- There's about 5,000 of these that could go into the dumpster each week, creating that like methane emissions that we don't want.

So that's why we like to rescue them.

- Hi, I'm Hannah.

I'm the garden manager at Central Texas Food Bank.

Here, our mission is to nourish hungry people and lead the fight against hunger.

And we do that by growing as much produce here on this one third acre as we can.

- My name is Angel, and I am with the Central Texas Mycological Society, and we have a wonderful program.

We've partnered with Central Texas Food Bank and a lot of other community gardens and school gardens.

And we rescue mushroom grow blocks that could go into the waste.

And we take these sterilized blocks and we teach people in different ways how to put them back into the soil.

- So here in this spot that you can see, it's about a third of an acre of growing space.

In the last two years, we produced just under 23,000 pounds.

And that goes out to our community who is experiencing hunger.

Through our programs, we have an onsite pantry.

Most of our food goes directly there first.

That's the first stop.

If we have too much for that, it goes out on mobile distributions to one of our 21 counties that we serve in Central Texas.

- Central Texas Food Bank and Hannah reached out to us and signed up to be part of the program.

And so we've been delivering about once a month and using them in the soil here.

- We have pretty hard clay here.

It really seems to help add some tilt to that and help aerate the soil.

So we wanna feed our garlic some extra nutrients.

So we're going to mix this straw with the mushroom substrate to try and help feed those microbes.

- And so we're gonna mix in this spent mushroom block, which is simply just sawdust, and I just like to step on them and smash them up.

You can also just open up the bag and smash it with your hands.

It's nice to get your hands on the mycelium to feel how strong it is.

It's got a really nice strong bond.

And you can just mix it in with your straw and that mycelium and the mushroom, the decomposer fungi is gonna continue to break down, accelerate the decomposition process of the straw.

So this is the food that fungi loves to eat.

They like a lot of carbon matter.

I like to tell people that fungi is the reason why we have a surface to walk on.

They're our chemist of our planet, just breaking things down.

So you wanna make sure that you've got a lot of moisture as well because that's gonna help both your plants.

And it helps jumpstart this continued decomposition.

- I like to use this mulch method for long season crops like this garlic that's gonna be in the ground for six months.

It'll just really help mitigate the weeds and help feed the plants.

- But it's gonna help break down some of this remaining woody matter of the plant and cycle that back.

You can put some cardboard on top to help retain the moisture, help it break down further.

This last fall, we introduced a program where we can deliver.

We got some grant funding.

We're able to deliver to schools, community gardens, churches, any community-based project that sees the value of adding soil, organic matter, or adding organic matter back to the soil.

- We have two full-time staff, myself and my coordinator, Ollie.

And besides that, we run volunteer shifts about three days a week.

Typically Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday mornings.

So you can go to our website, centraltexasfoodbank.org and click volunteer and see what kind of shifts we have coming up.

Because we love to have help out here.

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