Miracle mushrooms

Look at these baby mushrooms - don't they look like they would cure cancer?

During the hot part of the year (and this year was hotter/dryer than usual), our mushroom production dwindled. However now that it's chillier we are back in full swing, getting about half a pound of oyster mushrooms every other day or so. And boy, are they good!

We will now be getting some warm weather spores, so we can have mushrooms year round.

Oyster Mushrooms

We have been eating off our oyster mushrooms this week and it has been a real treat.

We grew button mushrooms before, but our success was only mild. They are a lot more picky about humidity, and we weren't quite up to the challenge at that point. Now we are trying our luck with oysters, a far more forgiving shroom. They grow incredibly fast - you can almost watch them grow if you are so inclined. They are also incredibly tasty. We grow them in laundry baskets filled with shredded straw.

We have made more liquid culture, grain spawn, taken a spore print and have even cloned a few mushrooms. We mean to continue this wonderful experiment.

For more photos, click here.

You gotta love 'shrooms

Last night we ate the first mushroom grown on our place. You expect homegrown veggies to taste better (and they sure do), but we never thought it would make that much difference with a mushroom. It does. Neither of us have ever tasted such a delicious, great textured button mushroom.

We have two types of button mushrooms as well as oysters growing. One type of the buttons is starting to fruit.

It was super easy.

• We put horse manure and cut up hay in an ice chest and added water.
• We turned this mixture every couple of days to speed up the composting. As it composted, it got super hot (you couldn't even hold your hand in it), thus killing any unwanted critters.
• After about 20 days, we put the compost into plastic lined boxes, and added the spores.
• Once the spores filled the soil, which it has done with the one type of buttons, we added a sprinkling of peat moss onto it, opened it up and spray it with water every day. The mushrooms are our reward.

We plan to build the mushrooms their own little underground house when we get a chance. Right now we have them in the power house, which stays a pretty constant temperature all year around. This is key with mushrooms - you don't want it getting too hot or too cold.

Mushrooms

We are now mushroom farmers.

We put a bunch of horse manure and straw in an ice chest until it completely composted (and got incredibly hot). We then put the compost into lined boxes and added the spores of Oyster, button and almond button mushrooms.

No photos on this right now, as it's just a bunch of dirt in boxes.