Month: April 2022

Growing your own mushrooms gets a boost in Saxapahaw

By Maria Johnson

Wearing the knit headband and sun-kissed cheeks of an avid outdoorswoman, Jeanne Verrecchio traces her mushroom obsession to the COVID pandemic.

Last summer, she spent some of her down time watching the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi.

“I said, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to learn about mushrooms,’” says Verrecchio, her Brooklyn accent underlining her earnestness.

She slipped down the fungal slope quickly. She read up on edible mushrooms. A friend up the street gave her a growing kit for Christmas.

In January, when Verrecchio retired from her job as an oncology nurse at Duke University Medical Center, her colleagues threw her a going-away party in a conference room. They hung paper mushrooms from the ceiling. They gave her an accent pillow covered with a charming mushroom print. They decorated her cake with little plastic mushrooms. They presented her with gold-plated mushroom earrings.

Wait. There’s more.

In February, Verrecchio took a mushroom foraging class led by an expert in Durham.

And now, on a nippy Saturday morning, Verrecchio and 15 others stand in a semicircle in a barnyard at Haw River Mushrooms, in the Alamance County community of Saxapahaw, using battery-powered drills to poke holes in logs perched on sawhorses in front of them.

In a few minutes, the students will begin noccing — short for inoculating and pronounced “knocking” — their logs with cultures that will grow into mushrooms. 

Prepandemic, more than 200 people a year signed up for Haw River’s noccing classes, which were designed to make participants more fungi friendly.

“We want mushroom gardening to be as common as tomato gardening in North Carolina,” says Laura Stewart, who owns the farm with husband Ches. “Mushrooms grown on logs are about the most laid-back product you can add to your garden. They’re very resilient.”

COVID halted the noccing classes in 2020 and 2021, and the term inoculation took on a different meaning. But earlier this year, as the pandemic subsided in this country, the Stewarts and their employees resumed their noccing events, as well as mushroom foraging on the property.

Participants popped out like shiitakes after a rain.

Stewart attributes the burgeoning interest in mushrooms to several longstanding trends:

A concern about the environment and a push for sustainable agriculture. A growing number of vegetarians in this country. An interest in the medicinal qualities of mushrooms, especially as anticancer agents.

The pandemic helped the fungal cause too.

Fantastic Fungi, the Netflix doc, sparked a wave of interest, she says. And some people started growing mushrooms as a socially distanced hobby. Count 14-year-old Alex McPherson in their number.

“I looked it up during quarantine,” she says. “I was bored, so I thought, ‘Mushrooms. Sure, why not?’”

Her father, Heath, followed her lead. They ordered a growing kit and marveled at the fungi that sprouted in Heath’s office in their north Raleigh home.

“It’s kind of like growing flowers,” says Heath. “There’s an aesthetic to it. The colors, the textures. It helps us to try different foods, too.”

Alex enjoys mushrooms with pasta. “Anything pasta,” she says.

For noccer Adam Dovenitz, who lives in Durham, pizza is a powerful motivator. He once grew blue oyster mushrooms and put them on a pie.

“They were amazing,” says Dovenitz, long a devotee of edible fungi. When he was 10, he experimented with inoculating logs and nearly caught his parents’ home on fire while melting wax to plug the nocc holes.

“I learned you don’t put out a wax fire with water,” Dovenitz says, throwing his hands apart with an explosive “PSHHHH!” to communicate the idea of “wax fire.”

“Now, I actually have good instruction.”

And how. The Stewarts have been full-time mushroom farmers for five years.

In March 2020, they moved to a 17-acre spread where they expanded their operation to several outbuildings, including an old railroad shipping container, two repurposed truck trailers and a new barn.

Their yield: 30 tons of mushrooms a year.

More than half the haul goes to 10 farmers markets in the Triangle and Triad.

Restaurants get the next biggest slice, about six tons.

The rest goes to subscribers of Community Supported Agriculture.

Eric Dragone and Susan Pizzuti of Carrboro buy the Stewarts’ mushrooms at their local farmers’ market. They’re fond of the lion’s mane variety, which has a flavor similar to crab meat.

“She’s replaced most of the meat in our diets with mushrooms.” says Dragone, nodding proudly to Pizzuti.

Hoping to grow their own fungi, the young couple have signed up for the noccing class, which begins with a tour of the farm.

Stepping around cats, chickens and an Australian shepherd-Labrador retriever mix named Isaac, students learn the basics of mushroom cultivation.

They see how the Stewarts make their own growing medium from locally sourced oak sawdust and soybean hulls. They hear how the Stewarts pasteurize and inoculate the medium with a rainbow of oyster mushrooms, cinnamon caps, black pearls, lion’s mane, shittake and the medicinal reishi.

They step into the earthy air of a trailer and witness how the cultures colonize — in plastic bags on racks made from metal pipes — into masses of white mycelium, the brainlike motherships of mushrooms.

Students then dip their feet into an anti-fungal bath and enter misty grow rooms, where scores of plastic bags have been slit open to reveal the fruit of the mycelium— plump buttons, domes, ruffles and fingers of mushrooms in luscious shades of blue, gray, rust, gold and cream.

“They’re beauuuuutiful,” coos Verrecchio, the former nurse.

Outside, after breaking for a cup of soup made from lemon grass, lion’s mane and coconut milk — “Do you have, like, six more gallons of this soup? It’s incredible,” says Dragone — Laura Stewart preps her charges with a couple of nocc talks.

The Log Talk: You will select four logs of freshly cut oak, which is the best host for mushrooms. Other types of logs will work, but don’t use dead wood because it’s already growing stuff.

The Spawn Talk: You will receive cups of cultures — mashed mycelium — and an inoculator resembling a big brass syringe to inject the cultures into the log holes. You will have a choice of blue oyster, shiitake and lion’s mane mushrooms, but jab each log with only one variety of mushroom. More than one culture guarantees fungal war.

The pupils get to noccing.

Amber Brothers who runs Elijah’s Farm in the Rougement, hopes to add more mushrooms to the produce she sells at the Black Farmers’ Market in Durham, at another market in Henderson, and — one day, she hopes — at a market-on-wheels that she will drive into poor communities.

“I want to teach low-income kids about sustainability,” she says.

Already, she has converted part of her home into a mushroom growing center.

“My living room is covered in plastic, with vents out the windows,” she says.

Lori and Dan Seiler of Burlington are interested in the marketability of mushrooms as well.

Prepandemic, they enjoyed a special all-mushroom dinner prepared by a chef in Raleigh. When COVID dinged their janitorial business, they warmed to the idea of growing mushrooms as a side hustle on their five-acre place.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we try it?’ We have trees that need to be cut,” says Lori.

To that end, they’re inoculating their logs with shiitake, lion’s mane and blue oyster cultures and daubing the holes with paraffin, while gently shooing a tabby cat who keeps jumping aboard to investigate.

Laura wraps up the class with a final address.

The Care Talk: Don’t let your logs get dirty. Don’t let them dry out. Set them in a shady spot out of the wind. Don’t worry if the paraffin peels off your nocc holes. And don’t worry about the myth that you should seal the ends of the logs, too.

“I think that’s a conspiracy spread by Big Wax,” Laura says with a grin, her blond ponytail protruding from the backside of her trucker hat.

Within a year, she advises, you should see mushrooms growing from your logs. Check them frequently.

“It’s a good experience to go out after a rainy day and realize, ‘Oh, I just made myself a meal,’” she says.

If your nocc is a bust, she counsels, contact the farm. She’ll give you another log.

“I want you to be successful,” says Laura, who, like her crop, is pretty laid back.

“Anything with farming pushes you into more systems thinking,” she says. “You realize, ‘OK, everything is related,’ and if that’s your thinking from the get-go, it makes you a little more empathetic.”  OH

Learn more at hawrivermushrooms.com.

High Point restaurateurs Tu and Todd Sen revere the history of their Johnson Street home
By Maria Johnson • Photographs by Amy Freeman

The real estate listing popped up on Tu Sen’s Facebook page around midnight.

She went running to find her husband, Todd, who was minding a backyard fire pit with the couple’s daughter Tiffany Vanhpraseuth and godson Christian Thomas.

The family had just gotten home from working at their restaurant, 98 Asian Bistro in High Point.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, Todd, my dream house is for sale! We have to see it!’” Tu remembers.

Todd knew which house she meant, a wide-set Prairie-style gem that would fit right into Oak Park, Ill., where famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright lived and worked.

Built in 1910, Tu’s dream house sat squarely in High Point’s Johnson Street Historic District on the eastern edge of downtown. Officially, the place was called the Burnett-McCain House, after the structure’s first two owners.

A century later, whenever Tu and Todd passed the house at the corner of Johnson Street and East Farriss Avenue, Tu would ask Todd to put on the car’s emergency flashers and stop at the curb so she could get out, jab a couple of incense sticks in the corner of the yard, light them and pray to the house, asking permission to live there and take care of the structure some day.

Todd knew that Tu loved the house because it looked Asian, with its simple horizontal lines and deep front porch.

He knew, too, that she thought it would be a good home for the many Buddha statues that she kept in her prayer room, a shrine she created inside a storage shed at their suburban High Point home.

But even in the face of Tu’s excitement about the historic property, Todd was overcome by worries about money — and by an unspoken feeling that people like him and Tu, who came to this country as child refugees from war-torn Southeast Asia in the 1970s, shouldn’t, and couldn’t, live in a big house like that.

“We can’t afford it,” he told her that night. Undaunted, Tu made an appointment to see the house the next morning. After the showing, she called Todd. “We have to make an offer,” she said.

The house was charming and sophisticated, she reported. It was full of modern furniture and — although the owners weren’t Buddhists — it contained several Buddhas already. “I said, ‘No wonder I liked it,’” she recalls.

The owners were asking $350,000. They had three offers already.

Tu — who had a good idea of what she and Todd could afford — wanted to offer $358,990. Cash.

Todd knew how determined his wife could be when she wanted something. Usually, he was happy with the outcome. “OK,” he said. “Do it.”

They made an offer.

A few days later, Tu toured the house again. This time, she took fresh fruit as an offering, spread it on a white sheet in the foyer, lit 10 white candles and had a chat with the house.

“I said, ‘I’m here. You already know me. If you want me to be your next caretaker, choose me. If you feel I’m not the right person, I will accept it.’” Two weeks later, the agent called. The owners had taken their offer.

The Sens moved into their new-old home in November 2019.

Sitting in the front room, on a plush beige sofa that matches the couple’s blond Yorkshire terriers, Bang and Blue, Tu explains why she believes the former owners accepted their offer.

“The house talked to them” she says. Todd chuckles and points out that Tu talked to the house first.

“I’ve been with my wife 29 years and let me tell you,” he says, “I’ve seen miracles around her when she prays.”

Tu nods, adding that she prays for many things: family, friends, her hometown.

By hometown, she means High Point, not the U.S. military base in Laos where she was born 48 years ago. A lot has happened between then and now. “I pray for healing,” Tu says. “For what I went through.”

She remembers the sound of helicopter rotors slapping the air. Then a toddler, Tu was strapped to her mother’s chest with a bed sheet. Her mother had one foot in a Black Hawk helicopter and was telling Tu’s father to come on. Because Tu’s father had worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Laos during the Vietnam war, the Americans offered to evacuate the family as Vietnam and neighboring Laos fell to Communist forces. If you stay, they will kill you, her mother told her father.

I’ll be fine, he said. Tu’s mother stepped out of the helicopter. Laotian officials arrested her father and threw him in jail, where he was chained in a dark basement. Tu, her mother and two sisters lived nearby. Her mother cooked and kept house for her husband’s captors. Gradually, they trusted her enough to release her husband. But he wasn’t the same when he got home.“He was broken,” says Tu.

Her mother, who was Thai, decided the family should risk an escape to Thailand. One night, when Tu was about 8, her family and a few others boarded canoes to paddle across the Mekong River to Thailand. Rain lashed the canoes. Thunder rattled their already raw nerves. Lightning strobed, exposing their location to Thai soldiers, who shot at them. “My mom told all of us to lie down,” Tu says. They made it.

A couple of days later, Thai police picked up the group, soaked and traveling on foot. Eventually they were taken to a refugee camp. The family stayed in camps for about four years. Tu remembers room dividers made of newspaper and bamboo. She remembers getting one fish, one bowl of rice and a five-gallon bucket of water every day. She remembers Thai vendors selling apples outside a barbed wire fence.

“I wished I could taste that apple,” she says.

Once her family was cleared for green cards because of her father’s service to the U.S., camp officials asked her mother where they wanted to go. Her mother pointed to a post card of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

“She said it was the land of gold,” Tu says. “My father said the Americans would never leave us. He believed that.”

The family lived in Jersey City, N.J., for several years, then followed their middle daughter, Mary, to Greensboro.

Tu’s parents worked in a mattress factory in Asheboro. Mary worked at a sock factory and grocery store in Greensboro. Tu waited tables in a Chinese restaurant, Empress Garden, in Greensboro.

“I did so well I had people waiting to sit in my section,” she says. “All my customers were elderly. They tipped me really well. They knew I was a single mom.”

Years later, when Mary and her husband, James, opened Thai Chiang Mai, a restaurant in High Point, Tu and her second husband, Todd, joined them in the family business.

Born in Cambodia, Todd also had lived in a Thai refugee camp — though not the same one as Tu — before his family immigrated to South Bend, Indiana. One spring weekend Todd came to a friend’s wedding in Lexington, N.C.

His parents saw photos of him wearing shorts in North Carolina while they still wore coats in Indiana.

They saw the red clay soil, which promised a longer growing season for their garden.

They were sold on the South. The family relocated to the Piedmont, worked in furniture factories, and planted a huge garden.

“I think my mom has never bought a vegetable,” Todd jokes. “For the older generation, they grow stuff to connect them to the old country. Myself, I go fishing because that’s what I did when I was younger, in Cambodia, for food.”

His fish-grilling skills came in handy when he and Tu opened their own place, 98 Asian Bistro, in 2015. The upscale restaurant, which occupies part of a former Chevrolet dealership on Main Street in High Point, memorializes the year Tu’s father died, 1998.

Tu and Todd insist on honoring those who have paved the way for them.

In their home, they have set aside the master bedroom to venerate the home’s second owner, physician H.W. McCain, whose family lived there more than 40 years. No one sleeps in the king-size bed, which is strewn with photos and write-ups about the home.

Another bedroom is Tu’s prayer room, which twinkles with banks of metallic figures representing both sides of her family: Buddhist and Thai cultures for her mother; Hindu and Indian cultures for her father. Fresh flowers, fruit, candy, bottled water and sweet drinks welcome the spirits. Incense perfumes the air.

A third bedroom serves as a closet for Tu and Todd.

The couple sleep in a modest fourth bedroom. It’s the only room that they have furnished themselves.

The home’s former owners, Michael and Patricia Bellocchio, who own a furniture manufacturing company, left behind many sleek pieces — the armless sofas in the front room, the minimalist dining room table and chairs — as well as carved Spanish Mission-style chests, sideboards and armoires that harmonize with Eastern flavors.

A pair of decorative wooden doors — supposedly from an Asian temple — are set into the wall of a professional kitchen that sports a six-burner gas stove, a concrete-and-mahogany topped island, an extra-wide refrigerator and freezer, a double oven and walls textured with stacked quartz stone.

Other than painting the home’s interior walls gold and green, the Sens have done very little updating. They’ve filled in the gaps between furnishings with a bevy of treasures, many of which have been given to them or sold at a discount by friends in the furniture industry.

The faux pink cherry blossoms that fill giant metal vases on either side of the fireplace? A customer ordered them for her daughter’s wedding and gave them to Tu afterward.

The bronze Chinese lions in front of the house? Tu saw them in a High Point store more than 10 years ago. “I said, ‘If you stay here, I’ll come back for you,’” she says. When she returned, the big cats were waiting at a fraction of the original price. She took them home and draped them with red strings of Buddhist prayer beads.

The burbling orb fountain with water slipping down the sides? A gift from the owners of the Phillips Collection, who are Tu’s customers.

The house-warming gift that she wanted the most — an American flag — came from the High Point Chamber of Commerce, which named her Businesswoman of the Year in 2016.

“I always said I wanted to have a piece of America,” says Tu. “Owning this home is a piece of America.”

The house continues to inspire dreamers, Todd says.

“Every once in a while somebody will stop their car in front of this house, get out and take a picture.”  OH

The green thumb of Bill Craft

By Cynthia Adams   •   Photographs by Mark Wagoner 

Bill Craft, head of Craft Insurance and self-styled nature lover, could have spent his dollars on self-aggrandizing gestures.

But no. Over 81 years, Craft expended resources and muscle making Greensboro better, more colorful and definitely greener.

Wearing old shorts and battered sneakers, Craft took to the creek banks near the family home on Dover Road, rousing a few of his nine children to weed and play, creating a naturalized woodland “creek park.”

He toiled there and at other public spaces for 50 years until the end of his life.

Craft’s headstone at Forest Lawn Cemetery simply reads “Greensboro’s Johnny Appleseed.” Yet, according to a horticultural inventory, Craft planted almost everything but apples in the public spaces he beautified.

He singlehandedly planted and maintained more than 100 species of trees, shrubs and rare plantings in his pet project — a namesake park in Old Irving Park just south of Greensboro Country Club — Bill Craft Park. The “creek park” he created was a perfect backdrop for his father’s labors, says Daniel Craft. “He kind of had a blank slate. . . . Nobody [else] looked after them.” Worn, meandering and unpaved paths seemed perfect for walkers and children at play. Nothing overly manicured.

He invited others to fall in love with the great outdoors, as he had. Adding dollops of color through plantings and taming overgrowth was enough; Craft knew when to step back from the canvas.

Resident Ann Robinson says the idea was “to create a walk in the woods.”

Her sons Will and Patrick Robinson spent hours playing there when young, making forts from culled bamboo and splashing in the creek with their dog, Nipper.

Craft was restless, possessing an unusual amount of energy. As an only child, he inherited his father’s business, dutifully leading it from 1954 until 1996 when his children took over. But he bolted outdoors as often as possible on a dizzying mission: beautifying grounds at St. Francis and Holy Trinity Episcopalian churches, as well as at St. Pius and Brightwood Christian Academy.

He also turned his attentions to Fisher Park, the Greensboro Science Center and Irving Park School.

Craft even kept a garden for seniors at Evergreens Nursing Center and took them flowers.

After graduating from Carolina, he served in the Coast Guard before marrying Joanne Brantley. They had six sons and three daughters. Craft’s Chevy S-10 pickup’s tag read: “9Younguns”. David still has it.

Daniel recalls being “dragged to parks, to a playground or Scouts” on Saturdays. Craft led Boy Scout Troop 216 for years; all six sons earned their Eagle badge, like their dad.

David says their colorful father, turbocharged with energy, “didn’t like sitting around talking about things.” An understatement.

His favorite expression was, “Okey-doke.”

Robinson, whose family moved to Blair Street 25 years ago, soon encountered Craft’s energy. Despite his thatch of white hair, he carried buckets and buckets of water, tending plants.

“When we first moved to Blair Street,” Robinson remembers, “I ran into Bill in the park — working, planting as usual . . . and I told him that I had two boys who could help out if needed. He kind of nodded and pointed to our house on the corner to say, ‘Is that where you live?’” That Saturday morning, the doorbell rang, “and there was Bill with buckets and shovels. I opened the door and he said, ‘Where are those boys?’” Robinson woke her sons, and they returned exhausted.

The Craft boys related.

Equally fond of hiking and biking, Craft volunteered on Greensboro’s network of bike trails, which eventually extended through Lake Daniel, Latham Park and Lake Daniel Greenway, on the Benjamin Parkway.

Indefatigable and upbeat, Craft was “kind of a dreamer,” once driving a few of his children to Morehead City in search of Spanish Moss. He stuffed the station wagon, returning home the same day.

“The moss didn’t make it in our climate,” adds Daniel, “but it got us out of the house.”

Stories about Craft tumble out of family and friends.

After years of his beautification endeavors, the Chamber honored him in 1974. A comical exchange with philanthropist Joe Bryan became his favorite story.

“He got the Dolley Madison award the same night Joe Bryan got an award,” Daniel recalls.

“They both lived in Irving Park — knew each other. Dad started talking to him, and said, ‘I’m getting an award for my park.’ Joe says, ‘I’ve got a park named after me, too. But they don’t make me work in it.’”

The Bill Craft Park grew as colorful as its namesake. Craft’s sons estimate there are easily “l00 azaleas and camelias alone — his favorites.”

Daniel mentions a 1990 summer date with his later wife, Kathy. They were cycling toward Greenhill Cemetery and spotted a man working. “I think I said, ‘Oh, s—t,’” he spluttered.

“Kathy said, ‘What?’ ’’ Daniel recognized the unmistakably tan, wiry figure of his father.

“There he is, tennis shoes, no shirt, and a black Speedo bathing suit, planting a tree! That’s how she met him.”

David groans at the Speedo story, saying, “Dad was just living. Didn’t care about judgment . . . I thought he was a kind of a nut when I was a teenager.”

But they admired how their father juggled a vocation and fatherhood with many interests, never missing dinners. He watched no television, and read with the same fever that he brought to gardening. His sons say he took pleasure “in very basic things.”

Sons No. 9 (Daniel) and No. 8 (David) remained in Greensboro as adult siblings scattered.

If there is an apple tree, seems the Craft sons did not fall far from it. Daniel also likes to do his own thing. “I don’t need validation for what I do.”

He points out that David has been instrumental in building trails and creating the Haw River State Park. David points out Daniel’s devotion to the Bill Craft Park auxiliary.

Ann and Russ Robinson were also among original members. “The auxiliary started after Mr. Craft passed away . . . We were in the group that got it going with the Crafts and other neighbors — many of whom were friends and contemporaries of Bill’s,” she recalls.

A dozen or so auxiliary members meet twice annually at the Bill Craft Park sign, sharing donuts and coffee the Robinsons bring before weeding, pruning and clearing.

Years ago, Styers helped with an inventory that totaled 117 plantings. The inventory documented varieties of dogwoods, hollies, birches, buckeyes, elm, redwood, magnolias, cherries and fruit trees, plus nut trees, hemlock, pines, persimmon, sweet gum, oaks, spruces, cedars, maples, cypress, and even unusual palms, roses, jasmine, lilac and anise.

Shelton Styers documents images on the Bill Craft Park Auxiliary Facebook page (www.facebook.com/groups/164265200263243/).

On workdays, stories emerge about the man who inspired it all.

“We control the invasives. Prune some things here and there,” Daniel says. “One of Dad’s biggest regrets was planting bamboo there.” He tackles the dreaded bamboo first.

For the Robinsons, the park became important to their sense of community. “Our most recent park project has been very fun,” says Ann. “There was a really big Ash tree that came down in front of our house in the park. It was during COVID. I’d been involved in a fundraiser in the mountains that involved making wood-turned bowls from a tree that came down and thought we could perhaps do the same for Craft Park.”

Woodworker, Rick Andrews made wooden bowls and ornaments that were sold last year.

“We even had one bowl that we gave to Rip Bernhardt — an old friend of Bill’s who, although he lives at WellSpring now, always tries to come at least for the coffee before the clean-up and visit. He was very touched by the bowl we gave him and to have a ‘piece of the park’ and asked me to take his picture on the stump of the old Ash tree to send to his friends.”

David adds, “One of his buddies, probably 20 years ago, said, one of your dad’s greatest skills was he can talk to the janitor of the company and the CEO of the company and make them feel equally important.”

In 1991, the Greensboro Interclub Council recognized Craft’s outstanding civic leadership: a Jaycee, and a Red Cross and Kiwanis member, he served on most all the civic organizations. He joined nearly every outdoor group, including the Piedmont Appalachian Trail Hikers, the Guilford Wildlife Club and more.

David muses. “Dad used to say that being in the insurance business made him a good living and enabled him to do what he wanted to do . . . but if he could have been something else, he would have been a college professor.”

No doubt, a botanist.  OH

Adopt a Park  Adopting a park helps keep public parks beautiful. Contact Alex Alexandra Zaleski, the city’s volunteer coordinator, at (336)–373–7507.