ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 22, 1996 TAG: 9612240006
SECTION: HOMES PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: ADRIENNE COOK SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON POST
Mushroom vendors and growers in recent years have taken advantage of the burgeoning interest in exotic varieties with the marketing of home mycology kits.
Once the only way you could cultivate your own shiitakes - one of the easier mushrooms to grow at home - was to find a mushroom farmer willing to sell some appropriate oak logs and the correct spawn.
The task of inoculating the wood with the spawn, followed by the long wait until the first bloom, may have been mitigated by the promise of four years of harvest from the single log. Still, growing shiitakes and other mushrooms this way has been left to dedicated gardeners with a taste for gourmet fungi.
The method still is employed by professional growers. But for the home market, modern technology and rapid delivery services such as Federal Express have brought mushroom farming within reach of ordinary gardeners.
Mushroom kits with a range of varieties are now a common feature of garden catalogs and even some garden centers. Certainly they are not difficult to find.
Years ago, I launched a small shiitake operation up in the woods west of Washington. This was a major undertaking. It took about 20 hours over the course of several days to inoculate the two dozen oak logs we had cut down. The logs were 4 feet long. We drilled dime-size holes into them and placed in each cavity a thimbleful of spawn. The holes then were corked with Styrofoam plugs. Over and over again. Each log got perhaps 30 of these injections.
Then the logs were stacked carefully in the woods in cool shade, where they rested for several months as the spawn permeated the now-dying wood. Through the first summer, when rain was plentiful, we harvested a few basketfuls of mushrooms. When rain was scarce, we soaked logs to stimulate a bloom. We had a respectable but not overly abundant crop that first summer; after that, the harvests dwindled to nearly nothing.
Later, we discovered that the spawn we had bought was bad: Shiitake producers up and down the East Coast had been stuck with inferior spore culture, all of us seeing harvests well below expectations. It was too much to repeat the labor, and we simply gave up on it.
It was thus with some trepidation that I received earlier this year from Fungi Perfecti in Washington State two kits: one for growing shiitakes, the other for oyster mushrooms (so-named because they taste like the mollusks).
The kits arrived in boxes that were large - about the size of a five-gallon bucket - but surprisingly light. Each contained a sealed plastic bag holding something that looked like sawdust.
The mixture, according to Fungi Perfecti president Paul Stamets, contains sawdust, wood chips and bran. Each sawdust bag already had been injected with the appropriate spore.
The shiitake bag was ready to bloom, evidenced by numerous black buttons showing on the surface of the pale sawdust. Following the instructions, I cut open the sealed bag, removed the sawdust block and immersed it in non-chlorinated water for 24 hours.
Once drained, the block was placed indoors in a light-filled room because it was still quite chilly outside. The kit came with a humidity tent: a plastic bag with holes placed over the block. The instructions told me to mist the block three or four times a day - I managed about half that. Nonetheless, within a couple of weeks we were sampling the first of our shiitakes.
The block is supposed to rest for several weeks between blooms, mimicking the outdoor oak-log system: Technology may have altered the way I was growing the mushrooms, but it couldn't force itself on nature's rhythms.
By the time the six-week rest period was up, the weather outside was warm enough for me to move the mycelium block outside. In the woods, with natural rain bathing it regularly, the sawdust square bloomed anew, each time with fewer mushrooms, into fall. The last bloom yielded only a pair of shiitakes, indicating the end of production.
The oyster mushrooms were the big surprise - and the big hit. Unlike the shiitake block, the oyster mushroom patch remained in its original bag, which again is placed inside a humidity bag and given frequent mistings. Within days, oyster mushrooms began springing out of the holes. They grew and grew and I had dozens of the delicate white fungi. I picked some, and others kept on growing. Every few days, new mushrooms appeared.
The oyster-mushroom kit produced almost continuously for about three months. I kept it handy, in a room next to the kitchen, because of the misting regimen. It, too, could have gone outside with the warmer weather, but by the time it got warm enough, the patch was dwindling in production. But it was certainly the more productive of the two. And both were a marked improvement over the old method of mushroom cultivation.
Fungi Perfecti sells 11 mushroom varieties raised with indoor kits and an additional four, including morels, that are cultivated outdoors in the earth. Costs range from $19 to $29.95 plus shipping.
Catalogs are available from Fungi Perfecti, P.O. Box 7634, Olympia, Wash., 98507 (360-426-9292).
LENGTH: Medium: 90 linesby CNB