Shitake coming soon! (I hope)

One of the treasures we brought home from the workshop with Paul Stamets at Fungi Perfecti was a bag of alder chips and sawdust we inoculated with shitake mycelium. The mycelium has now completely colonized the chips and sawdust and is ready to be stimulated into fruiting. The method for doing so is to increase the moisture content and humidity by spraying the block daily with rain water. I made a humidification chamber out of a wire structure wrapped in stretchy plastic to keep the moisture contained around the shitake block. When i lift off the chamber for the daily misting CO2 will escape and fresh air will fill the chamber. Hopefully in a week or so mushrooms will start to form and we'll be eating fresh, nutritious mushrooms soon.
I've got my fingers crossed.

Mushroom are coming

The mushroom cultivation workshop with Paul Stamets was great. There were 27 people attending from as far away as Russia, Mexico and Germany. A huge amount of information was presented over the course of the weekend. Paul is so passionate about what he does. It is very inspiring. He is committed to saving the planet with fungi leading the way. He and his team were going to San Francisco last Monday to provide oyster mushroom spawn to break down the oil from the spill in the bay. The oil was soaked up into human hair mats by volunteers on surf boards.
Paul says that the fungi mother the forest. They interconnect all of the creatures. This is the link i have been searching for during my whole career as a horticulturist and landscape architect.
I now see the Funny Farm through a mycelial lens. Everything we do from here on out will be mothered by fungi. We started work on our sterile culture lab today. Soon we will be producing mushroom spawn and inoculating the world with it so we can take advantage of all the nutritional and medicinal benefits that mushrooms provide us.