Winter was made for Drying Mushrooms

Growing and finding mushrooms has definitely made winters in the pacific northwest more tolerable. What better way to save time and energy than drying mushrooms in front of your heater? Here I’ve placed some soup mushrooms on a bamboo sushi mat. It allows air to flow through and dry out the mushrooms. Set it and forget it. Cozy mushroom vibes all day.

Mushrooms, like us, are mostly water content. Drying mushrooms is the oldest and easiest way to preserve them. Once they are dry, you can store in a jar for later. Eat them or, in my case, use them for arts and crafts projects. For these ones I’ve ordered some resin to make some cute crafty accessories with.

Here’s an aesthetically pleasing jar of dried mushroom samples of mixed species; grown, foraged, and purchased. I’ve really been on the lookout! Developing those mushroom finding eyes! O_O The little packet you see in there is a silica packet, like you’d find in a shoe box or fancy chips. Save those if you want to keep your mushrooms fresh and toss them in with any dried guys.

A simple sample of what I will be doing with resin. This piece was made with a blue oyster mushroom abort that I dried and recolored with watercolor paint. Newer pieces I have planned will look way better. I want to make some cute magnets too, of little mushroomy scenes.

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!).