cultivation
Growing the Ungrowable Fungi
Exploring the delicate art and science of coaxing fungi into the lab – when they otherwise refuse to grow without their hosts
An unlikely delicacy: the basket stinkhorn
This isn’t the first post you’ve seen here about stinkhorns. They’ve just got that special something. In the Western hemisphere, they’re wonderfully disgusting. In the East, they’re wonderfully delicious. Let’s explore.
ZAP! Lightning, Gods, and Mushrooms
Everyone knows mushrooms pop up after thunderstorms, right? Japanese mushroom farmers sometimes deploy electric shocks to get their shiitake mushrooms to fruit. So, what would happen if you wandered around in the forest zapping the ground?
Taming The Fungus
Many tasty mushrooms aren’t hard to culture, if you know the tricks. Here is our illustrated primer on making a clean tissue culture of a wild or cultivated mushroom. Later you can try to get it to fruit in your basement or backyard!
So you want to be a truffle-farmer…? (Part 2)
Our trufficulture adventure continues with a short history of black truffle cultivation in France, with a note on the unreasonable expense of synthetically truffle-scented olive oil.
So you want to be a truffle-farmer…? (Part 1)
Truffles are ugly, dirty, stink in a lascivious way, and excite wild desires in humankind and pigs alike. Apparently people will pay just about anything for these lumpish things. Hmm, what if you could grow them? Read on.
The Future of Fungal Freshness?
What if mushrooms weren’t grown in dank grow rooms by gnomes and elves, but instead grew right in their clever packaging on the way to market? Our student reporter interviews designer Agata Jaworska about her concept ‘Made in Transit,’ presented as her MS thesis at the renowned Dutch nexus, Design Academy Eindhoven.
A simple way to preserve fungal cultures
In this post, PhD student Anuar Morales Rodriguez shares a cheap and easy method for maintaining collections of fungal cultures. If you don’t have access to a vat of liquid nitrogen or a lyophilizer, this method (first developed in Brazil at CIAT) allows you to store your favorite fungi over the long term as dried cultures on filter paper.
Huitlacoche
This post was contributed by Fahma Bob, a student in my Mushrooms class, PLPA 319 For a gardener, Ustilago maydis can certainly be a little scary, especially if you don’t know what it is. Imagine going out to your sweet…