Do you grow food, plants, or both?
Do you grow food, plants, or both?
Tried my hand at a vegetable garden in the past, and had miserable luck with it. To be fair, it was in some pretty crummy Maine soil that was full of rocks. Might have more success now though. Just curious what everyone is growing.
What I really want is a yard of just wildflowers. Better for the environment, less effort to maintain, and much more in keeping with my personality. I hate the fully manicured look. Only downside to that is ticks...so many ticks in New England...walking through it would likely be a horror show.
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Do mushrooms count too? I currently have multiple blocks of Lion's Mane and King Oyster going. I also make chickpea tempeh. Since I only have an indoor space, I can't grow large-yield food plants, but I like to grow spices and teas. At the moment I have mint, turmeric, and very young chamomile plants.
Oh really! I’m so fascinated with mushrooms. I started a log with oyster mushrooms but it hasn’t produced anything yet (after a year)
I grow in bags indoors so I don't have experience growing mushrooms in logs yet, but it is something I want to try
Is it like those kits you get? Those are great
Yes - they are like some of the kits! I buy a culture once and then use the culture to make the blocks myself.
Here is a picture of one of my Lion's Mane:
Oh that’s growing great! I tried the lions mane last year and also oyster. Oyster was super easy but my lions mane didn’t grow well. So you are propagating the mycelium?
Hmm, maybe the the Lion's Mane was contaminated? 🤔 When the colony is clean it tends do well over a wide range of conditions.
Yes, I do propagate the mycelium in agar plates. I grow the mycelium on the plate, then inocculate a jar of cooked grain, and once the grain is colonized I put the grain into the fruiting block (oak hardwood pellets, wheat bran, and water)
I bet that’s hard to get right. Lots of ways it can go wrong I would think, right? How did you get into that?
I bet that’s hard to get right. Lots of ways it can go wrong I would think, right?
Relatively sterile conditions are needed because the gourmet fungi tend to grow very slowly relative to common molds and bacteria, and if spores of a fast growing species gets into the growing medium they will quickly grow and deplete the resources. So you can easily end up with a block of mold or of bacteria instead of the intended fungus! It takes some practice and a bit of equipment to prepare the agar, grains, and fruiting block under sterile enough conditions. But now that I have some experience and that I have the materials at home it is not hard anymore.
How did you get into that?
I was in college and I learned about the lifecycle fungi in biology class. It was fascinating, so I looked into how to grow fungi online and discovered a trove of resources about growing psychedelic mushrooms (Psylocibe cubensis), as well as learned that their spores were legal to sell and buy online. So I bought some spores. After growing these I ended up with the problem of having too many mushrooms that are illegal to have. I had no intention of selling them, there was no way I could eat all of that myself in a single lifetime, and I did not have enough friends experienced with psychedelics to gift them to. Most of them were simply tossed out. So I faced the problem: I want to grow mushrooms, but the output was a liability. That's when I started branching into the world of "gourmet mushrooms", and found several interesting species to grow. So you can say that hallucinogenic mushrooms were my gateway drug into the world of gourmet mushrooms.