The wife and I went for a tour of an organic mushroom farm today. It was really cool. They were growing maitakes , shiitakes, white beech and brown beech mushrooms. The GM was a really good guy, showd us everything. I also have an internship lined up for the winter when the restaurant slows down! We left with 6 lbs of maitakes , a big paper bag of king oysters, 2 ea maitakes , shiitake, king oyster blocks to fruit at home. Also got some spawn of brown and white beech , king oyster to expand and grow at home. I will post some pix later.

Actually on Mother's Day, I was surprised see morels growing in the mulch around the shrubs at my in-laws' house. They live in N. Smithfield; maybe the mulch came from Pennsylvania replete with spores.

Heres some pix from the farm

Ill post a lot more later, going squidding!

Cant upload pix, no security token?

this is A MUST watch video
 

Quite interesting.

Stamets has done lots of great research in this field. Amazing guy! I have most of his books, loaded with good info . He has done a lot with bioremediation using mushrooms. In one they used soil soaked with diesel fuel from a DOT lot. There were a couple others test by people using chemicals , or bacteria etc to clean the soil. He mixed in oyster mushroom spawn into his pile. The oyster mushrooms broke almost all of the fuel down into harmless simple compounds in the process, cheaply cleaning the soil

Stamets' research with fungi is pretty amazing. I've read a couple of his books as well. The efficiency in which mycelium can break down hydrocarbons always amazed me.

contrary to co workers who say Stamet is a booring dude, he is quite a fungi :hihi:

:rotflmao::rotflmao: Nice

Now if you grew some porcini mushrooms.....:drool:

Sorry, cant cultivate those. They have symbiotic relationships with trees and need them to fruit.

oak logs notched with a saw or holes and plugs for shietake's eh?

wanted to add

that they did tests on flashing mushrooms with pulses of light
rapid fire to see if that would multiply the vitamin D content
and it worked like a charm

took no time at all
and the shrooms retained it for weeks

cool stuff, Chef

way cool mushroom growing video
 

i love this method of hanging it

check it out

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