Fall is mushrooms

[greenstorm]

King stropheria/ wine cap mushroom bed went in today. What I did:

Laid down a layer of cardboard

Laid down a bale of straw, one flake at a time flat like tiles, on top of the cardboard

Watered well

Crumbled my block of spawn over the straw

Set another two bales' worth of flakes over the spawn, again like tiles, so the spawn had one tile below and two above, for a total of roughly a foot of straw over the whole bed

Watered well

So altogether it was pretty simple. I had found some deck railing while at the dump the other day, so I scavenged that to block off the spot to the north of the storage container for the mushroom bed. The area is larger than the one bed, so if I want to double its size next year I can. I'm hoping there's enough time for the mycelium to get well established before it gets too cold out and everything goes into deep freeze. I'm also hoping it overwinters; my understanding is that it will, but I haven't found a ton of literature on trying to grow them this far north.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

i am going to try this when we go to Morhardt, where it rains all year except summer and doesn't really freeze. i hope you get lots of fruit!

[squirrelitude]

After our previous conversation I tried making crispy shiitake mushrooms according to a recipe I found. It called for corn starch, which I didn't have, so I used tapioca starch; one website said to double the amount when doing that substitution. It was probably referring to its use as a *thickener*, though, because what actually happened is that the tapioca starch immediately glommed all the slices together into a big gluey ball. I pan-fried the heck out of it and it eventually looked and tasted cooked, but had turned into a single, large mushroom gummy. Cooled in the fridge and thinly sliced, the flavor was intensely bacon-mushroom umami and it was really pretty great in sandwiches.

I might try for crispy at some point, but this was actually pretty nice too, if extremely weird to work with.