Review: Mella fruiting chamber turns mushroom growing into home hobby

New Atlas ^ | December 24, 2022 | By David Szondy

[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.

[Roccus]

Former neighbor of mine comes by early every spring with some of his kids. They spend some time picking up branches off my grass and then go across my creek and forage for morel mushrooms and ramps on my wooded hillside. I’ve let them collect over there for years.

Back in the late 40s, as a real youngster, I used to hunt mushrooms with my Grandfather in the old World’s Faire Grounds in Queens, NY. There were these wide boulevards with center medians that were bordered with some type of shrubbery. Over the years those bushes had gotten so big that they made a tunnel of the center of the median. Grandpa would fight his way through the thicket and we would hunt in that dark tunnel. He carried a rectangular vegetable basket and a pointed stick...his “diggin’ stick”... and I would hunt them up for him. I couldn’t tell you what type they were (NOT morel) or which ones were “bad”, but I could always spot the ones HE wanted.

[Tommy Revolts]

In Missouri.

[NorthMountain]

The DEA might take an interest in your hobby ...