Ringless Honey Mushrooms

I’ve been on a mushroom kick lately, as you can tell by the last couple of posts. By “lately”, I really mean the past year and a half. Perhaps a better way of putting it is “I’ve been on an extended mushroom kick”.

You know how when something is brought to your attention you start seeing it everywhere? That’s more or less what it’s been like with my mushroom obsession. I see mushrooms everywhere now, even when I’m not looking for them. I’m pretty much a total newbie when it comes to identifying wild anything, and wild mushrooms are no exception, but whenever I see one I haven’t seen before I rush to look it up online and see if I can figure out what it is. It’s fun to find something mysterious and unknown, and then put a name to it.

However, I’m consistently plagued by self-doubt, and with the exception of some easily identified mushrooms (puffballs, chanterelles, oysters), I haven’t actually had the balls to eat any of the mushrooms I’ve found that I determine to belong to the (depressingly small percentage in my experience) list of “this one won’t make you gag, get sick, or kill you.”

All this brings me to a phenomenon that occurred over the past week- which was the sudden and ubiquitous emergence of these pretty little clusters of yellow/brown mushrooms.

 

EVERYWHERE. Not an exaggeration. Like one every few feet. If I had a mind to, I could probably have filled several garbage bags full. And I’m talkin’ the big 72 gallon bags.

So of course I rushed doubly fast to the computer, a specimen in my lap, and began to scour the small section of the web devoted to figuring out which mushrooms are which. I determined, with like nearly 99% certainty, that my farm was being overtaken by Ringless Honey Mushrooms.

I saw it described at being “technically edible”….Heh, not a ringing endorsement.

But still I thought to myself  ”Aha! I can eat this!”  Of course, I didn’t. Because like the many, many birds I have cavorting around the farm (who, incidentally were not eating any of the mushrooms either),  I was chicken. The part of my brain wired for survival started to think that maybe this mushroom looks EXACTLY like all the ones with the little skull and crossbones icon next to their pictures in the field guides.

 

 

One day I will be brave, bold, and sure of my identifications- but not today. Today, at least I am alive, and am not in the process of having my stomach pumped. Anyway, anyone ever eat one of these?

Making a Home Mushroom Lab

I started writing this post by typing the title “Building a Home Mushroom Lab”, when I instantly realized that “building” is far to glorious a name for what passes for my laboratory.

I actually made my lab over a year ago, and am just getting around to posting about it. But in a way I’m glad I held off writing, because a year was about what I needed to make the little adjustments that made it better.

You may be wondering, “Why do you need a laboratory to grow mushrooms?”  The simple answer is- you don’t. Although hardcore mushroom enthusiasts (yes, such people do exist) might vehemently disagree.

No matter how you slice it, a lab is necessary at some point of the process whenever a mushroom is grown; or if not a lab, at the very least a sterile environment, as mushrooms cultures are mostly started using tissue culture <—handy link to Wikipedia! 

You don’t need to do this part yourself though, as many mushrooms farms and hobbyists buy their mushrooms spawn from labs that specialize in producing it. But if you want to be really cool, and save a bunch of money and headaches (and create another set of expenses and headache inducing problems), you will want to make spawn yourself!

You also don’t need a setup as fancy as the one I’m about to describe- not that a pvc and greenhouse plastic tent is fancy. You can make do with tissue culture, with more frequent failure, with a glove box or even a clean kitchen counter if you so desire.

So how does mushroom tissue culture work?  Paul Stamets is the go-to guy on all this stuff. Usually when you hear the phrase that someone has “written the book” on a certain topic, it’s just a metaphor for them being really knowledgeable. Even if they wrote a book, there are probably several others by just as prolific authors. Pauls Stamets actually wrote the book. Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms is a gigantic tome with all the information you could possibly want on growing mushroom spawn in a sterile environment. It’s really the only book like it. The problem with it is that it’s totally inaccessible. I plowed my way through it as a complete beginner and was totally stumped. So much so that I ended up having to attend his conference (hmmm…intentional?) just to make sense of it all.

In my opinion, this website  does a much more concise job explaining the process that doesn’t leave you feeling overwhelmed- plus you don’t have to pay like 40 bucks for the book and potentially 800 additional for a seminar.

Anyway, enough about other people. If your interested in doing this stuff, check out the link or the book, or both. Here is MY lab:

First off, it’s in my bedroom, which was a HORRIBLE idea because the fan for the laminar flow hood (more on that later) is very loud, and it used to keep me awake until I got used to it. My first night sharing my living space with this messy-looking structure had me lying on my back on my bed, eyes wide open and thinking “What have I done?”

It’s also a horrible idea because my dog sleeps in this room and spreads- I’m sure- all sorts of horrible contaminants around wherever she goes. But it was the only place in the house that had the room. I didn’t have anywhere near the budget for a seperate structure, so a room in the house was necessary. In places where people have basements (Interesting random fact: I don’t think I’ve ever been in a basement in my life), basements  are often used for this purpose. Garages could work too.

I made it out of pvc using 4-way pvc fittings I bought at this site . I had a big roll of 6mil greenhouse plastic left over from another project. I’ve seen a lot of people use a ready made plastic greenhouse from home improvement stores, but I had the plastic on hand and wanted something a little bigger, anyway. I made it 8×8 feet. I made the doorway with a piece of cutout plastic and Velcro for “hinges”. Yeah, the door sucks.

Here are the critical components, if you will:

1. Laminar flow hood

A Laminar Flow Hood is basically just a fan that pushes air through a HEPA filter, that filters out bacteria and mold spores that would otherwise get into mushroom cultures and wreck havoc.

I made this myself  (using plans from a site I Googled but can not find now) by buying a squirrel cage fan and a 24inx24in HEPA filter on Ebay. I got my dad to build a the plywood box for it. We made it so the fan was pulling in air from outside the lab, through the HEPA filter. THIS IS CRITICAL! It creates a positive pressure environment in the lab. So all the little holes and cracks have air being pushed out of them, instead of the other way around. Contaminant laden air (i.e. any air that isn’t run through a HEPA filter) is always pushed out, and can’t seep in.

Here you can see how I built the box housing the fan to be open on the back side to achieve this:

 

2. A Desk or other workspace for the flow hood to sit on

I had an old metal desk laying around from back when people used writing desks instead of computer desks. ‘Nuff said.

3. Copious amounts of tape!

I used greenhouse repair tape, and when I ran out, I used duct tape to tape the sheets of plastic together, and tape the plastic around the floor. You want to make it as tight as possible.

4. Shelves, for holding the bags of spawn.

And that’s about it. I set the whole thing up for under 300 dollars, and the vast majority of that was the cost of the filter for the flow hood. This 8×8 space has been all I’ve needed to make enough spawn to keep my 8×20 foot grow room filled mushroom-producing bags. I get virtually no contamination working in this environment.

Sorry!

I’m currently working to fix the image issue. Farmers and computers generally don’t mix and this is no exception. All images in the posts themselves are displaying, it’s just on the main page.