Mushroom Spotting

Mushrooms are some of the most fascinating of species. Around here, they erupt into rapid growth and live out their entire life cycles within a 3 month period. In the arctic, they can be born and then die in the same week.

Their colours and shapes are fascinating, from the cute to the grotesque. Some taste good, some are poison. Others are much sought-after for their psychedelic properties.

A common site in dry areas is the Puffball These grow in open fields, using thatchy buildup and soil as their growing medium.

Shelf Fungi grow against the sides of trees and sometimes on the walls of old wooden buildings. These fungi are very fleshy, but very few are edible. There are shelf fungi that only grow on certain species of trees, so if you want to collect spores of these and grow them, make sure you have a like species of tree in your garden.

Psiloscybes are very common here on the west coast, but in other areas they are very rare. I have a large rotting log in my garden. Growing on this log is a mishmash of many types, but none are the psychedelic kind. This is the perfect situation for these fungi however, so this fall I intend on hunting down some spores.

To view mushrooms in database style, identify mushrooms you've seen, or simply learn more about the art of mushroom spotting, I recommend the following website.

Mycological Resources on the Internet

How to Grow Mushrooms

In this article, I hope to give a short primer on what mushrooms need to grow, how to start them, protect them, and provide a suitable habitat for them. This will vary for each type of mushroom grown, but a basic understanding of how they work will definately help.

Mushrooms grow naturally in wooded areas, normally on rotting objects such as fallen branches and trunks, and sometimes animal droppings. The button mushrooms that are very common in North American cuisine are grown on cow dung.

Why grow Mushrooms

Mushrooms are highly ornamental and interesting in their own right.

How to Make a Spore Print

When mushrooms are finished with their fruiting bodies, they shed millions of tiny spores. You can catch these spores as they fall using the following method...

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