Smoky Mountain Myco is a new addition for our business and community center. Our property is 28 acres of mainly wooded mountainside. The Lord has blessed this land with water and fertility which is perfect for growing mushrooms. Although we previously had no experience with mycology, my son became aware of this new potential two years ago.

Our latest piece of equipment came this week:

150L Commercial Pressure Sterilizer – Digital Electric Mushroom Autoclave

Our Professional 150L (160 Quart) Mushroom Autoclave is a true commercial-grade unit, taking up no more space than a small bar refrigerator. Trusted by top labs and commercial mushroom farms for over 15 years, this model is known as the industry workhorse—offering exceptional value, safety, and reliability.

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The Lord moves in mysterious ways and this path was guided by Him for us. I actually should say it was pushed by Him. We are growing mushrooms both indoors (laboratory, colonizing chamber and fruiting chamber) and outdoors. As I posted in another article, our planer is providing hardwood shavings for mushroom media which was an unexpected bonus.

The outdoor areas are being expanded with the help of the local electrical co-op which is donating wood chips to help retain moisture underneath inoculated logs and build trails. I have spent a large amount of time this summer cleaning debris, spreading mulch and developing areas for separate mushroom types: oysters, shiitakes and turkey tail for now. We hope to start having walking mushroom tours next year.

In the future, this endeavor will provide healthy food and medicine. For more information visit Smoky Mountain Myco and subscribe to their site.

One of the changes on Appalachian Renegade will be updates on the community center. As promised on a reply to a comment on NCRenegade.com, I am outlining two new equipment purchases for our workshop.

The first is our new planer. We had a smaller Dewalt planer but our expanded wood operations required a larger one. We bought a South Bend SB1109 earlier this summer.

This planer allows us to efficiently plane lumber from our sawmill. Fortunately for us, we bought this unit prior to the new tariffs imposed. Not only are we able to plane larger widths, the unit is very quiet. We also incorporated a larger dust collection system for the shop. An unexpected benefit to this unit is the fast collection of wood shavings (oak and popular hardwoods) that are used for media to grow mushrooms for our new Smoky Mountain Mushrooms.

The second piece of woodworking equipment was a new table saw. Our existing table saw was 40 years old. The issue was horsepower: we needed a 5HP saw to cut thicker dimensional lumber from the mill. The new 220V saw and router table from Grizzly.com is shown below:

I am a big proponent of converting fiat currency to assets to help rebuild this fallen nation.

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