I Ask, the Lantern Answers

After a long winter hiatus, I'm blogging once more.

Last fall, I asked the Slate's Green Lantern about cage-free and free-range eggs. On Tuesday, the Lantern answered. Interestingly, cage-free and free-range eggs turn out to be less green in some respects that penned-up hens, but the Lantern recommends raising your own chickens to reduce transportation costs.

Mushrooms Day 12: Almost Edible

Yesterday, the primordia had grown enough that the individual mushrooms were becoming obvious:

Holy mycelia, Batman! There must be 15-20 mushrooms in that one big primordium, and it looks like there are around 20 primordia all over the kit, which translates to 300-400 mushrooms total! Anybody want to buy some mushrooms when they're ready? I'm not convinced we're going to be able to eat them all while their at their peak. I know, we can dry them, but what's the fun in that?

By yesterday evening, they had grown significantly:

Today, the mushrooms are noticeably bigger, more distinct, and more mushroom-like in shape:

 

I noticed some shrooms sprouting under the label, so I peeled it off to let them grow:

Next time, I'll remove the label immediately. There are new primordia showing up everywhere on the bag where there is no mold. It's quite impressive, and also sort of nice that we'll get the mushrooms in stages, so they won't all peak at the same time. We're probably two or three days away from edible shrooms!

Zing! Pizza Announces All You Can Eat II - Tuesday, January 19, 6-9pm

Mark Ostow, owner of Zing! Pizza, has declared a repeat of his very successful All You Can Eat night. For some small fee, you can go to Zing! Pizza and eat as much as you like, trying all their amazing, delicious, locally-sourced pizzas. My personal favor is the Blue October with butternut squash and blue cheese - mmm! For more information, see http://zingpizza.blogspot.com/.

Mushrooms Day 10: Primordia Galore

Okay, dark patches in the straw are NOT primordia. On day 8, I turned the kit around to check for primordia on the back and found an enormous green splotch:

That's mold, not primordia, which means we've been keeping the humidity too high. I had just sprayed the kit (oops), so I resolved not to spray on day 9.

However, there were clear signs of primordia developing on day 8. You can see one poking out a bit on the far left of the moldy photo. Here's a clearer shot, showing popcorn-like growth:

 

 On day 9, these had grown noticably:

 

There were similar primordia all over the front of the kit.

Today, day 10, the primordia do not appear to have progressed much:

So I misted the kit again. While the primordia don't appear larger, they do appear more bifurcated (split into lots of little knobs). We'll see what they do with a little more moisture.

Update: More Shiitakes on the Way

I received an email response asking me to call Fungi Perfecti (pronounced Funj-eye Perfect-eye, apparently). The customer service rep I spoke to there was very helpful and immediately offered me a replacement, which will arrive here in about a week. Meanwhile, she instructed me to put the failed kit in the compost. Hmmm... will we have shiitakes growing out of the compost come spring?

Well, this way, we won't be inundated by mushrooms all at once.

Mushrooms Day 7: Primordia and Other Mushroom Vocabulary

Day 7 of our great mushroom experiment, and there's a big dark patch on the side of the pearl oyster mushroom kit:

According to our instruction manual, this is the first sign of the development of primordia - "the youngest stage of mushroom formation, usually appearing as small bumps or clusters."

Here's some more mushroom terminology for you:

• flush - a crop of mushrooms
• fruit - to cause mushrooms to form
• initiate - to stimulate mushroom formation by dropping temperature ("cold shocking"), adding more moisture, or providing air or indirect light
• mycelium - the fungal network of thread-like cells that gives rise to mushrooms
• spores - microscopic "seeds" of mushrooms which appear as a white dust around and below mature Oyster mushrooms

Note that other species of mushroom may have differently-colored spores: black, brown, even red, blue, orange, or purple.

At any rate, I expect that we'll see the small bumps of primordia in the next day or two. A correction to my last post: the instructions say that we should see primordia within 14 days of starting to mist the kit. The photos in the manual show primordia at 7 days, so we're doing just fine. If all continues as expected, we'll have mushrooms ready for harvest in about four days.

The shiitake mushrooms look pretty much the same as last night. I've had no word back yet from Fungi Perfecti on what to do with them, so I misted them as instructed, just to be on the safe side.

Try This At Home: Grow Your Own Mushrooms

Over the long, slow winter, when our garden is bedded down with snow, we decided to try growing mushrooms. We had heard Paul Stamets speak at the NOFA 2009 Summer Conference and had picked up his Fungi Perfecti catalog. After much deliberation, we chose to try out the Pearl Oyster mushroom kit ($24.00) and the Shiitake mushroom kit ($26.00). These are pretty standard, tried-and-true shrooms, and they looked fairly easy to care for. They arrived six days ago on Friday, January 8th. We waited until we got the girls to bed, then gleefully unpacked them and figured out how to get our shrooms growing.

Each kit came packed in a plastic bag with an instruction manual and an additional, larger plastic bag with holes punched in it:

The pearl oyster mushroom kit (left) came as packed straw inoculated with mushroom spawn. The shiitake kit (right) turned out to be a pressed brick of wood chips. It looked remarkably like popcorn. Reading the manual and checking the date on the bag (Nov. 20 was less than 40 days from the date of arrival), we learned that the shiitakes were not yet ready to bloom. We were advised to keep them in the refrigerator for 3-5 days (picture was in fact taken in the fridge).

The pearl oysters, however, were ready to go. I placed them in a clean pink hospital tub:

Then, according to the directions, I used two wire coat hangers to create a tree, straightening out the hook ends and pushing them firmly into the straw.

I misted the kit all over with water. The water cannot be chlorinated; the instructions recommend rainwater, but since it's January in Massachusetts, I filled a pot with snow and melted it on the stove, then let it cool before spraying the kit.

Once I misted the kit, I covered it with the large plastic bag provided:

We mist the kit every morning. We keep it in our second floor bathroom with the blinds down, where it benefits from low natural light and steam from morning showers.

After keeping the shiitakes in the fridge for 5 days, we took them out. The instructions say to open the bag they come in and fill the bag with water. Alternatively, you can soak them in a 5-gallon tub. Since we chose to melt snow, the 5-gallon tub sounded like a good idea. We unwrapped the brick and placed it in the tub full of snowmelt... where it floated. (I completely failed to take pictures of this, sorry.) We weighted it down with a pyrex pan and a rock inside it so that it would stay submerged, and let it soak for 24 hours as recommended.

Today, I tried to take the brick out of the tub, and it disintegrated in my hands. I strained the crumbled block out in a colander and did my best to press it back into shape with the popcorn-y outer crust on the outside:

The bag provided had also disappeared, so I made do with another bag, punching holes in it approximately the size and frequency of the bag on the pearl oysters. The instructions say to use skewers or chopsticks pressed into the block to keep the bag open over the shiitakes, but there was no way they'd stay in. So I used four angle brackets that were lying around and hung the bag over the remains of the block.

At this point, I have very low expectations for the shiitakes. If they bloom, I'll be amazed. What went wrong? Did I miscount the days and kill off the shrooms in the fridge? Was there something in the snow? We took it from the garden, and we don't use salt on our walks. We also cleaned out the tub first. Should we have left the block in the bag? Been more careful removing it from the tub? I'll write Fungi Perfecti and ask.

The pearl oysters, on the other hand, seem to be doing fine on day 6:

There's clearly a lot of moisture inside the kit bag, but not too much. Misting appears to be working well. I see no sign that the shrooms are beginning to form, but we're not supposed to see anything until day 7. I'll post again as soon as something comes up.

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth

I'm back. My apologies for the long hiatus. I went on vacation to New Mexico in late October/early November, and then the holidays just steamrolled right over me. But I've got tons of new stuff to share with you, including:

1. Giving farmshares as Christmas presents
2. The latest from Lexington Community Farm
3. Growing mushrooms at home (with pictures!)
4. Upcoming locavore meat deliveries