Cornell University

cultivation

veiled

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.

Mushrooms by Alan Weir from flickr

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?

Hypholoma sublateritium

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.

truffles

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.

oysters en route

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.

cultures

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.

corn smut

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…

Mushrooms in Samoa

Daisuke Goto – The first to cultivate mushrooms in Samoa

Our correspondent and Cornell grad student visits Samoa, and reports on the state of mushroom cultivation methods in the South Pacific.

About

Most people don't pay much attention to fungi, which include things like mushrooms, molds, yeasts, and mildews. Here at Cornell we think they're pretty fascinating. In fact, even the most disgusting foot diseases and moldy strawberries are dear to our hearts. We'd like to talk to you about fungi, so that like us, you too can tell gross stories at the dinner table. Afterwards, maybe you'll notice some things you would have overlooked before, and we think this could be good for the planet.

Kathie T. Hodge, Editor

Beneath Notice, our book of borescopic mycology.

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