Ora et labora. Pray and work.
When the Cistercian community isn’t at prayer, be it with the Hours, Mass, around meals—and sometimes all of the above—the monks are at work. The two other monasteries I’ve stayed at, both Benedictine, supported themselves through education: Glenstal Abbey School in Co. Limerick, Ireland, is an all-boys secondary boarding school, the last of its kind in the country, and Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island is a co-ed, grades 9–12 boarding school. It goes without saying that neither of these, nor my time working in secondary education, prepared me for work on a mushroom farm.
That’s Mepkin Abbey’s labora. The mushroom farm sprung up around 2009 as the abbey phased out its chicken farm, which is reported to have produced something like nine million eggs a year.1 For monastic guests like myself, it is one of a few work possibilities, which may also include work in the gardens, in the kitchen, or elsewhere on the abbey campus. The Monastic Guest Program guide reads:
There is no charge for the Program. Your work with us is regarded as an adequate “exchange” for your living costs while here.
The work day begins around 9 AM, but sometimes sooner. I meet Br. Clement at the golf cart and bike garage next to the laundry building, and we take a cart and drive out to the farm. We drive past the retreat center, the welcome desk and gift shop, the gardens, the columbarium office, and finally a statue of St. Joseph the Worker. Clement tells me most, if not every, Cistercian monastery will have just this statue at the entrance of their places of work. We arrive and park outside what I call the farmhouse.
The farmhouse is home base for all mushroom operations. It’s where the farm manager, William Tanner, has his work desk, and it’s where a lot of important things happen. Here, the mushrooms are refrigerated and packed for shipping; alternatively, they’re refrigerated, trimmed, dried, and bagged for sale and shipping. There’s one refrigerator for the freshly picked mushrooms, a second that stopped working years ago and serves as additional storage, and a third where we store buckets of soon-to-be compost alongside the shiitake logs, which mark the beginning of our shiitake farming.
The true beginning is, of course, washing our hands and putting on the appropriate gloves.
The beginning of the shiitakes’ involvement is with the logs they’ll grow on. These exist compositionally between mulch and a tightly packed Irish peat log, like the ones we used to burn in the stove at Cluain Dara in Wexford. They’re about eighteen inches long and have a diameter similar to the top end of one of those Stanley cups. The logs are packed to the brim with the cream-colored shiitake mycelium, which will grow into the mushrooms themselves. Each batch is made up of seventy-two logs, and these we cart over to the shiitake hangar, their new digs for a week or two.
When I say “mushroom farm”—and honestly, when I still think of a mushroom farm, though I know much better by now—the picture in one’s head might be of a little red barn, behind which is a patch of land, or perhaps a stretch of forest, and picking mushrooms involves going out there, out back, and collecting them from the ground and off of logs and the sides of trees, à la Animal Crossing.
The truth is that the mushrooms grow in these two large buildings, which I call the hangars because they look like small airplane hangars. Each one is dedicated to one type of mushroom: shiitake in one, oyster in the other. I spend the most amount of time in the shiitake hangar because they grow much faster than the oysters, and while the oysters might require more committed care, the shiitake require more frequent attention.
Once the logs are in place, we must water them. I first put on a waterproof apron that is so large it completely wraps me up. It doesn’t cover the bottoms of my jeans, but these will dry, and my work boots might not be as waterproof as they were four years ago, but so help me God if they didn’t keep my feet adequately dry when I walked more than an hour from Nancy Blakes to my UL apartment at 2 AM and in pouring rain, when the rain froze over on Christmas Eve the year before, or when I hiked Knocknarea in Sligo or Mount Brandon in Kerry. The boots are well-suited for mushroom farming.
They used to water the logs by soaking them in a large bin overnight, which sounds straightforward, and I have to imagine it is not only straightforward but more so than the way we water them now. Now, we connect the hose to a contraption of two smaller hoses with long needles at their ends. We puncture a log with a needle, turn on the water, and let the magic happen. The water injections seem to work, and as far as I know, they work better than the soaking method, but I’m glad I’m wearing an apron, and I’m glad the boots are mostly waterproof. As compact as the shiitake logs are, they are still but compost held together by force, a binding agent, and/or the grace of God, and the passage of time tells us that even the strongest rock will give way to the forces of water. Accordingly, nearly each and every injected log sprays some of the water it receives right back at us. But what's a monk to do?
After this, there’s lots of picking, picking, and picking the mushrooms; so much so that this is the first thing we do every morning, and there’s always plenty to be picked. There’s also re-watering the logs one or two more times, then taking the dried husks of the washed-up, used-up logs to a secondary location where they’re taken out back and shot, execution style.
I’m just kidding, we load them up into the back of a repurposed garbage truck where we load up on such materials before they’re ground together to make compost that the abbey later sells. Every person who has told me about this sale uses the exact same expression to describe how quickly the compost goes: “like hotcakes.”
Some of the mushrooms are boxed up as-are and sent to local restaurants and grocery stores; some are sent straight to the abbey kitchen for use in our meals; and as for the rest of the shiitake and oyster mushrooms, Br. Clement, Fr. Oscarito, and I trim them down to be dried, packaged, and sold at the gift shop.
The oyster mushrooms are a completely different ballgame, so expect more on those guys later.
The mushroom farm has been an unexpected delight to me, but that’s how it goes, isn't it? Joy is often enough unexpected, plain and tall. When we make a plan, God laughs. What can we do but smile along?
This is awesome Joseph...I read every word even though I'm in a hurry to go ride my magical e-bike on this gorgeous autumn day in Vermont. Yeehaw and congratulations on writing just enough words! Not too many that I felt the need to skip and not too few that I wondered "What the heck?" Have so much fun with your new Monk-ey friend! <3
I'm dying:"But what's a monk to do?" I love getting to hear about your days in more detail!