The dirty, awkward and amazing world of mushroom growing.
Fungi have always sparked some curiosity in me. They’re not animals, or plants, having their own taxonomic kingdom [1], they have the title of largest living specimen ever found [2], and they are the closest thing we have to a Zombie apocalypse [3][4][5]. So, obviously, when I saw a mushroom growing kit in a garden store, I had to buy it! But let’s backtrack a little bit.
As a kid, I was told to be afraid of mushrooms. As I remember, my parents would not even let me touch them due the slightest chance of me wanting to taste them. I must confess, that has probably contributed to my curiosity,
A couple of years ago I moved to Finland, at the end of the Summer of 2013. With the first Autumn rains, came the mushrooms… lots and lots of them! more than I ever had seen in my life.
Some time passed, and I realised how mushroom picking is part of the Finnish culture. Every August thousands of people venture into the Finnish forest to pick not just one or two species, but a wide variety of mushrooms. Some quite particular to the country’s cuisine, like the False Morel, that although deadly poisonous and coma inducing when raw, is edible* when properly cooked, commercially sold and regularly consumed in Finland.
Fast forward one year, and with another summer arriving, I decided to look a bit further into the fungi world. Since I was a bit over 20 years behind the “common” knowledge, I went mushroom picking along with some Finnish wisdom, prepared and tasted the most common species growing in Scandinavia, including the False Morel.
One day, in a casual visit to a gardening shop, I found a pre-made mushroom kit, ready to produce mushrooms. It consisted of a plastic bag, filled with straw and some strange white stuff growing in it. It had really simple instructions.
- Make holes in a plastic bag
- Keep moist
And soon enough I had my first set of self grown mushrooms!
The Dirty part
I, that as a kid wished toys were broken so I could tear them apart and see how they worked, followed the instructions for the first batch of mushrooms, until I started poking around that strange white stuff growing in the straw.
What we normally call a mushroom is actually just a fruit of a much larger organism, that usually grows underground, or inside tree trunks and stumps. The mycelium, as it is called, grows from spores when they land in the right conditions. For example, some fungi will only grow near certain plant roots, with who they develop symbiotic relationships (the mycelium breaks down nutrients from the ground that the plant can’t, receiving sugar in return). Anyway, I digress.
I started trying to transplant mycelium from the kit I had gotten, into other growing substrates. While making research on mushroom growing, I soon realised what would be the biggest challenge: hygiene. And yes, I do mean my hygiene. Most of us don’t even realise it, but we are dirty. Everything around us is dirty. Very!
The dirty part of growing mushrooms is, literally, you!
To germinate a certain type of mushroom spores/mycelia, we have to provide a rich nutrient environment, while keeping away every other organism, removing diseases and competition for nutrients. This means completely sterilising something to the point there’s no bacteria, or fungi, or fungi spores left.
Funny thing, if something is completely sterile, it won’t decompose, ever! No mould, no smells, no strange colours or strange liquids. Remember that video of those McDonalds fries that stay the same after 2 months? It probably means good sterilisation, transportation, restaurant hygiene and giving a fatal blow with some deep frying (I sterilised a jar of banana peals, and it stayed the same for about the same time…). After getting something properly sterilised, all you do is introduce mushroom spores, or some pre-existing mycelium, and wait for it to flourish in a nutrient rich environment, without competition.
However, as you may have guessed it, sterilising is the difficult part. Your skin is riddled with one trillion bacteria. The air in your home is filled with billions of spores of countless fungi, moulds, bacteria, and viruses. If any of these microscopic things hit the high rich environment it’s jackpot for them, game over for the fungi you want to grow. Fungi compete with each other in a very real microscopic bio-war, and is the reason why each mushroom releases millions of spores: the probability of one spore leading to a mushroom is really low.
I’m still fine tuning the sterilisation process. One of them consists of boiling the substrate for 15 minutes, for 3 consecutive days, called Tyndallization. A simpler process is to use a pressure cooker, which reaches 120 deg. Celsius, killing pretty much everything… but who owns a pressure cooker nowadays?
The awkward part
I know what you’re thinking, it has been asked to me multiple times:
Are you growing magic mushrooms?
As soon as I told to someone that I was growing mushrooms, there was a strange silence moments after. Some people did not dare to make the question, others bluntly suggested it. Was I growing magic mushrooms?
All the techniques that I learned can be applied to cultivate any**[as mentioned in hackernews comments this applies mostly to saprotrophic mushrooms] kind of mushroom, it does not mean that I’m growing psychedelics in my backyard. Besides the negative connotation of being poisonous and dangerous when picked from the forest, cultivating mushrooms is immediately associated with recreational drug consumption. It is my belief that this association and stigma is what keeps some people from growing mushrooms. And yes, magic mushroom cultivation communities have one of best repositories of information, growing techniques, mushroom classification and academic materials, along with communities like reddit (r/mycology and r/MushroomGrowers)
You can say you like gardening and no one will thing you’re growing marijuana in your backyard. But if you say you’re growing mushrooms, you’re gonna get some questions.
One usual method of germinating spores is with agar (a jelly like algae, used in labs and in food) with some polysaccharide like starch, potato dextrose or fructose (crushed banana). Instead of making your own messy potato/banana mess, you can get agar and any of the mentioned sugars in a pharmacy. But as I’ve seen written here and there, do not tell the pharmacist that you’re using those things to grow mushrooms! You will probably get questioned…
The Amazing part
Fungi and Mushrooms are a fantastic living things, and the effect on the mind, or the body, of some species should not deter us from exploring the usefulness of this bio-resource. Mushrooms take any shit (literally, and non literally), being able to decompose even the most harmful substances into organically usable components. This ability is used in processes of Mycoremediation, using fungi to clean the environment of some toxic substances. This happens in nature, specially in the symbiotic relationships of fungi and plant roots, where fungi trap heavy metals, protecting the plant. In some experiments Oyster mushrooms were able to decompose fuel residue from oil spills into usable composts [6] — That’s the same mushroom I first cultivated.
Mushrooms are also changing packaging and the plastic industry. Using the mycelium living tissue as glue to hold biodegradable materials together (like wood chips), companies are able to produce completely biodegradable materials. Dell is an example of a company already using this kind of materials in packaging, and research is pushing the possibilities of fungi materials into multiple fields.
If you got interested about all of this, you can start easily with available kits.
Here are some interesting projects I have been able to spot around here so far:
Finland:
(If you know more, please contact)
*False morels should not be eaten in big quantities, even when properly cooked.
