The Mushroom Farm

This real mushroom farm, Earth Angel in Pacific, shipping 400 or more pounds of mushrooms daily, is an old warehouse with four rooms: the first one for starting oyster and shiitake mushrooms from clones, using slices of mushroom, because spores won't work for commercial growing -- in a sterilized "clean room" in sterilized growing media: sterilized compressed blocks of sawdust pellets or sterilized cottonseed hulls in a plastic bag. Then the bags are shelved in a room kept at around 70 degrees to encourage mycelium, or threads of pre-mushroom, to grow. In the photo you can see mycelium, the brown stuff, at its most developed in the bags on the top shelf, while the other bags are in process. It has to be organized.

In the cold-and-humid room, ceiling pipes dripping chilly condensation, the mycelia bear fruit: oyster and shiitake mushrooms. Shiitakes are on shelving. Standing in columns are the oyster mushrooms, pictured, growing out of pinpricks in the bags, multiplying dementedly. Imagine a 20x40-foot room full of mushrooms.
They're harvested here. The fourth room is for packaging.

How to learn to grow mushrooms on this scale? The owner cheerfully answered, "Failure." Any grower must experiment dozens or even hundreds of times and waste tons of materials before he gets mushrooms -- shiitakes, especially, are very difficult to grow. I personally asked him, "Do you like cooking and eating mushrooms?" He said yes, but if he had a pound of mushrooms he'd rather sell them than eat them. This eye-opening tour was arranged by the Missouri Mycological Society.

Winter What??

I was outclassed by the lady at the annual Missouri Mycological Society Photography Night whose slide show of fungi was not only gorgeous--so was mine--but she had everything identified and labeled with its Latin name. It's the way the Society closes the year, and I'm a bit sad because morel-hunting season is four months away and in the meantime, in winter,  there are no fungi to hunt, eat, or study, outside of books.

Wrong.

In a city park so dull I usually walk its half-mile path while reading my phone, I look up and see mushrooms growing high on a dead tree. Into the tangle of trees I go to investigate. What to my wondering eyes should appear at that tree's base but the hugest freaking trove of edible oyster mushrooms, each six to eight inches across (they're usually oyster-sized--not very big). Oysters have no poisonous lookalikes in Missouri.

Pinpointing the tree with GPS I get a bag from my car and remove about three pounds of mushroom--hoping no one is watching because I don't know what the laws are. An ethical forager takes only what she can use. At home, I take a spore print to confirm my ID. Poach some in beer, and roast and make quiche and pizza with the rest. They're delish. The next week, I take another four pounds and share.

Okay, I was simply super-fortunate to find an oyster log. Today I'm out puttering next to my propane tank, and spy there my first-ever Earthstar mushrooms, side by side, like petaled flowers, each with a central sphere full of spores. These are very old and dry so I can't identify which type of earthstars they are; when fresh, they're grayish-white. Earthstars are inedible. But I'm still bowled over: Earthstars at Christmas! What could top this? But something will!