On Growing Shitake Mushrooms (2008.12.15)

Stumbling across new things in the world of biology tickles me. Yes, I've thought about the statement and yes tickles is the right word. I recently went to the 39th annual Fungus Festival in Oakland and it was at the surface level interesting, just like going to any sort of niche categorical-fair is interesting; a bunch of people head over heels about some thing and usually the less main stream it is, the more people love it, covet it, and wildly embrace seeing themselves through the adoration of that cherished thing. I think you find the same sort of unbridled enthusiasm for Pez dispensers and My Little Pony paraphernalia in the right circles. At the fair I'm wondering around like an American tourist in Europe; everything is vaguely familiar, but I can't speak the language, have "tourist" written all over my face and spend awkwardly long pauses while looking at specimens or eves dropping on people talking the native dialect. As a tourist I look for a souvenir of the experience. I could have bought just about any mushroom specimen under the sun, but really I don't know what the fuck to do with most of them. I couldn't tell you what tastes like crap and what is worth pay a couple hundred dollars a pound for, so I do the prudent think and buy myself a science experiment. For $15 I get a block of brown rice with red oak sawdust that has been inoculated with shitake mushroom mycelium. I take the thing home, bunch a couple of holes in the bag and stick it in my bathroom, where its kind of dark humid and then cross my fingers. I should have taken a photo the first day I got the block, because in two days the whole thing had changed and all of a sudden there were these small bulging phalluses all over the block. Wow! The biologist in me loves this. Its really impressive how fast the fruiting body of basidiomycota rip up from their mycelium into this bulges and then within one more day I went from having a "bag of mini-dicks" to a bag full of huge shitake mushrooms. The process of watching these things bloom was easily worth the $15 bucks and then on top of it I got to fry a couple up, take a couple on the camping trip at Mt. Tam this weekend and if all goes right I should be able to get the block to bloom a couple more times. My big hope is to actually make some blocks of rice and oak chips myself and spread the mycelium around.


1 bag full of mini-phalluses


mini-phalluses luckily become shitake mushrooms in 1 day


the big shitake cut in half before getting fried...mmm