Mycology

For decades we have been collecting and eating morels, puffballs, shaggy manes, oyster mushrooms and a few other varieties of wild fungi. We have always stayed with varieties that we can absolutely, positively identify and that means avoiding the typical "toadstool-shaped" mushrooms - not because they can't be identified but because there are too many varieties to remember all the subtle identifying characteristics and we usually don't have a reference book with us when we find them.

Although we've harvested a lot of fungi from the wild we have done little in the way of growing them ourselves. We did try a shiitake kit once, but we didn't water it as reliably as we should have so it produced only a few small mushrooms. But now we're trying again thanks to Jay's mom, who gave us a mushroom kit for Christmas 2008. Click here to watch the exciting story unfold!

We became even more interested in home-grown fungi after reading the book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, which we highly recommend. Aside from lots of information about how to grow mushrooms, this book also has nutritional analyses and it's surprising how nutritious mushrooms are. Although they've been rumored to be little more than "water and minerals", they are actually quite high in protein as well as a wide variety of beneficial compounds. Our property in Saranac already has a diverse population of wild fungi and in addition we plan to grow shiitake and oyster mushrooms to start, with more to follow once we find the time.

August 9, 2009
Click here for photos of our Mushroom Logs.