Contents Introduction vii PA R T I
The Fundamentals of Mushroom Cultivation
1. The Ecology and Life Cycle of Cultivated Mushrooms 2. The Seven Basic Stages of Mushroom Cultivation 3. Choosing a Mushroom to Cultivate 4. Choosing, Handling, and Storing Spawn 5. Cultivating Mushrooms Outdoors on Logs, Stumps, and Wood Chips 6. Cultivating Mushrooms on Compost and Livestock Waste 7. Cultivating Mushrooms on Pasteurized or Sterilized Media 8. Cropping Containers 9. Natural Pest Control and Disease Management
1 13 31 37 45 59 65 73 83
PA R T I I
Mushrooms for Life: Innovative Applications and Projects Using Fungi 10. Recycling, Composting, and Vermicomposting with Mushrooms 11. Urban Mushroom Cultivation 12. Shroomin’ Off the Grid 13. Mushroom Products and Cutting-Edge Applications 14. Mushroom-Infused Beer, Wine, and Spirits 15. Mushroom Marketing 16. Fungi in the Classroom
95 105 111 123 137 145 151
PA R T I I I
Advanced Techniques and Research
17. Basic Laboratory Construction, Equipment, and Procedures 18. Starting Cultures and Spawn Generation 19. Storing Your Cultures 20. Advanced Cultivation and Research Strategies 21. Morel Cultivation: Research Update 22. Introduction to Mycoremediation
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PA R T I V
Meet the Cultivated Mushrooms The Genus Agaricus (white button, portabella, and relatives) 251 The Genus Agrocybe (black poplar) 257 The Genus Auricularia (wood ear) 261 The Genus Clitocybe (blewit) 265 The Genus Coprinus (shaggy mane) 269 The Genus Fistulina (beefsteak) 273 The Genus Flammulina (enoki, velvet foot) 277 The Genera Fomes, Fomitopsis, and Laricifomes (amadou and related conks) 281 The Genus Ganoderma (reishi and other varnished polypores) 285 The Genus Grifola (maitake, hen of the woods) 289 The Genus Hericium (lion’s mane, pom-poms) 293 The Genus Hypholoma (brick top) 297 The Genus Hypsizygus (elm oyster, shimeji) 301 The Genus Laetiporus (chicken of the woods) 305 The Genus Lentinula (shiitake) 309 The Genera Macrocybe and Calocybe (giant macrocybe, giant milky) 315 The Genera Macrolepiota and Lepiota (parasol) 319 The Genus Pholiota (nameko) 323 The Genus Piptoporus (birch polypore) 327 The Genus Pleurotus (oyster mushrooms) 329 The Genus Sparassis (cauliflower) 339 The Genus Stropharia (king stropharia, garden giant, wine cap) 343 The Genus Trametes (turkey tail) 349 The Genus Volvariella (paddy straw) 353 Acknowledgments 357 Glossary 359 Bibliography 363 Resources and Suppliers 367 Index 369
For a more complete list of common names, see individual profiles for each genus
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The Seven Basic Stages of Mushroom Cultivation
These harvested oyster mushrooms were lightly trimmed. Later they’ll be stored in ventilated cardboard boxes to preserve moisture and allow for gas exchange, which prevents spoilage.
Refrigeration and Shelf Life
crunchy, meaty texture even after years in storage. In general, I only recommend drying your mushrooms if you grow too many, so that you can at least recover the cost of production and offer a companion product to your fresh mushrooms that can be used for flour, making teas and extracts, and other products. Chapter 15 discusses some of the ways you can market, package, and display your items if you are going to sell them; you might be surprised how many different ways mushrooms can be sold. Be creative and dream up something new to make your operation different!
If you’re storing fresh mushrooms at 38 to 42°F (3–6°C)—the ideal temperature for long-term storage of fresh mushrooms—store them in cardboard boxes that have a few holes, similar to produce boxes. Since these boxes aren’t cheap, consider asking local restaurants or produce distribution companies for their used boxes and then use them over and over again. You’ll get many uses out of the boxes; they only become unusable when they get wet, so store them in a clean, dry place. 29
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Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation
Grain spawn is usually more expensive than sawdust and plug spawn, but it supplements the medium with nutrients from the grain.
Transplanting wild stem bases and mycelia can provide beneficial microbes that some mushrooms need to trigger a fruiting response.
and should never be used in outdoor beds that will be in contact with soil or for wood log or wood chip cultivation, where insects can find and eat it before it has a chance to spread forth mycelium. One exception to this rule is outdoor beds of manure susbtrates that have been steam-treated or composted to a high heat. These can be inoculated with grain spawn effectively, along with paddy straw cultivation using low-tech techniques.
spawn. Although using natural spawn can often work in a pinch when laboratory spawn is unavailable, you wouldn’t want to use it if you were running a commercial operation. It has benefits, but also potentially disastrous disadvantages for a large operation. The downside is that naturalized spawn comes along with millions of microbes. If you’ve foraged mycelium from the wild, how do you know you are expanding the right type of mycelium, when most mycelium is white and indistinguishable? You could be propagating an unwanted or even poisonous species. One advantage, however, is that the mycelium most likely contains microbes that stimulate fungal
Naturalized or Wild Spawn Spawn that has been transplanted or grown from the bases of wild mushrooms is called naturalized or wild 40
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Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation
A wood chip bed.
mycelium get well established and then mulch it in the fall to provide an additional layer of insulation and food for the following year. Regardless of when you spawn your bed, when winter approaches, cover any summer-fruiting strains with leaves and straw to insulate them from the freezing weather. Remove the covering before the mushroom’s fruiting season arrives, but don’t rake it all away; you need a thin layer to preserve moisture. Wood chip beds generally fruit for one to two years. If you add more wood chips at the end of the year, you can extend the life span of the beds for several years, but I have found that worms often infiltrate the beds and consume the mycelium in the second year, so I encourage scooping out the beds and refurbishing them completely if no visible mycelium is detected with a little digging around. You can also simply add more cardboard to the existing bed and start the process again on top of the existing bed, which will build your soil and add inches per year of incredible compost to your gardening areas. Or, to perpetuate your operation, you can harvest the best-looking mycelium from select regions of the bed and move it into fresh chips. Whatever you choose to do, never add more chips to a bed when your mushrooms are about to fruit or it will delay fruiting, since the mycelium will become more interested in colonizing the fresh substrate.
a layer of substrate all around the edges of the bed, and then water heavily. Wood chips are especially helpful for log raft cultivation; they give the bed an extra food source and help retain water for the developing mushrooms when they fruit. Once the logs have been trenched or set up in rafts, water them once a month. When you begin to see fruit, mist them daily.
Wood Chip Cultivation There are many popular and reliable edible mushrooms that people cultivate outdoors on wood chips, many of which incorporate beautifully into fruit and vegetable gardens. For example, king stropharia (Stropharia rugoso-annulata) is suitable to most climates and loves fresh-cut hardwood chips, preferably the heartwood or sapwood, rather than the outer bark layers commonly sold as mulch. Some species of terrestrial wood-inhabiting mushrooms need a thin (1/2 inch) layer of soil or compost on top of a wood chip bed to supply symbiotic bacteria or a different habitat interface to promote fruiting. (For all the details on particular species, see part 4.) Wood chip beds can be spawned year-round, except in extremely cold climates, where you would want to spawn your bed in the spring to let the 54
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Cultivating Mushrooms Outdoors on Logs, Stumps, and Wood Chips
Wood Chip Cultivation Step-by-Step Step 1. For a tidy wood chip bed, build a frame out of hardwood logs that are about 6 to 8 inches in diameter. (You can inoculate the logs themselves with mushroom strains that prefer log cultivation, like reishi.) If you don’t have logs available, you can use untreated lumber. Or just clear an area; you do not necessarily need edging or formal borders. The mushrooms will need some shade, so locate the site in a shady area or between rows of vegetable plants. Step 2. Cover the bed with cardboard from flattened boxes. Water the cardboard until it is saturated. Then sprinkle sawdust spawn sparingly onto the cardboard, casting it in small islands, so the mycelia pieces can branch out and find each other to join forces.
Sprinkle sawdust spawn sparingly onto a layer of wet cardboard.
Step 3. Add 2 to 3 inches of fresh hardwood chips. Scatter sawdust spawn over the wood chips. Rake the chips to even out the surface of the bed, and pack them down to get rid of air pockets. Sprinkle the bed lightly with water, enough to moisten the chips. Step 4. Cover the wood chips with another layer of cardboard. For this layer, you’ll want smaller pieces of cardboard to allow water to pass through to the wood chips. A single layer of newspaper will also work. Sprinkle another layer of spawn “islands” onto the cardboard or newspaper. Sprinkle lightly with water.
Add fresh wood chips to a depth of about 2 to 3 inches and scatter spawn on that as well.
Step 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until the beds are at least 6 to 8 inches deep. Cover the bed with 1 to 2 inches of straw or leaves to preserve moisture and shade the chips. Step 6. Water your bed every day for the first week. Water it every other day for weeks two through four, and once a month thereafter (unless it receives sufficient rain). After four to eight months the mycelium will have spread throughout the chips and penetrated the surrounding soil. Check back on your patch often! Mushrooms grow extremely quickly once they start fruiting. Your patches may flush several times a year, during the temperature window for the mushroom you are cultivating.
Using a rake, even out the chips. This will help integrate spawn into the wood chips. 55
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