is kind of like the seeds, but in mushrooms it's not called seeds, it's called spores.

And this is what your mushrooms grow from.

So when we order our spawn, it's in sawdust, but you can see kind of the spores are already growing and mycelium, if I can break it apart without, are those thread-like structures that you can kind of see running through the substrate.

So we have spores, spawn, mycelium, yeah, for sure, substrate.

So for right now, it's sawdust, but when we plant it into the log, then your log would be your substrate.

Colonization is the process of this mycelium working its way through the log.

And when we plant our seeds, our spawn, into the mushroom log, that process is called inoculation.

So if I use those terms, I just wanted you to be a little bit familiar with them.

So we're going to talk about when to plant, how to choose your logs, how to inoculate logs, how to care for your logs, possible problems, and then what you can do with these mushrooms.

Yes, but it has to be done in a sterile environment There's some pretty specific conditions in order to make sure that you're getting the right spawn growing I don't have any experience doing it.

We buy all of our spawn from a company called Field and Forest, and it comes in bags like this, all ready for us.

We keep it in the fridge until we're ready to plant it.

There's also a company called North Spore that sells similar products.

I've never used them, but I hear that they're good.

Okay, so the first thing you have to do if you're going to plant mushrooms is you have to harvest logs.

The best time to do this is to harvest your logs is late fall or early, between late fall and early spring, because you don't want your tree with sap actively flowing through the tree.

You want it to be in a dormant stage because your mushrooms are going to feed off of the log, but the sugars in the tree, and because the tree itself can produce chemicals that will kill the spawn if it's not harvested at the correct time.

So if you live in Michigan, you're looking for logs that have been harvested between November and March.

And then you would want to inoculate 2 to 6 weeks after cutting the logs for best results.

So for example, we had, our neighbors had a logger.

These are the size logs that we're using.

So we went in, in the winter, and pulled all the logs.

They sat, piled up all winter, and then early spring we inoculated the logs.

So this is, this picture is from Field and Forest.

They have a tremendous amount of resources about growing any kind of mushrooms you can imagine.

But this is basically explaining when you would want to harvest your logs, because again, you're harvesting live trees.

You don't want to harvest trees that are already dead, because you run a risk that there's already other fungus growing in that mushroom, and shiitakes don't compete well.

So in Michigan, you're looking at oaks and maples are the types of trees that handle it well.

There are some others, but those are your most common trees.

Again, Field and Forest has a great reference for all the different types of trees, but oaks and maples do really well.

If you don't have, so how we do it on our property is we manage our woods.

We have about 20 acres of maples and we just go through in places that trees are growing really close together where they're never going to fill out.

We harvest the smaller ones so that the other trees can grow.

Or, we look for loggers who are cutting trees in the late fall and early spring, and then we ask if we can go in and clean up after them and take their limbs.

Okay, then you have to choose the mushroom variety because there's actually lots of different kinds of shiitakes.

Well, my personal opinion is they all taste pretty much the same.

Some of them look a little bit different than others, but how they produce is different.

So there's cold weather strains that will produce more in cold weather.

There's warm weather strains, and then there's wide range strains.

So on our farm, we grow both warm weather strains and we grow mostly wide range strains.

The wide range will produce fruit in cooler weather and in warmer weather.

So WR46 has been a really reliable producer for us.

There's a warm weather strain called night velvet that we grow as well and that 1 does produce fruit but typically it won't produce well until July, late July, early August.

So if you're looking for a really reliable producer for a longer season, your wide range strains are the best option for you.

So the first thing is you're going to be drilling holes in your logs.

So you've cut your logs early spring, before the sap is flowing.

03 Mighty Microgreens

As Mike already introduced, I'm Melissa Clayton, my husband Chet.

I actually have 2 boys, but I have a sister.

She works for me on my farm and she had the privilege of working with Cedar Lake growers this year while she was at GLAW.

So I don't know if she would appreciate she's sitting in the loft being counted as 1 of my kids or not but it works.

My husband he works in the ER as a house supervisor and so he was supposed to make it and the schedule got really jumbled up and there's only a few people that can do his job so It just didn't work out this time.

Alright, so this is our farm, Hillside Harvest.

Garlic was the crop that we got started with.

We make seasonings from our garlic and the herbs that we grow.

So those are our 3 cash crops, if you would say, for our farm.

We sell at 3 to 4 farmers markets throughout the summer and we do have an online shop for a lot of our seasonings as well.

So today we're talking about microgreens.

These microgreens, they've fared pretty well.

I brought them down with me Saturday morning and they've just been living outside right in front of our camper for the week.

They've traveled a long ways to be here, but that's fun.

So we're going to talk about why microgreens are such a great crop.

We're going to talk about how to choose what seeds to grow, what the supplies you need are, oh, deciding on seeds, deciding on how you're going to grow it, how you're going to use lighting.

I'm going to show you how we do it and then I'll take some questions.

So this is, these are some of our microgreens.

We grow a mix and I'll talk about the mix.

We just do 3 things, well 4 things for market.

We have 2 mixes, a spicy mix and a not spicy mix.

This is amaranth, which it kind of tastes like grass.

So we mostly grow it because people really like the color, the red.

I guess we also do peas and sunflowers sometimes too.

So you may be familiar with sprouts or probably all of you are familiar with microgreens at this point.

Microgreens are different than sprouts because they're grown in soil.

So especially worth noting if you live in Michigan, Michigan law allows you to sell microgreens in a farmer's market.

It does not allow you to sell sprouts because when you're growing things with water there can be additional concerns of E.

Whereas microgreens can be grown hydroponically but it's a bit more common practice to grow them in soil, which is how I'm going to teach you to do it today.

These were planted, let's see, today's Wednesday, these were planted about a week ago and these are ready for harvest.

I would harvest these in the next 2 to 3 days at the latest.

So they grow really fast, they're nutrient packed, and you can grow them year round.

We eat microgreens all the time, my kids love them.

I have 1 that will just eat them like a salad.

And it doesn't require any gardening space.

These can be grown in a window, on your kitchen counter, in your basement, wherever you want to grow.

So they really are a quick, easy way to have fresh greens all the time, and it's much more affordable to grow your own versus to try and purchase microgreens.

So these are some of the plants that are commonly grown as microgreens.

There's kale, broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, basil, peas, sunflowers, arugula, radishes, fennel, celery, mustard, alfalfa, spinach, amaranth.

These are radishes here and we grow these radishes.

A lot of the microgreens taste almost exactly or at least very similar to what their full-grown vegetable would taste like.

So the radishes are fun again because of the color.

They really add, especially fancy restaurants like the microgreens, with the color because it just makes the dishes pop.

All right, I don't know if you can see this or not.

Microgreens are a very concentrated form of the nutrients that would be in whatever that full grown vegetable is.

And so they all have different health benefits compared to, like peas are going to have the same health benefits as full-grown peas.

The advantage of eating them in microgreens is that it's a very concentrated form.

And this is just a sample of a few of them.

I actually asked chatGPT, it's an AI, to make this chart for me.

So there are a lot of health benefits to growing your microgreens.

All right, so when you're trying to decide, well, which microgreens should I grow, There's a few things that you want to think about.

If you want a quick harvest, you want something that's going to be ready very soon, then you would want a fast-growing variety like peas, radishes, broccoli, mustard, or arugula.

They're going to be ready 7 to 10 days after you plant them.

If you want something some there's some slower growing crops like basil, basil can take 14 to 21 days and sometimes even longer if it doesn't if it's not warm enough.

So that's 1 thing to consider is how long.

I'll show you how to find out how long each thing is gonna take.

Consider how do you think you're gonna use these microgreens?

What's something that you or your family would enjoy or maybe not enjoy.

Series

Health and Harvest: Grow Your Own Nutrient-Dense Food

04 Extend your Growing Season

Transcript

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