One more try...

March 18, 2018 Elizabeth Boegel

We've tried growing mushrooms twice before, with zero luck. We've used old logs, fresh logs, oak, ash. We've tried them in different places in our yard. no go. Mostly I think it's too hot here, but I wanted to try one more time, make sure to place the logs in a very very shady place, and use water from the rain barrel (not the municipal system), and see if we can't make it happen.

So again I ordered plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti in the Pacific Northwest. The last two times we tried shiitake, so I ordered oyster spawn this time, hoping for a different result. An arborist pruned our oak this past Monday, so I saved some thicker branches, and also got some older Coast Live Oak logs from my parent's property. I invited a classmate from my school, who has also always wanted to try this - he brought the entertainment, his adorable three-year old daughter. Who, it must be said, was completely indifferent to the project, and preferred coloring.

My friend brought some more plug spawn - Shiitake, Reishi, and Lion's Mane. So we had a lot of variety to choose from. The process really couldn't be simpler; you just drill holes (5/16th bit), hammer the plugs in with a mallet, and seal the holes with melted wax.

For the logs we kept, we made a makeshift rack to place them on so they are off the ground, in the deep shade under the ceanothus. My friend took his home to Oakland where they will likely fare better. I vow to water mine every day. And cross my fingers.

Here is a picture from Sharondale Mushroom Farm in Virginia - this is how they look when they fruit. I can only hope we will have a similar picture next winter.

I have contacted a local mushroom farm, Far West Fungi, to see if I can visit and have a tour. If so, you know I'll share the journey with you!

Have you grown mushrooms successfully? I'd love to hear more about it.

Mushroom ID: Will it ever be Straightforward???

January 16, 2018 Elizabeth Boegel

I am continually fascinated by, and equally frustrated by, the process of mushroom ID. Wintertime is our mushroom time, as that's when we get the rain - it's dry 8-9 months of the year here in inland Northern CA. So when we get a good rain, boy, that's when the fruiting bodies of these fungi finally pop up, creating such a beautiful display all over the garden. Some are in leaves, some are in soil, but the overwhelming amount I find are growing in the wood chips we have all covering all the pathways and perennial beds.

The pictures here today are all from one cluster, found in a shadier part of the garden, under Chinese pistache trees and Ceanothus. The mushrooms are not growing out of the leaves, however - they are growing out of the woodchips.

You'd think identification of these would be easy - they're NOT 'little brown mushrooms' (or LBM's, as they're known in the mycology world). These are a glorious orange. But when I plucked a few out and went to my trusty mushroom book (California Mushrooms: The Comprehensive Identification Guide), just knowing the color alone did not help. Nor did the fact that they were growing on wood chips. It was really getting the spore print that helped me to identify this mushroom.

It's easy to do a spore print - just take the stem (or stipe) off the mushroom and place it gills-down on a piece of paper. Cover it with a container to keep it from drying out too quickly, and leave it overnight. In the morning you will have a good idea of the color of the spore. In this case, the spore was a very similar color to the mushroom, but that isn't always the case. For instance, chanterelles are deep yellow mushrooms with light-colored spore.

Once I had this spore color, I could begin to key out my species. Do you know about Botanical Keys? They are kind of like a flow chart to determine what it is you are looking at. They are also called Dichotomous Keys. On paper, they can be many many pages long. One of the questions on my lab practical for Terminology was to key out to plant family. The instructor had a plant sitting there that was in bloom. We had to take a flower and dissect it to determine all its parts, and then key it out. It was not as easy as you would think and a lot of folks had trouble with it. Some books, like my mushroom book, include a key at the very beginning to get you to the genus of mushroom that you are looking for. Then there are keys in each spore color group, so if you know the spore color, you can go right to that key. It's an interesting process.

Of course there are terms that I had to look up, like the aforementioned 'stipe,' plus things like adnexed or adnate, decurrent or subdecurrent, etc. Yikes.

I found a nice online keying system for mushrooms that got me to the right genus, too - but it is very east-coast centered, so I had to find the correct west-coast version in my book. This system is called MycoKeys. I thought this was a nice way to figure this mushroom out if there isn't a field guide handy. (For an interesting example of an online botanical key, check out this one from the UK.)

Anyway, after fiddling around with these dang mushrooms for two days, I think I have my ID. I believe these orange mushrooms are Pholiota malicola var. macropoda. Unfortunately, the edibility of this particular mushroom is 'unknown.' So I guess we won't be eating them anytime soon. Still, this was a useful exercise in recognizing and identifying mushrooms. The problem is, I probably won't remember this. And then I'll have to do it all again next year.

How are you at ID'ing fungus? Do you enjoy doing it? Do you ever get GOOD at it? Are you one of those knowledgable people who can forage for edible fungi? And if so, are you willing to take me under your wing? :)

Fungus Fair

December 5, 2016 Elizabeth Boegel

The 'woodland' mushroom garden just inside the door

As promised, here is my report on the 47th Annual Fungus Fair, organized and hosted by the Mycological Society of San Francisco. I had hoped to attend with a similarly-interested friend, but that didn't work out, so I was on my own. What that means is that I wasn't as brave as I normally am and didn't to talk to as many people as I normally do. In a small group, for some reason I find myself more able to speak up and ask questions, but on my own I am a little bit shy. Therefore I spent only about 20 minutes wandering around the fair, absorbing what I could, and only about 10 minutes talking to a volunteer about identification. It was still fun and interesting. But would have been better with my courage-giving buddy.

Walking into the fair, the first thing you see is the kid-friendly area, and there were many projects for kids to do, from making mushroom paper to crafting their own mushroom out of curved paper bowls. Next was a dying station, with yarn being dipped into various vats of color made from mushrooms, and every color was represented. Then there were various tables for the different mycological societies in each county, plus a California lichen table (fascinating), plus a table for psychotropic mushrooms (natch). There were the requisite number of craft sellers, displaying everything from mushroom-themed socks to handmade scarves printed with mushroom spores. There were vendors selling mushroom kits, spore-laden sawdust and dowels, and of course t-shirts celebrating the event.

Probably the highlight for me was an enormous rectangle made out of tables taking up most of the room, lined with leaves and forest duff, with hundreds (thousands?) of mushrooms nestled within it, all labeled by group.

Just a very brief section of the tables filled with mushroom varieties

Classifying fungus seems a tedious business, with many thousands of different kinds of fungus in any given area. Upon speaking to a volunteer, I learned that common names are virtually useless, and that all mushrooms should be identified by their Latin names.

The real educational opportunity came when I went to the 'Mushroom ID" station and asked the volunteer there if he could identify some of the mushrooms in my yard from the photos on my phone. He looked a bit skeptical but said he'd try. Sensing his discomfort, I changed tactics and asked if he could teach ME how to ID the mushrooms in my yard. He smiled big and said, "Now THAT'S the right question!" We got right to work with an ID book that he had on hand (the author was there selling them).

Which leads me to offer this side note: This volunteer said that Californians should really consult only these two books: California Mushrooms by Dennis Desjardin, Michael Wood, and Frederick Stevens; and Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast, by Noah Siegel and Christian Schwartz.

Here's the mushroom that we worked on together, found in the wood chips by the asparagus patch (oh, and he said wood chips are the greatest surface for finding all kinds of mushrooms - apparently fungus loves wood chips):

The volunteer said nearly nothing could be discovered from looking at the tops of mushrooms, you really have to look underneath. Luckily I knew that and had taken a picture of that part, too:

The first thing you noticed is that this is a 'gilled' mushroom, which is in the group "Basidiomycetes." Basidiomycetes are further divided into Agarics (gilled mushrooms), Boletes (tubes, no gills), Chanterelles (veined and trumpet shaped), Club & Coral (simple or multi-branched), and seven other categories including truffles.

So, we go into Agarics, or gilled mushrooms, in my guide (NOT one of the approved guides) and then the next thing you look at are the spores. Well, the spores are inside the gills and it's complicated to retrieve them. However my guy taught me a 'cheat' - if you look at the mushroom above, can you see, directly below the umbrella, on the stalk, a line of color, sort of yellowish brownish? The bottom mushroom is the one that has a defined mark. That's called a 'veil' and is often the same color as the spores. So I know that this mushroom has a brownish yellowish orangish spore, kind of rusty. So that's a 'brown spored' mushroom. I look at that category next. Then it's a matter of looking at pictures and habitats until you find the right one. The stalk on this one has striations, or stripes, and there is some white mycelium on the base, so given its size and placement on rotting wood chips, I can be almost sure that this is Gymnopilus sapineus.

I like knowing things, and I like naming things, but naming a mushroom isn't terribly satisfying because, honestly, am I going to remember that? Um, no. So the next time I see one I'm going to have to go through the whole stupid process again, unless I keep a record. Which maybe I will.

Let's try another one, this one I'll do here on my own, without my star volunteer.

These are all over our garden.

Ok, it's gilled, so we start there. I don't see any veil at all, but the volunteer said that the edges of the mushroom umbrella are often the same color as the spores, so that would be black. Here I run into trouble. Are the gills 'decurrent?' Gee, I don't know, I'll have to look that up. Now I'm going down a rabbit hole about how gills are attached to their stems. I think these gills are adnexed. But that's not a choice in the book I'm using. So I'm going to go with 'free to adnate.' But then it wants to know if the cap is 'viscid' - so I have to look that up. It means sticky. I don't know, I didn't touch it, I will next time. Then it wants to know if the gills are 'autodigesting.'

You can see why this is frustrating. I have a new respect for mushroom scientists. And those that forage for mushrooms and manage not to kill anybody.

Screw it, I'm just going to look at ALL the pictures for gilled mushrooms with black spores. I just realized there aren't that many. Aha! I've come up with the same name that I came up with last year before I knew any better - Inky Caps - or Coprinopsis stercoreus. Lo and behold, the description says it has adnexed gills. TAKE THAT YOU STUPID GUIDE.

Ok, that's it for today's mushroom ID lesson, I'm starting to get heated. If any of you out there are expert mushroom identifiers, maybe you can come to my house and we'll go over all of this in person. I'd really appreciate it.

Weekly Walkthrough: Mushrooms, Bees, and more!

November 5, 2016 Elizabeth Boegel

I bought this new nifty microphone to attach to my iPhone, and - well, it worked about half the time. And I'd say that was 100% user error. There's a little voiceover on this episode, but we promise to fix that audio issue next week!

Join us as we get the mushroom spawn plugged into the logs, do a November check on the beehive, and various other projects. It's a beautiful weekend!

Here's the video:

Signs of Spring

February 13, 2016 Elizabeth Boegel

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's only mid- February. But we've had sunshine and temps in the 70's, and things are just popping out all over. The neighborhood Bradford pear trees are flowering and odiferous; the plum trees in the creek are blooming. The honeybees bring pure white pollen in to the hive. And everywhere, there is new green.

I'm trying not to think about the fact we've had no measurable rain in February thus far, and just am just enjoying this early spring. We have Indian Summer - do we also have Indian Spring?

Flower seeds coming up in the Pollinator garden

We've had the windows and doors open to the breeze for days now. Crane flies are starting to hatch and fly in at night, attracted to our lights.

I set the tray of tomato and pepper seedlings out every day, to catch the sun. Its rays are far stronger than any grow light.

This weather makes us feel like grilling and staying up late (even though it's only light until 5:45 or so). Fortunately, we're having company over tomorrow night and we'll put a Cuban pork shoulder on the grill all day (Lechon Asado). Then we'll make Cubano sandwiches on my fresh sourdough, with pickles Tom made last summer.