With a little guidance
and the right conditions, gourmet, medicinal mushrooms are easy to grow
at home
February 23, 2009 - Mail Tribune
A life-long gardener, Braxton
Reed starting mucking around a decade ago with a more mysterious method
of growing his own food.
Edible
mushrooms have popped up unannounced in Reed's garden beds, leaf piles
and landscaping. Harnessing the fungi's potential, however, is best
left to the experts, specifically businesses that sell mushroom-growing
kits.
Reed
purchased his first kit — a plastic bag of straw harboring mushroom
spores — about 10 years ago from a Washington-based mail-order company.
As the Internet's popularity has grown, Web sites peddling mushroom
kits have multiplied, too. For as little as $18, the budding mycologist
or adventurous cook can purchase fungus "gardens" from sites like
fungi.com, mushbox.com, sporeworks.com and gmushrooms.com.
"It's a lot of fun," Reed says.
"It's a whole other life form — not like regular gardening."
Instead
of letting Mother Nature dictate growing conditions, mushroom gardeners
must maintain an environment ideal for fungi: fairly moist air hovering
between 60 and 65 degrees. Bathrooms and kitchens can be prime mushroom
real estate, particularly on durable surfaces like counters and in
showers that hold up under the frequent misting mushrooms need.
"Humidity is the key to it," Reed
says.
But
contaminants — like the mold spores found in most homes — bloom under
the same circumstances, making mushroom kits fertile ground for
unwelcome and unwholesome guests. Small patches of mold can be excised
from the main mass of fodder or treated with a weak bleach solution
without harming the mushrooms, Reed says.
"Usually,
the mushrooms are actually more aggressive," Reed says. "If it gets too
nasty, you have to throw it on the compost pile," he says, adding that
he's later found gourmet mushrooms sprouting from his household's stew
of kitchen scraps.
"I've gotten 'em to grow on
cardboard and waste paper ... coffee grounds ... leaves."
Hoping
to naturalize mushrooms in his home garden outside of Ashland, Reed
turned to John Teem, owner of Continuum Mushroom Farm in Talent. Teem,
a commercial grower of gourmet and medicinal mushrooms, also caters to
homegrowers like Reed. Continuum sells a range of mushroom spawn in
plastic bags that display white, web-like networks of the mycelium that
"fruit" as reishi, oyster, lion's mane or the most popular mushroom,
shiitake.
For avid fungus farmers like Reed,
Teem prepares logs that he drills full of holes and fills with
spore-inoculated sawdust. Unlike indoor mushroom kits that will yield
tasty morsels in just a few days, mushroom-seeded logs kept outside
likely won't fruit for a couple of years. But when they do sprout,
they'll continue to fruit for many years.
While
some companies sell spores and growing medium, called "substrate,"
separately, mushrooms must be seeded under sterile conditions,
requiring a clean room and specialized equipment. Ready-made kits are
not only more reliable but also more cost-effective for the mushroom
hobbyist.
Most kits will produce several
crops, or "flushes," of mushrooms, depending on the species, growing
conditions and care taken. An initial mushroom flush rewarded amateur
grower Shahoma McAlister of Cave Junction, but she found it difficult
to stimulate further fruiting.
"My growing
room was too hot and dry," McAlister says. "I'll be doing it more and
more till I discover the right amount of moisture," she says, noting
that she's making mulch from cottonwoods.
"Oyster
mushrooms love cottonwood," she says, adding that she grows gourmet
mushrooms for use in stir-frys or to garnish soup after they're sautéed.
"They're a high-energy super-food
with good proteins."
Reed agrees.
"More people are becoming aware of
how many edible and medicinal mushrooms there are."
Cultivating
a wide variety of gourmet mushrooms purchased by some 15 local
restaurants, Teem also produces reishi mushrooms for medicinal use.
Reishis, he says, are a tonic for the heart, lungs and nerves that also
are "used for cancer and proven effective."
It's
a sentiment shared by Eric Cerecedes, owner of Jacksonville's Mushroom
Way, which sells dehydrated and pulverized fungi in capsule form at
local health-food stores and Ashland Food Co-op. Mushrooms, Cerecedes
says, are antiviral, antibacterial, anti-tumor; they lower cholesterol,
moderate blood pressure and blood sugar and enhance liver and kidney
function; some of them improve sex function in men.
Mushroom
marketers like Cerecedes are forbidden by the Food and Drug
Administration from claiming their product can cure, treat or prevent
any disease. However, they can say such substances support, optimize or
enhance immune functioning, energy, mental or athletic abilities and
are being studied, with positive results, for their effects on cancer
and HIV.
"They're finding more and more
medicinal compounds in mushrooms," Teem says. "I believe there are
thousands more to be found. You only have to look at how resistant they
are to decomposition in the forest."
Mushrooms
comprise a group of polysaccharides, or complex sugars, that "sit like
a lock and key" on immune receptors in the human body, Cerecedes says.
Fungi also stimulate the body's production of macrophages, white blood
cells that attack bacteria, pathogens and tumor cells, he adds.
Produced
in California, Cerecedes' mushrooms are grown without chemicals under
controlled conditions that mimic nature to bring out the widest variety
of bioactive ingredients, he says. The remedies are sold in several
formulas said to increase memory and cognitive functioning; remove
chemicals and heavy metals from the liver and fortify blood; increase
production of biochemicals that promote the exchange of cellular
energy; and enhance the immune system with "nine of the most powerful
mushrooms on the planet."
Finding a receptive
audience at a recent class on the Ashland campus of Southern Oregon
University, Cerecedes says he plans to expand his business to selling
mushroom-growing kits similar to Teem's. For $20 to $30 — the same
price as a bottle of mushroom-based supplements — customers can harvest
several pounds of fresh mushrooms. The interest in mushrooms, he says,
only stands to grow.
"Enough people are spreading the
word that it's becoming a national phenomenon."