Alan Rockefeller said:

Mycoremediation barely works, most times I think it is better to save the time and energy and let nature do the remediation.    Particularly with regards to mycofiltration, eating oil and heavy metal removal.  If you do nothing at all, natural bacteria and fungi in the environment will do the remediation - so maybe just mix in some substrate, turn the soil and let nature do the rest.

Regarding mycofiltration, doesn't really work and even if it did, wouldn't take long for the mycelium to go anarobic and die.  One idea I heard is to just dump a truck load of wood chips in the stream, and let nature do the rest.  At least that way you are not wasting energy making spawn.  No idea if this works at all.

You can eat oil with oyster mushrooms, but it has to be at really low concentrations, and you probably burn more oil than you eat making the spawn.  Natural bacterias eat oil too and they are everywhere.

Regarding Paul, he is a great salesman and ambassador, and he has gotten a lot of people into mushrooms.    For that he deserves to be held in high regard.  He is pretty cool in person.  I do think he probably oversells his products, and that medicinal mushrooms shouldn't be sold as medicine until they are proven to work.  Turkey tails have been proven to work (but not very much), and the rest of them are pretty much untested in large clinical trials.    Mushrooms do make excellent placebos.

If you ask professional mycologists about Stamets or mycoremediation or medicinal mushrooms, they typically change the subject pretty quick, if they are feeling polite.

There are a ton of people doing mycoremediation trials, but almost no one scaling it up to solve real world problems.  Every idealistic first year college mycology student wants to save the world with mushrooms, but by the time they get a PhD they are thinking very differently.

Tradd Cotter and Peter Mccoy are doing a lot of work with mycoremediation, but I notice that they are mostly making their money writing books and giving workshops/lectures rather than actually doing it.    But they probably answer their emails and would be excellent people to talk to about details and new ideas.

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drake89 said:

Which should be pretty intuitive to anyone who has ever wprked with straw logs, the mycelium is not very permiable to water.  Which makes it an excellent sheet mulch in the garden btw.

If you're looking for a good practical application thats something ive never seen written up.  Old straw logs turned into sheet mulch, keep weeds down and reduce watering needs, plus adds organic matter eventually.

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Straw can also be buried, but as i found it nice to see, the oyster mushrooms need to be cleaned off the straw and the soil



I read that spent oyster straw could be used to grow blewits. Anyone has tried it? Should I build a pile of that straw and compost it, right?

Bumbaclotjohnson said:

hey folks so Im starting a 5 month project experimenting with fungi and bioremediation. Just wondering what people on the shroomery know about different fungi and there affinity to do break down complex polymers and move toxins. I have 12 species that im right now working with but id like to include more if possible.

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Bumbaclotjohnson said:

Well im definitely gonna post my article here when its done hopefully i can add to the current data pool.

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