Freemotion's mushroom growing experiment....success! Pics p 1 & 3 & 4

[Farmfresh]

No idea if this works at all, but Grandma Nettie used to always put any morels that we found in a bowl of cool water and let them soak for a few minutes, swishing them occasionally. She said this drove out any hiding bugs AND washed the spore into the water. After the swishing she always poured the water around the trees in the yard. She claimed that would seed the spores for more mushrooms.

 

[mrs.puff]

Farmfresh-- theoretically, that should work. Yes, you are pouring spores out with the wash water in most cases. The trick is spreading them under the proper trees.... I actually used to know a guy who worked on the team at U of Michigan (or Minnesota?) who patented the method for "growing" morels. He said you had to have "electricity" (aka- lightning) to make them fruit. Unfortunately, he passed on a few years ago. In a grocery store in Kansas City, I saw morels selling for $40 a pound. Dried ones are $300 a pound in Whole Foods.

And that bit about growing oyster mushroom spawn on cardboard would probably work. The kits you can buy I think are often just a mesh bag filled with cardboard and straw. Oysters are easy to grow, although I haven't done it myself. Always enough wild ones around.

 

[lwheelr]

I've seen the little button mushroom kits, and they always say they'll produce for several weeks or a couple of months or whatever. But mushrooms are just like everything else - if you want to produce them indefinitely, you just have to let some go to "seed".

There was a field above our home that grew button mushrooms after the rains in the spring, and you could always tell where one had gone to seed - because the next season's mushrooms were growing in a circle around where the previous one had grown. My mother called those "fairy rings".

I hate mushrooms. My husband loves them. I had always figured if I ever did invest in anything with mushrooms, I'd be making it last forever, because I'd never want to buy stuff more than once.

I don't know what other mushrooms grow in, but I know the button mushrooms grow well in compost, after all they grew in a cow pasture. Morels should grow in an alkaline compost, since they grow really well in the ash after forest fires.

 

[freemotion]

We got our first mushroom last week....I'd stopped checking them a long time ago, assuming (there's that infamous word! ) they were long dead. I decided to use them to make some raised hugelculture (sp?) beds for raspberries and went to take a look at them....and found this:

Yowza! My first overgrown mushroom! I contacted Field & Forest and was told that the rains from Irene could stimulate fruiting, and that my strain often took 18 months....well, I hadn't read that in the instructions.... He said if I turned the logs it would likely stimulate fruiting.

I got dh out there today to help turn the logs and two of the three pallets of logs had mushrooms already! About a dozen on each pallet. Pics later as I had an appointment and didn't have time to go get the camera. One pallet of logs had no mushrooms, so we turned those logs. Each pallet has a different strain.

I told the guy we got the logs from.....he'd told me when he dropped them off that they'd tried it the year before and got nothing. Well, it has been three years for him and he said it is CRAZY this year, tons of mushrooms! I'm so excited!

The neighbor wants to drop a broken tree that is right on his property line and asked if he could just drop it into my swamp. I said sure, no problem. Now I'm going to go back and ask him to hold off until everything is frozen. It is a large maple, and I will gather the larger branches to inoculate in the spring. I love mushrooms. Maybe I'll look into some different strains for the maple logs.

Yippee!

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

WOW!!! oh man!! ok i'm totally inspired to do this. we have horrible mushrooms in the stores here (whats with that!??!) and i get so hungry for him! yipeeeee is right!!! oh to have them sauteed in butter and scrambled in fresh eggs! with gouda. goat gouda....

*passes out from food-euphoria*

 

[freemotion]

I've been swooning from food euphoria myself at the thought.....imagine a sort of marsala made with pastured pork and these mushrooms, finished with some onion wine instead of marsala.....holy cow, I'm floating! Someone tie my leg to a cinder block so I don't sail away!

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

wha....what?? what happened????

*reads post, thinks about pork/mushroom marsala, passes out again, falls on Free's tie rope and keeps her from floating off*

 

[colowyo0809]

Do you know, can I do this with pine?

 

[Emerald]

I am pretty sure that hardwoods so better for ****ake mushrooms.. and I am so jealous! Did you know that if you dry them out in the sun that the vitamin D in them will be about 4 times higher than if you just dry them in the dehydrator? Read about the Japanese folks actually hitting them with high UV lights for about 10minutes before drying and the Vit. D more than quadruples.

The only mushroom I've had luck with is the pearl oyster-we bought a box of them right when the snow was melting this spring and tried to grow my own spawn on coffee grounds no luck, but another site suggested just laying them on the wood we wanted them to inoculate and I have a huge tree that fell and one big hunk we just can't cut or move so I put three big caps out there in the cold and they kinda melted into it.
Earlier this month I got these-

I only ate a small amount and they were really good(just like what we bought) and I was going to go out and get the rest of the two clumps for dinner only to find that my little bantam hen chowed down on them and didn't leave me any! But they should flush out a few more times for me the log is about 3 feet across and is going nowhere!
Sorry the one is a tad blurry- my cell phone isn't the best at close up pictures!

 

[freemotion]

No, it needs to be freshly cut hardwood like oak or maple. Softer woods like birch break down and decay before plenty of mushrooms can be harvested. Not sure if pine is not good for that reason or if the resin prevents the shiitakes from growing on it. The hardwood logs need to be cut a few weeks before inoculating, and they need to be inoculated in the spring, so late winter cutting is best. If old logs are used, wild species compete and take over, as they've had more time to get established on the logs. I will have this problem on my logs because of the drought year we had last year....the other mushrooms you see in the pic will eventually crowd out my shiitakes. I hope to be organized enough to start more logs next spring and maybe start new ones every....um....maybe three-four years? Not sure how long they will fruit, I think it is up to seven years, but it will be less for the logs I have now for the above reasons. Apparently. From what I've been told.

Pics tomorrow if I can get out there when it is not raining!