Mushroom hunting: Let the Festivities begin!

At SciFoo at Google in August ’08 I met Paul Stamets of Fungi.com.  One of the many give a ways was his book, Mycelium Running.  I have been obsessed ever since.  I had the opportunity to ask Paul about cultivating morels I have my yard.  I am watching and waiting for my morels to sprout (which is typically 2-5 days after the first heavy rain in April in this region), but in the mean time I am checking out what’s come to fruit after the rains this weekend.  I’ve also propagated some shiitake (which I bought at fungi.com in the form of plug spawn) and some shaggy parasol mushrooms I picked out of the goat yard in the fall.  I am cultivating these in corrugated cardboard (in one case a pizza box) which I left out over the winter.  The mycelium are running, but I am worried I have some undesirable mold running, too.  Time will tell.

In any event, I put together this enjoyable slide show of my Sunday morning mushroom adventure (updated with music):

Now that I have moved my operations into FITCI@Hood, I hope to take advantage of the Hood Biology department to help me identify some of these fungi.  I bought the National Audobon Societies Field Guide, but I can never make a firm identification.  you don’t want to be making bad taxonomic decisions when it comes to wild mushrooms.  Any experts ut there who would like to start a c”shroom hunting Club?  One interesting thing about Paul is that he was the Ken Kesey & the Merry Prankster’sofficial mycologist.

I think I have blogged his TED talk before, but it’s worth another post

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