Posted on 12/27/2022 11:31:51 AM PST by Red Badger
For indoor gardeners who want to try something a bit more exotic, cultivating mushrooms can be rewarding and FirstBuild's Mella smart mushroom fruiting chamber promises to take some of the guesswork out of the challenge. New Atlas recently got its hands on one and we put it through its paces. Here's what we found.
For centuries, mushrooms have been a mystery and often suspected as being something supernatural. Suddenly appearing out of nowhere, they were thought to be the works of the devil, or witches, or lightning, or shooting stars.
Folklore even suggested that rings of mushrooms in a field were the gathering places of fairies. According to legend, if you stepped into one, you could end up in Fairyland, where you would be dined and entertained all night by your generous fairy hosts, only to wake up the next morning outside the ring of mushrooms to find that one evening in Fairyland equals 20 years in the mortal world.
Fairies have a warped sense of humor.
We now know that mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi – that strange third kingdom of life that is neither plant nor animal. Despite their strange reputation, people have been eating them from prehistoric times, though most of the time they've been gathered in the wild by those with enough luck and knowledge to find where they grew and to tell which were edible from those that were poisonous.
The poisonous bit gave mushrooms such a bad reputation in some parts of the world that many English-speaking regions were, until recently, mycophobic and mushroom hunters had a reputation as eccentrics who flirted with death for their dinner.
(Excerpt) Read more at newatlas.com ...
I think I’ve even seen kits where you can start cultivating them outside, if you have the right conditions.
I’m in PA, I can’t grow poison ivy here with any reliability. :(
LOL! My husband is from PA - his Dad grew about 1/4 acre of great tomatoes every year (I think blight got them one year) and a whole big patch of other veggies.
(Husband suggests contacting local extension, and having a soil survey done. And finding someone nearby with a supply of horse manure :-)
I’m in southeast PA on a horse farm. He’s welcome to all he can carry. :)
Yes, some folks can grow a micro Amazon jungle in PA soil.
But I can’t! That’s why I resorted to mushrooms.
I’d agree that morels are the best, and IMO the best way to prepare them is just to slice them thin and saute the slices in a little butter. I could eat a whole panful. Haven’t had any morels since moving to Arizona in the 80s.
Those are morels, where did you hunt them?
At a stable where I used to ride, there would always be a huge pile of it. Little old ladies would drive up in their little cars and cart off garbage bags full of it for their suburban and city gardens. One of them told me she sprouted her seeds directly in it.
Old folks know how to grow stuff.
I have family who live on the Oregon coast. Their entire property has magic mushrooms growing everywhere. Can’t say I am adventurous to try them. I take my drugs in 12 ounce bottles....
You would love living in Eastern Europe. When I did you only had to go to the local street market and there were mushrooms of every variety cheap sold by mushroom hunters. And oh my God.. The korbyczyk and ocsypek cheeses of the Tatras heated up with some fried fresh morels...
Smacznego!
I want to go to Zakopane one year for the Holidays.
They don't particularly like the dark, they just don't produce chlorophyll or do photosynthesis, so they don't need sunlight for that reason. However, they do need a "grow light" of some form to tell the mushrooms which way is up. Otherwise they grow up deformed.
But they're mostly water (by weight) so too much sunlight can dry them out, stunting or killing them.
They're widely available, and completely legal. The spores are unregulated, it's the psilocybin in the fruit that's illegal. Even the magic mushrooms have been decriminalized in some of the same places that have decriminalized pot (Colorado is on, IIRC).
My thoughts exactly. Most starting mushroomists D-I-Y a fruiting chamber from a $10 64-quart transparent sterilite plastic tub from the store with a sign that looks like a bulls-eye. And they D-I-Y most of the rest with the exception of spores.
If you're the ambitious sort you'll learn to harvest spores from your own fruit, at which point you're pretty self-sufficient.
Unfortunately, no one has yet come up with a reliable method for farming morels. Which explains why the ones that are available fetch such a dear price.
Morel-gathering is licensed in Oregon so if you're caught gathering mushrooms the Game Warden will ask to see your license. He'll also ask to see your shrooms because it's illegal to gather the psychedelic ones.
If you have any psychedelics they'll arrest you. If you have poisonous mushrooms, they'll seize them and give you a stern talking to.
So if you're caught with mushrooms that will send you to God, you get off with a slap on the wrist. But if you're caught with the ones that will only make you see God, they'll put you in jail.
Go figure.
I think Oregon legalized ‘shrooms...
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2020/11/oregon-becomes-first-state-to-legalize-psychedelic-mushrooms.html
And I recall Asian gangs having shoot outs over morel hunting grounds.
And there are FReepers who say that pot mushrooms are harmless.
LOL
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