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.