Sharondale Farm
This place is located at the base of the Southwest Mountains of the Virginia Piedmont about 12 miles east of Charlottesville in a village called Cismont. Growing up, we visited our Grandma’s home here most summers. When I was six or so, Grandma introduced me to yellow tomatoes; my earliest memory of being fascinated by eating something so delicious right off the plant. I still believe the best food only travels no more distance than one’s arm length. Everyone can grow, and should grow some food, if only for a moment of fascination.
I became fascinated with the fungi during a college mycology class. We grew some oyster mushrooms on newspaper, and identified the wild ones. I was hooked and accepted a research assignment identifying compatible strains of a fungal wilt of Capsicum pepper and resistance to the wilt disease among pepper lines. Following grad school, carpentry is the trade I learned. It has afforded the time and money to build gardens, study horticulture as therapy with kids and disabled adults, and explore permaculture methods for developing polycultures.
After developing useful landscapes and encouraging people to grow food in the city, I moved to my family’s homestead Sharondale in the summer of 2004, with the intention of living and learning a more rural permaculture and expanding a useful plants business. My focus has been on developing perennial polycultures that integrate fruit, flowers and fiber plants with mushrooms and animals. My interest and work is evolving to include farm waste management strategies, and developing methods that contribute to agroforestry and natural resource management plans, intercropping mushrooms with vegetable production for food and soil building; and using local strains of mushrooms for bioremediation.
Mark Jones
CEO, Chief Ecological Organism
Current research includes:
Identifying and evaluating commercial and locally collected mushroom strains for production value in central Virginia under different outdoor growing conditions and on different substrates.
Intercropping mushrooms in the perennial garden
Evaluating the potential of numerous perennial fruiting tree and shrub species and varieties
Awarded a USDA-SARE producer grant for 2008-2009 to study mushroom cropping and earthworm effects on the soil amendment value of manure wastes (http://www.sare.org/reporting/report_viewer.asp?pn=FS08-227)
Developing value-added food and medicinal products from abundant yields
Designing a growing system for indoor mushroom production
