Cultivation Quarters

Ken Litchfield

With the new format of the Mycena News, I’ll be going into a much more in depth discussion of mushroom cultivation techniques, wherefores and howtos, the biology of mushroom lifestyles, pictures, etc. In addition I am requesting submissions of written or graphic contributions from the membership of your own first-hand knowledge, observations, and experiences with growing techniques or particular species or perhaps mushroom farms or growing operations you may have visited here or in foreign lands. I am more interested in having first-hand experience than simply recounting the same staid techniques that may be found all over the internet. However, it could also be excerpts from historical descriptions of early mushroom cultivation techniques from a hundred years or more ago and the mentalities that went with them. Priority is for gardening over laboratory techniques but demonstrating new, low overhead - high return methodologies for all aspects of mushroom cultivation is of value. Please send those submissions to mycenanews@mssf.org

This month we’ll begin our discussions with an introduction to the lifestyle categories of the various useful mushrooms and their practical applications to mushroom cultivation.

But first a note about growing mushrooms, garden style compared with laboratory style. Mycological enthusiasts that want to get into mushroom cultivation regularly encounter an assuming attitude from certain mushroom cultivators that laboratory methods are necessary de facto. And, in addition, they encounter commentary that laboratory style mushroom cultivation is actually really simple and inexpensive - and then they proceed to encounter the recommendations for expansive facilities and boocoo expenditures. Rarely do they encounter even a mention of the simple natural and organic emulations for culturing wild mushrooms called “mushroom gardening.” Millions of regular everyday people practice gardening as a hobby or business. This compares with a fraction of that number that are regularly practicing lab techniques for growing plants or mushrooms. Yet much of the mushroom cultivation advice purveyed assumes that it is an obvious proposition that mushroom cultivation requires laboratory methods. Much of this attitude originates from the clandestine culture of magic mushroom cultivators that do make up a substantial contingent in mycology and have made substantial contributions to laboratory knowledge of mushroom cultivation that can be applied to regular species of mushrooms.

But let’s just step back a moment and look at the bigger picture. Millions of people, called gardeners, grow thousands of different species and cultivars of edible, herbal, aesthetically pleasing, and just plain interesting plants in multitudes of growing formats: in the ground, raised beds, containers, hanging baskets, greenhouses, windowsills, etc. But the number of folks who grow plants in comparatively complex laboratory conditions, primarily known as meristem culture, is comparatively miniscule. Really miniscule. It is easy to contend that the vast majority of gardeners have never even heard of meristem culture and far fewer have ever even tried it. Yet if a regular practitioner of meristem culture of plants were to give advice to a gardener on what equipment, facilities and knowledge they would need to grow plants, that gardener would rightly consider that advice nerdy, nutty, and ridiculous.

There is also a substantial deterrent to laboratory cultivation of mushrooms that isn’t often discussed by lab practitioners. Lab conditions rely on sterile monocultures of one desired fungus. That may work if you are only growing certain saprobic mushrooms, those that live on dead stuff. If you want to cultivate mushrooms that require some sort of symbiont for parasitizing or mycorrhizing or an ecosystem of diversity of organisms that may be necessary for many desired fungi to thrive, then sterile lab conditions are likely to be counterproductive. In addition, some of the lab practitioners that may rail against the likes of Monsanto for practicing industrial scale monoculture of crops don’t seem to recognize the irony in their own practices.

It is possible for the home gardener to have an inexpensive home laboratory setup by modifying a closet, kitchen, or bathroom and using readily available and recycled household items. And it is useful information to have for some aspects of mushroom cultivation. But laboratory methodologies aren’t a necessity for successful mushroom cultivation. For our purposes we’ll be discussing mushroom cultivation in terms that the average home gardener can understand.

We’ll cover truly simple, inexpensive, low overhead - high return lab practices later, but for now let’s look at some aspects of mushroom biology as it relates to mushroom cultivation.

The average person seeking to learn mycology, and especially mushroom cultivation, often finds frustration trying to get a handle on all the different taxonomic classifications and their natural, or not, characters. Rather than 17 or 39 or 117 different categories to try to wrap your brain around, it is much easier to remember only the three categories for the four different basic lifestyles.

All mushrooms, for mushroom cultivation simplicity, can be sorted into saprobic, mycorrhizal, or parasitic lifestyles. Saprobic mushrooms like garden giant, turkey tails, oysters, reishi, and shaggy manes live on a substrate of dead stuff like tree trunks, logs, wood chips, sawdust, straw, mulch, compost, manure, or duff. Mycorrhizal mushrooms share resources, usually with a living tree substrate, like candy caps, chanterelles, and truffles with living oak tree roots, or porcinis and Santa mushrooms on living pine tree roots. Parasitic mushrooms obtain resources from some other species without sharing in return, like Cordyceps mushrooms on live caterpillar substrate or huitlacoche on corn substrate; you grow the sweet corn to grow the mushroom. Combinations of these three lifestyles constitute the fourth lifestyle, which we can call opportunistic - those mushrooms like morels or honeys that have more than one method of getting their nutrition.

Let’s look for a moment at the most basic aspect of saprobic mushroom cultivation, the mushrooms that live in nature on raw undecayed organic matter, the interior dead heartwood of tree trunks. These would be the typical “gourmet” andor medicinal market mushrooms like oysters, shiitake, lion’s mane, pioppino, maitake, reishi, that grow in human symbiotic commercial conditions on bags or jars of hardwood sawdust as you might see at Far West Fungi or Gourmet Mushrooms.

The dead heartwood of trees is a special habitat for mushrooms in the wild. In a healthy uninjured mature tree, the dead heartwood represents a sterile “petri dish” of raw organic matter residing in nature. This dead heartwood would normally provide the strong support structure for the trunk and main branches of a large tree. It is the inner cylindrical product of many years of early tree ring growth that has died and is encased in younger outer tree rings that are still living and growing. These outer rings keep the dead inner rings sealed off from outside organisms that might devour and hollow out the dead cylindrical heart of the tree. This seal is both physical and chemical; as long as the living outer shell of tree rings is physically intact and unbroken it continues to generate anti-biological exudates that chemically protect the interior of the tree from decay organisms like fungi.

You can witness the interior living and dead regions of a tree’s anatomy in the basal stump of a freshly cut tree. On the outside is the bark layer. The outermost layers of the bark are dead, expanding and cracking in a distinctive, species specific pattern, and sloughing like epidermal skin as the trunk expands from inner growth of tree ring wood and living inner bark layers. Between the bark and the tree ring wood lies the cambium, where new cell reproduction for the bark and wood takes place, bark to the outside and wood to the inside. Interior to the cambium are the youngest outer layers of living tree rings that ooze the protective exudates in the sap. Interior to the sappy outer layers are the non sappy dead heartwood rings. You can see the sap oozing out of the outermost 2-4 inch thick cylinder of living tree ring wood and no sap oozing from the main dead interior region. It is this interior dead zone that becomes the hollow part of the tree when a mushroom mycelium devours it out, usually by entering from a broken branch or other wound that penetrates through the living wood layer. If the sterile dead interior is not exposed due to a too-shallow wound, then the living tissue can heal over with no hollowing taking place.

If the dead heartwood interior is exposed and the heartwood becomes devoured and hollowed out by a fungus, this still doesn’t harm the living tissues of the tree. The hollowing fungi are saprobic, living on dead stuff, and eat out the dead heartwood, not the living outer wood. This is similar to surgical maggots that are used to eat out necrotic tissues in wounded human tissue without affecting the living cells. The structural integrity of the tree may or may not be compromised upon hollowing out by fungi. It is not necessary to cut down a hollowed out tree. Many of the long lanky branches of the tree can be cut back to reduce the wind stress on those branches that might put more stress on the hollowed trunk. The living and growing tissues will continue to reinforce the outer cylinder to strengthen it.

When plugging freshly cut logs it isn’t necessary to wait for a few months for the antimicrobial oils to volatilize. Just drill through the outside sappy layers into the dead heartwood with deeper holes and insert enough dowels to fill the hole with the last dowel, which becomes the unwaxed plug. No time is wasted melting unnecessary petroleum based paraffin to tediously pour into the holes, most of which runs over the log anyway, wasted rather than sealing the holes. Or you can just drill through the ends of the cut logs directly into the central dead heartwood. Recommendations to drill one inch deep holes into the outer sappy layer of the log don’t make biological sense, and inserting one dowel in such a short hole is more likely to dry out the dowel quickly.

If you imagine for a moment that the mushroom mycelium is an actual metabolic fire, it is burning up the dead heartwood like a real fire, but slower, on a biological burn timescale. Each dowel that you insert into a hole in the heartwood acts like a burning match on the overall log. One little dowel will take a long time to “take” and take off but will eventually ramp up and devour the whole log in a slow motion conflagration. The more holes you drill and the more dowels you insert, the faster the log will burn. This knowledge about the dead heartwood has several applications in mushroom cultivation.

When chipping logs and branches keep in mind that the larger in diameter the trunk or branch log is, the higher the proportion you will have of freshly chipped sterile heartwood rather than barky, leafy, or twiggy material. The freshly chipped heartwood is mushroom gold for growing mulch mushrooms or gourmet mushrooms on bagged chips. Leafy and twiggy material has high concentrations of external surface area that is not sterile but covered in dust, dirt, spores, mold, lichens, and other weedy contaminants.

In old growth forests there are many hollowed out ancient trees that are perfectly healthy and which provide habitat for nesting birds or beehives. There is actually a symbiotic relationship between the birds and bees and the hollowing fungi. As the fungus hollows out the heartwood and the hollow attains a size that allows birds and bees to nest in it, the moisture from the respiration of adult and baby birds and adult and baby bees provides a conducive environment for the further hollowing out of the heartwood, making for more and larger nests.

Next month we’ll look at making compost and manure and saprobic mushrooms that feed on compost or like substrates.


Cultivation Quarters Ken Litchfield With the new format of the Mycena News, I’ll be going into a much more in depth discussion of mushroom cultivation techniques, wherefores and howtos, the biology of mushroom lifestyles, pictures, etc. In addition I am requesting submissions of written or graphic contributions from the membership of your own first-hand knowledge, observations, and experiences with growing techniques or particular species or perhaps mushroom farms or growing operations you may have visited here or in foreign lands. I am more interested in having first-hand experience than simply recounting the same staid techniques that may be found all over the internet. However, it could also be excerpts from historical descriptions of early mushroom cultivation techniques from a hundred years or more ago and the mentalities that went with them. Priority is for gardening over laboratory techniques but demonstrating new, low overhead - high return methodologies for all aspects of mushroom cultivation is of value. Please send those submissions to mycenanews@mssf.org This month we’ll begin our discussions with an introduction to the lifestyle categories of the various useful mushrooms and their practical applications to mushroom cultivation. But first a note about growing mushrooms, garden style compared with laboratory style. Mycological enthusiasts that want to get into mushroom cultivation regularly encounter an assuming attitude from certain mushroom cultivators that laboratory methods are necessary de facto. And, in addition, they encounter commentary that laboratory style mushroom cultivation is actually really simple and inexpensive - and then they proceed to encounter the recommendations for expansive facilities and boocoo expenditures. Rarely do they encounter even a mention of the simple natural and organic emulations for culturing wild mushrooms called “mushroom gardening.” Millions of regular everyday people practice gardening as a hobby or business. This compares with a fraction of that number that are regularly practicing lab techniques for growing plants or mushrooms. Yet much of the mushroom cultivation advice purveyed assumes that it is an obvious proposition that mushroom cultivation requires laboratory methods. Much of this attitude originates from the clandestine culture of magic mushroom cultivators that do make up a substantial contingent in mycology and have made substantial contributions to laboratory knowledge of mushroom cultivation that can be applied to regular species of mushrooms. But let’s just step back a moment and look at the bigger picture. Millions of people, called gardeners, grow thousands of different species and cultivars of edible, herbal, aesthetically pleasing, and just plain interesting plants in multitudes of growing formats: in the ground, raised beds, containers, hanging baskets, greenhouses, windowsills, etc. But the number of folks who grow plants in comparatively complex laboratory conditions, primarily known as meristem culture, is comparatively miniscule. Really miniscule. It is easy to contend that the vast majority of gardeners have never even heard of meristem culture and far fewer have ever even tried it. Yet if a regular practitioner of meristem culture of plants were to give advice to a gardener on what equipment, facilities and knowledge they would need to grow plants, that gardener would rightly consider that advice nerdy, nutty, and ridiculous. There is also a substantial deterrent to laboratory cultivation of mushrooms that isn’t often discussed by lab practitioners. Lab conditions rely on sterile monocultures of one desired fungus. That may work if you are only growing certain saprobic mushrooms, those that live on dead stuff. If you want to cultivate mushrooms that require some sort of symbiont for parasitizing or mycorrhizing or an ecosystem of diversity of organisms that may be necessary for many desired fungi to thrive, then sterile lab conditions are likely to be counterproductive. In addition, some of the lab practitioners that may rail against the likes of Monsanto for practicing industrial scale monoculture of crops don’t seem to recognize the irony in their own practices. It is possible for the home gardener to have an inexpensive home laboratory setup by modifying a closet, kitchen, or bathroom and using readily available and recycled household items. And it is useful information to have for some aspects of mushroom cultivation. But laboratory methodologies aren’t a necessity for successful mushroom cultivation. For our purposes we’ll be discussing mushroom cultivation in terms that the average home gardener can understand. We’ll cover truly simple, inexpensive, low overhead - high return lab practices later, but for now let’s look at some aspects of mushroom biology as it relates to mushroom cultivation. The average person seeking to learn mycology, and especially mushroom cultivation, often finds frustration trying to get a handle on all the different taxonomic classifications and their natural, or not, characters. Rather than 17 or 39 or 117 different categories to try to wrap your brain around, it is much easier to remember only the three categories for the four different basic lifestyles. All mushrooms, for mushroom cultivation simplicity, can be sorted into saprobic, mycorrhizal, or parasitic lifestyles. Saprobic mushrooms like garden giant, turkey tails, oysters, reishi, and shaggy manes live on a substrate of dead stuff like tree trunks, logs, wood chips, sawdust, straw, mulch, compost, manure, or duff. Mycorrhizal mushrooms share resources, usually with a living tree substrate, like candy caps, chanterelles, and truffles with living oak tree roots, or porcinis and Santa mushrooms on living pine tree roots. Parasitic mushrooms obtain resources from some other species without sharing in return, like Cordyceps mushrooms on live caterpillar substrate or huitlacoche on corn substrate; you grow the sweet corn to grow the mushroom. Combinations of these three lifestyles constitute the fourth lifestyle, which we can call opportunistic - those mushrooms like morels or honeys that have more than one method of getting their nutrition. Let’s look for a moment at the most basic aspect of saprobic mushroom cultivation, the mushrooms that live in nature on raw undecayed organic matter, the interior dead heartwood of tree trunks. These would be the typical “gourmet” andor medicinal market mushrooms like oysters, shiitake, lion’s mane, pioppino, maitake, reishi, that grow in human symbiotic commercial conditions on bags or jars of hardwood sawdust as you might see at Far West Fungi or Gourmet Mushrooms. The dead heartwood of trees is a special habitat for mushrooms in the wild. In a healthy uninjured mature tree, the dead heartwood represents a sterile “petri dish” of raw organic matter residing in nature. This dead heartwood would normally provide the strong support structure for the trunk and main branches of a large tree. It is the inner cylindrical product of many years of early tree ring growth that has died and is encased in younger outer tree rings that are still living and growing. These outer rings keep the dead inner rings sealed off from outside organisms that might devour and hollow out the dead cylindrical heart of the tree. This seal is both physical and chemical; as long as the living outer shell of tree rings is physically intact and unbroken it continues to generate anti-biological exudates that chemically protect the interior of the tree from decay organisms like fungi. You can witness the interior living and dead regions of a tree’s anatomy in the basal stump of a freshly cut tree. On the outside is the bark layer. The outermost layers of the bark are dead, expanding and cracking in a distinctive, species specific pattern, and sloughing like epidermal skin as the trunk expands from inner growth of tree ring wood and living inner bark layers. Between the bark and the tree ring wood lies the cambium, where new cell reproduction for the bark and wood takes place, bark to the outside and wood to the inside. Interior to the cambium are the youngest outer layers of living tree rings that ooze the protective exudates in the sap. Interior to the sappy outer layers are the non sappy dead heartwood rings. You can see the sap oozing out of the outermost 2-4 inch thick cylinder of living tree ring wood and no sap oozing from the main dead interior region. It is this interior dead zone that becomes the hollow part of the tree when a mushroom mycelium devours it out, usually by entering from a broken branch or other wound that penetrates through the living wood layer. If the sterile dead interior is not exposed due to a too-shallow wound, then the living tissue can heal over with no hollowing taking place. If the dead heartwood interior is exposed and the heartwood becomes devoured and hollowed out by a fungus, this still doesn’t harm the living tissues of the tree. The hollowing fungi are saprobic, living on dead stuff, and eat out the dead heartwood, not the living outer wood. This is similar to surgical maggots that are used to eat out necrotic tissues in wounded human tissue without affecting the living cells. The structural integrity of the tree may or may not be compromised upon hollowing out by fungi. It is not necessary to cut down a hollowed out tree. Many of the long lanky branches of the tree can be cut back to reduce the wind stress on those branches that might put more stress on the hollowed trunk. The living and growing tissues will continue to reinforce the outer cylinder to strengthen it. When plugging freshly cut logs it isn’t necessary to wait for a few months for the antimicrobial oils to volatilize. Just drill through the outside sappy layers into the dead heartwood with deeper holes and insert enough dowels to fill the hole with the last dowel, which becomes the unwaxed plug. No time is wasted melting unnecessary petroleum based paraffin to tediously pour into the holes, most of which runs over the log anyway, wasted rather than sealing the holes. Or you can just drill through the ends of the cut logs directly into the central dead heartwood. Recommendations to drill one inch deep holes into the outer sappy layer of the log don’t make biological sense, and inserting one dowel in such a short hole is more likely to dry out the dowel quickly. If you imagine for a moment that the mushroom mycelium is an actual metabolic fire, it is burning up the dead heartwood like a real fire, but slower, on a biological burn timescale. Each dowel that you insert into a hole in the heartwood acts like a burning match on the overall log. One little dowel will take a long time to “take” and take off but will eventually ramp up and devour the whole log in a slow motion conflagration. The more holes you drill and the more dowels you insert, the faster the log will burn. This knowledge about the dead heartwood has several applications in mushroom cultivation. When chipping logs and branches keep in mind that the larger in diameter the trunk or branch log is, the higher the proportion you will have of freshly chipped sterile heartwood rather than barky, leafy, or twiggy material. The freshly chipped heartwood is mushroom gold for growing mulch mushrooms or gourmet mushrooms on bagged chips. Leafy and twiggy material has high concentrations of external surface area that is not sterile but covered in dust, dirt, spores, mold, lichens, and other weedy contaminants. In old growth forests there are many hollowed out ancient trees that are perfectly healthy and which provide habitat for nesting birds or beehives. There is actually a symbiotic relationship between the birds and bees and the hollowing fungi. As the fungus hollows out the heartwood and the hollow attains a size that allows birds and bees to nest in it, the moisture from the respiration of adult and baby birds and adult and baby bees provides a conducive environment for the further hollowing out of the heartwood, making for more and larger nests. Next month we’ll look at making compost and manure and saprobic mushrooms that feed on compost or like substrates.
Mycena News - February