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Agarikon
The fungus Fomitopsis officinalis has a long history of use in North America and elsewhere, both as medicine and as a medium of ritualistic art. Read about Agarikon and its uses, and follow Fungi Perfecti President Paul Stamets on a successful expedition to find this rare mushroom.
Mushrooms as Sacred Objects in North America
Although surely many Native American peoples were experts on fungi, we have little knowledge of how they used them, particularly the more ephemeral mushrooms. Here’s a primer on three different bracket fungi (conks) used by some native peoples.
The fungus you want in your walls
Fungi are good at binding stuff with their filamentous cells. Now a group of New York entrepreneurs at Ecovative is producing sustainable packaging and insulation based on agricultural wastes bound by fungal mycelium. So instead of petroleum-based styrofoam, they can grow us some packing materials in whatever shape we like.
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!
Lactarius helvus, the maple syrup milky cap
Milky caps are distinctive mushrooms that “bleed” milk when you break them. So it’s easy to recognize the genus, Lactarius, but it’s often tricky to identify the drab ones to species. Here’s one that smells like maple syrup, or fenugreek. But although it smells like things you can eat, don’t eat it, or you’ll be sorry.
How to eat a bolete
King boletes are among the most delicious of mushrooms, so why is it that I am so bad at finding them? Some of their sisters are also delicious edibles; a few are not so good. This piece is not so much a guide to boletes, but rather an account of how to eat them.
Entomophaga maimaiga – The caterpillar killer
Since we’d rather not let gypsy moth caterpillars eat the leaves off entire forests, we’re pretty happy about Entomophaga maimaiga, a fungus that attacks them. In this post we take a close-up, time lapse look at the devouring of a caterpillar by a fungus that is an effective agent of biological control.
Fungi in streams: a leaf nightmare
The fungi that live in burbling streams are full of surprises. They’re shockingly pronged and elegant–not the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a spoonful of filthy-looking foam. And they’re surprisingly important as foundation members of aquatic ecosystems.
The Dish on Deliquescence in Coprinus Species
Inky caps are mushrooms that’re stately when they first appear, but dissolve into embarrassing black ink upon maturity. Why do they do that, and how? You can actually write in their stinky ink! How do I know the ink stinks? I don’t want to talk about it.