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.

Home Mushroom Growing: Phase 2

I forgot about the mushroom terrarium I made on March 22 and only today, while sneezing and muttering "*--!*&@! mold," did I remember the damp straw and mushroom spores in the plastic vegetable bag stuck in my darkest closet, and sure enough today it had white fuzz growing in it exactly as the mushroom farmer said it would, and the next step is to give it a little light--not blazing sunlight but perhaps the light from an eastern window, just a few hours of sun, and it is said that lovely oyster mushrooms will erupt from this mess, get harvested and taste real good. Truthfully, I have to force myself to believe this, but I am always game for an experiment that might end in mushrooms -- and by the way, it's almost morel season. I'll finish my taxes this weekend so that next week I may crawl around in the woods with a recycled Easter basket, poking beneath fallen trees in search of rare delicacies.