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.