Mushrooms About Portland: Agaricus On Naito Waterfront!

Not sure what species so I’m not eating them, but what a feast for the eyes!

Mel’s first witnessed fairy ring. Agaricus (some kind of field mushroom) grows around a tree on the Portland waterfront. The pacific northwest has an abundance of mushrooms, even in urban environments (if you’re looking).

Big chunky mushrooms growing in clumps.

Look at the gills on these guys! What a mushroom!

Once they pop, they don’t stop. These Agaricus mushrooms like to grow in clusters.

To some they’re a pest, to others a tasty treat. To me these guys are just local eye candy keeping me on track.

An absolute explosion of mushrooms! Just chillin’ on the river. Though that’s not the only place you can find them on this street. Go north up Naito towards the old mill and along the roads, you’ll find them too, hiding among grasses and shrubbery.

I found you, you sneaky snacks! I’m not gonna pick you though.

Oh hey there buddy, you look kinda lonely. Would you like to come with me?

Cool Agaricus sample bro. (I dried and kept this one. It’s in a jar with some other dried samples)

Where to start learning about Mushrooms?

So many ways to learn about mushrooms! For one, you have the wonder that is the internet, and it’s full of all kinds of wonderful information if you know the right keywords to use. It’s probably also a good idea to know your own learning style, as that will make learning any skill so much easier. I know that I’m a hands on learner so alongside diving right into growing, I mostly learned from watching videos online and buying and reading some lovely books. Let’s take a look at some easy ways to learn about mushrooms!

BOOKS!

Anyone who’s heard of a mushroom beyond the grocery store has probably heard of Paul Stamets. He’s THE mushroom guy and he’s got a lot of books to choose from. I’m currently reading this one here; Growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms 3rd edition. Full of useful information and lots of lovely pictures, it’s a must have for any would be mushroomer. I’ve heard ‘mycelium running’ is good too but I haven’t read it yet.

If you want to fall in love with mushrooms by understanding our interconnectedness with nature, this is the one. I’d like to speak to this lovely mushroomy man, what’s going on in his head? We wonder…seems kinda magical. This dude’s almost as cute as the mushrooms he studies.

If you want to know more about the movements within Mycology, Mushrooms, and Fungi, this book covers a variety of stories about people working in various fields of science and application. A pretty good read!

You won’t learn anything in this book that you couldn’t otherwise learn online. I’m sharing it because I purchased it for a friend who works better from books formatted this way. It’s very straight forward with plenty of detailed pictures. Easy to follow for any beginner.

YOUTUBE CHANNELS

Fresh Cap Mushrooms posts videos about all kinds of mushroom topics from growing to history and education in an edutainment format.

Paul Stamets has his own official channel.

Grow Cycle is all about growing your own mushrooms, whether starting at hobby scale, or going farm mode.

Amazing Fungi is just awesome mycoporn.

Myco Lyco makes mushroom music!

Southwest Mushrooms is a cool farm out of AZ that’s sharing their journey.

REDDIT

There are a few groups on Reddit that have been super helpful;

/r/Mycology

/r/MushroomIdentification

/r/Shroomers

Just to name a few.

I hope that this list of books and videos is enough to help you get started on your own mushroom adventure. What kind of mushrooms do you want to grow? Leave a comment! 🙂

Meet a Mushroom: Oy! Oysters!

Pictured: Shiitake Mushrooms in the center, with oyster mushrooms on either side. A display at the local super market mushroom section.

I would say the most basic of basic mushrooms, but we know that’s buttons. It blows my mind that my grocery store can stock 90% of their mushroom section with so many variations of the same species of mushroom. Stop it. Add more variety.

Sporing? More like boring. -yawn- (pictured: close up of portobello mushroom gills with spores)

Oh, what’s that? You did? Right when I was getting into mushroomy things myself? Awesome! Along with oysters, my local market started carrying a variety of specialty mushrooms which I suspect they buy from local distributors. I’m no stranger to strange foods, let me tell you! I’m excited to try all kinds of new flavors! I’ll be real with you though, I don’t go out of my way to eat mushrooms. I’ve only met a couple that I’d be like “yeah, that’s a really tasty mushroom!” but that’s a me thing. I got into them for healing things and arty things and sharing and growing things. Eating them? Meh. I will note that the different kinds of oyster mushrooms do very much have different tastes. And blue oysters are one of those that makes me go “you should really try that mushroom”.

Tasty blue oyster mushrooms I grew myself. Blue oyster mushrooms have a nice grilled flavor, even if you’re just frying them. Much more concentrated flavor than your regular oyster mushroom (pictured below, with a portobello mushroom behind it)

Just reading about them isn’t enough for me. I’m very much a hands on learner. Gotta get into it, yuh!

My sir, my king, such a beautiful thing! This is a lovely king oyster specimen. I picked out the nicest one to share with you.

Take a bow, you were delicious, fried and pickled into a nice snack. What a special guy. A fungi.

How dare you make a mockery of the oyster king!? Just kidding, these designs are hella cute.

Mushrooms on parade. I think they’re meant to represent king oyster mushrooms, maitake, shimeji, nameko, and shiitake, in that order. I think.

There are also Pink and Gold (yellow) oysters. You probably won’t find any pink oysters at a grocery store due to their short shelf life, but they are nice. They are delicate when fried and taste like chicken. The yellow ones are a bit weak in flavor and I’m not a big fan of those. They’re certainly cute mushrooms.

A Very Mushroomy Christmas Holiday

This year I got into mushrooming and as someone who usually wants for nothing, my friends were all relieved at how easy it was to get gifts for me this year. It’s all mushrooms baby, and I don’t mind. I love it!

I recently gave my neighbor a bag of growing chestnut mushrooms. For the holidays I gave them plushy mushrooms that I handmade myself and a bunch of pins. They got me a bunch of mushroom pins as well! They wouldn’t be the only ones to get me something I got them as my other friends bought me the same mushroom lights I was gifting to them! Too funny! I love these vintage mushroom shakers and awesome art by independent artists. Enamel pins are great because you can make yourself a walking art gallery.

My friend’s mom gave me this lovely Frog Prince ornament for Christmas. It’s very cute.

Look at his little toadstool!

Some other friends that I do work for gifted me this very lovely mushroom glassware.

Mushroom cookies anyone? They’re gluten free and vegan! (because food allergies)

I’ve been handing out these festive little toy mushrooms around.

A gift to myself, I used some of the scraps of the fabrics left over from mask making to make a quilted mushroom patch for the back of my denim jacket. So many mushrooms!

Look at this guy.

Here’s a festive Amanita Muscaria made out of perler beads. It’s available for purchase in my Etsy Shop.

Just a picture of an old man in the snow. I heard it’s supposed to snow tonight. Maybe it’s time to log off and look outside my window. Happy Holidays everyone! I hope you found a mushroom!

Tek Check 0 – Humble Beginnings

Oh boy, where do we even start?

So…like, what’s a mushroom anyways? It’s not a plant, it’s not an animal. It’s its own thing, belonging to the kingdom Funga. Mushrooms are actually the fruiting bodies of fungi, which are mostly underground most of the time. Some fungi don’t even grow fruits. In nature they are decomposers, breaking down dead stuff into nutrients for other things and passing along information and energy along their mycelial webs under forest floors. They’re kind of amazing and essential to our existence, in case you didn’t know. Before I got into mushroom growing, I actually didn’t know a dang thing about mushrooms. As far as I knew they were just a thing you find in the produce isle. I would say I was fungi-neutral. It’s come to my attention that some people are actually fungi-phobic and I’d like to help change that view. They can be quite cute and seemingly full of personality. Their variety is endless and endlessly interesting. There are so many uses for them too! I wasn’t sure how I would format this blog because I’m coming at it from many angles at once so I’m doing some posts that are about growing, some that are articles, and others that are just fun mushroom pics and things, recipes (maybe?), and whatever else seems like it should fit here. The following pictures were from my misadventures just getting into growing, when I was still working at my shop full time and didn’t yet have the time nor money to dedicate to it fully. It was a start, and things really took off when I did have time to take a whole month to dive in back in October, but we’ll get to that later.

As my first attempt to grow, I thought I’d try buying a ready to grow lion’s mane kit. Unfortunately, this was right before our freak heat wave and my apartment doesn’t have air conditioning. It dried up and aborted no matter how hard I tried to keep it moist. It was a miserable experience. But it was certainly an experience.

Not quite liquid culture. I put some shiitake spores in some water just to watch them. I’d never worked with spores or spawn or any of that yet. Just reading stuff online at this point and getting curious to see what these dudes are all about.

The first liquid culture I purchased because I figured if I didn’t have time to learn/improve tek just yet, it’d probably be best to get something I could maybe grow on my patio (spoiler; it doesn’t work out and that will probably be a whole post itself later). Wine Cap mushrooms seemed aesthetically pleasing.

Slowly gathering things that I think I might need for upcoming projects. This was also before I invested in a pressure cooker or purchased the right substrates. What do you think are the most essential mushroom growing supplies? Leave your top items in the comments.

I tried doing some agar tek (just some oyster mushrooms from the grocery store) but most of those samples contaminated. I would eventually invest in glass dishes but still haven’t had time to mess with agar stuff. Maybe later. There are so many entry points to growing mushrooms. Do you want to start with spores? Live culture? Spawn? Just buy a kit? Literally a billion ways to grow mushrooms. I’m not even sure I want to mess with this stuff to be honest. Live cultures have seem to been working out for me. I’ve grown fond of my collection of jars.

Itty bitty grow space with nothing going on just yet. Stay tuned.

This poor Lion’s Mane mushroom block couldn’t handle the freak heat wave that hit the pacific northwest in the summer of 2021. RIP first (sort of) mushroom.

Just early stuff in a box. Most of it contaminated, spawns survived. Pay no attention to the box in the box in the box, that will be another post too. It was a weird thing. We’ll get to it.

That does it for entry 0 of Tek Check. Next post will probably be something more informative than this embarrassing show and tell of my early lack of knowledge of anything fungi. Can’t wait to share my successes. We grew some cute ones (and some grotesque ones too!).