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Saturday, July 26th, 2008
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9:39 am - Radiosynthesis
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| Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
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10:18 am - Question about grad programs
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maevemacaraab
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I've been doing plant experiments (with intensive container gardening) for about 10 years now, and after getting so inspired by the symbiotic relationship of mycorrhizal mushrooms with crops, I've been thinking that I would love to get involved in researching this.
I'm thinking about trying to get into a grad program for Mycology. Unfortunately, I was an English major for my undergraduate work. I do have a couple years until I apply, so I'm going to be taking biology and mycology courses at my local college to have them on my transcripts.
My question to any mycology grad students:
1, Is it hard to get into the programs if you are not a Biology major?
2. Any advice on colleges you know that might be working on this subject (the symbiosis of fungus and crop plants)?
(So far the only college I could find was in India....and I'm kind of looking for one either in the US, Canada, or Europe)
Thanks in advance.
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(9 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, July 18th, 2008
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6:30 am - Cultivation Projects
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acy
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Soooo... my current projects are:
King Stropharia outdoor bed. I put this in on Monday after work. This started by moving a huge mountain of decaying pecan tree leaves, flowers and goat crap to the compost heap, digging down a few inches, then moving some of the goat mix back. Then a bag of stropharia spawn on grain, two inches of hardwood mulch soaked in dechlorinated water with some hydrated lime, a layer of cow manure and topsoil, then seeds from various flowering annuals--marigolds, cornflowers, purple prairie clover and picotee cosmos. It'll be nice to have some color in the back yard.
Oyster mushrooms. I have a sack of elm oysters and a handsome log cut from the chinese elm in my front yard. I'm planning on taking extra dowels and using them to make some cardboard spawn as well. My other oyster projects are coming along nicely. I have eight quarts of grain that are colonizing with phoenix and blue oysters with a good deal of vigor. No contamination so far... (knock on wood)
Stone mushroom (Polyporous tuberaster). I have a brick purchased from Fungi Perfect that hasn't been doing much sitting in my kitchen window, so I have a shady spot picked out in the back yard for it. I plan on digging a pit to bury it in with hardwood mulch this weekend. I'll be planting some really beautiful red empress ginger plants and chinese ground orchids around it.
Beech mushroom. One of my jars is green! The rest are okay. This is a slow colonizer, so they may be ready by the time the weather cools. Maybe.
Lots of cool stuff coming in the mail, too. Agar and petri dishes and stuff like that. I don't have a laminar flow hood, so I'll probably end up using peroxided agar for strain isolation and cloning of a couple of nice mushrooms I picked up at a market--a really nice looking shiitake and some golden oysters I got at the local farmer's market.
Yippee hooray!
current mood: geeky
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, July 12th, 2008
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3:50 pm - Death Cap
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sundew_hil
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Found this beauty at Bulow Creek State Park, in northern florida.
White gills, white ring, yellow-green colored cap and whitish stalk tinged with the cap color. Bulbous base with volva under the dirt. I'm thinking death cap?
Doesn't it just look ominous? :D
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, July 11th, 2008
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11:44 am - Mushroom field data slip
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| Thursday, July 10th, 2008
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9:46 am - Greeting Everyone!!
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maevemacaraab
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I just want to start off saying how excited I am to find this LJ group. I've been loving mushrooms for a while now. Stumbled across Paul Stamets’ TED talk this spring and immediately went out and reserved Mycelium Running from the Library. I was so inspired, especially about mycorrhizal fungus working with agriculture. I have been growing my own food in an urban setting for about 10 years now, and have always striven to have a pesticide and herbicide free garden. I bought a jar of mycorrhizal fungus spores this spring and inoculated my garden. Within the next week, I started to see little mushrooms pop up out of the plant beds!!
So it’s July and my garden is blooming like crazy. It’s funny, the shaded patches are growing better than the ones in full sun, and I’m thinking that it’s because the fungus mycelium has more of a chance to root there along with the vegetable roots. (I pull out radishes and am getting about a foot of luscious black root ball on the ends!!) It’s amazing!! I even stopped using my fish emulsion fertilizer on the shaded patches because they were just growing too big. I’ve also noticed that the plants are healthier this year overall….I often have beetle problems (even though I try to attract birds and mantids to the garden) but it seems this year the plants don’t wither and dry from the beetle bites. (This leads me to think that the mycorrhizal fungus may lead to helping the overall plant’s immune system) So I also ordered a Shitake log from the site…and have been enjoying delicious mushrooms all summer!!
I’m planning on starting to clone the mycelium from the shitake log this fall so I can have a continuous supply and I have a couple questions for the community: 1.) I read that Poplar and Alder wood are best for Shitake Sawdust….where on earth do I find something like that in a city??!! Does anyone have any luck finding decent sawdust in local stores (like Home Depot or Lowe’s) for mushroom cultivation? Can I order wood chips online? 2.) I read that hydrogen peroxide is used to sterilize the wood. Has anyone ever tried cloning spawn without sterilizing the wood chips? What was the effect? 3.) Has anyone ever had luck cloning mushrooms from the grocery store?? I want to grow oyster mushrooms and would like to clone some to grow on paper shredding. I haven’t seen any growing wild in my area and was thinking of just getting oyster mushrooms from the store and clone those…Has anyone ever tried that? What was your result? What methods did you use? Thanks for any info. I’m so hungry for knowledge in this area. I reserved Stamets’ mushroom cultivator book from the library so I should soon have that to research. I’m looking forward to posting all my ideas that I’ve been thinking about. Ciao!!
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
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8:31 pm - Large Mushroom
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electolife
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Hello, I just found and joined this community, and I am new to mycology. I took this photos earlier this year when I was in Germany, and I found this mushroom under a tree. It was approximately a bit larger than my hand (which is why I took a photo, its size surprised me). I was wondering if any body could help me identify it? Thanks.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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11:42 am
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giyoe
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Hey, I'm new to growing. I picked up stamens growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. I thought it woul dbe cool to grow some portabellas which apparently sounded easier than it is. I tried it with the agar recipies he put in his book, specifically the PDYA. I did half my dishes with cloning then the other half with spores from a print I took recently. A few days have gone by and no signs of growth, I thought maybe contamination, but then wouldnt there be other fungus/mold growing? It looks untouched.
I was wondering if any one has grown portabellas, if you guys had some suggestions. I'm still in step one.
Also, does anyone have any suggestions for which gourmet mushrooms would grow will in a vermiculite/brown rice flour type jar?
and when you sterilize the jars is it better to keep the jar slightly loose to avoid exploding from pressure? keep in mind there is tape over the top holes.
thanks for any help.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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6:07 am - Squee!
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acy
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I am containing my excitement, but just barely. Last weekend I made my first attempt at grain cultivation. Well, three days have passed and I'm seeing the first signs of growth!
The grain came out looking really good! Only a few ruptured grains, everything fully hydrated with no clumping. (I used organic red winter wheat with a little agricultural gypsum.) I screwed up with the lids of my jars and had to replace the tyvek filter material (for gas exchange) while I was innoculating them with liquid mycellium, but so far no contamination.
Unfortunately I picked up the wrong syringe and innoculated the grains with Buna Shimeji (Hypsizygus tessulatus) spawn rather than the much more agressive phoenix oyster. Most of what I've read about Shimeji indicates it's a slow grower that requires cooler temperatures (50-60° F) to fruit, so I may put the jars in the fridge once they're fully colonized until the fall. I plan on getting some autoclavable bags and growing them on hardwood mulch and newspaper pulp because I can't find sawdust anywhere.
Being of redneck stock, I have dozens and dozens of mason jars in the attic, so I'll be making up a few jars tomorrow so I can try again with oysters. Also going to try my hand at elm oysters on a chinese elm log once it's cut and cured for a bit. Will post pics if anyone is interested.
current mood:  bouncy
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
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6:32 am - Arr nom nom.
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acy
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So I was finally able to track down a copy of "Texas Mushrooms: A Field Guide," which was published in 1992. I flipped through it last night and saw entries for... chanterelles! Boletus mushrooms! Things I have never tried and would really like to. There are huge national forests near Houston, mostly pine, which is (I think) good hunting grounds.
So how do I go about finding people to help me hunt wild mushrooms?! I would dearly love to find specimens a native mycorrhizal species to clone for my air layering experiment.
That, and a clean facility with a laminar flow hood I can use. Argh. I understand that cloning outdoor mushrooms is best handled with a glove box to eliminate potential contaminants, but once I have cultures isolated I'm going to need to use techniques I don't think are possible in my home with 20 year old carpets and dusty AC vents. I should be in school. :)
current mood:  sleepy
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, July 7th, 2008
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8:23 pm - Urban wildlife for dinner
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urbpan
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I just found this in the park by my house. I thought it was interesting, how it was growing all curvy-like. Then I thought that its field markings were distinctive enough that I could probably identify it, once I got back to my field guides: velvety dark brown cap, whitish pores for a spore-bearing surface, solid stipe, with brownish color that doesn't quite reach the base, and a pleasant odor (sweet. [Unknown LJ tag] thought it smelled like coffee ice cream)
I identified it as Boletus aereus, sometimes called 'queen bolete.' My favorite mushroom guide, the Simon and Schuster one, gives it two forks up for edibility. I cut the stipe in half to see if fungus gnats had gotten to it first--no maggots! I sliced the cap into thin slabs and sauteed it in olive oil, drizzling a few drops of soy sauce on it when it was done. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cottonmanifesto, who hates mushrooms, tasted it, and declared that it was similar to bacon. I may have to go looking for some more!
Cross-posted to
[Unknown LJ tag]</div> the urban pantheist.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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7:46 am - seen yesterday at great brook state park, carlisle, ma
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| Saturday, July 5th, 2008
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8:59 am - mushrooms seen 7/4/08, cutler park, needham, ma
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| Friday, July 4th, 2008
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11:33 am - They're just too cute to eat.
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acy
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I recently acquired a shiitake mushroom "log," from the evil "making me buy stuff while bored at work" Internets. When I received it I stuck it in the fridge for four days then soaked it in dechlorinated water for.. almost two days. I put it on this plate last Sunday. ( Cut for large images. )
current mood:  lazy
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
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3:12 pm - Magic Mushrooms in the news again!
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3:01 pm - Mushroom ID slips
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anjel_kitty
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So I'm settled in at the Mycology lab here at the University of Mississippi where I'm doing my masters, and my adviser and I are wanting to put together a decent survey of mushroom species in the area. I'm going to be making a little field slip to fill out important pertient information about helping to ID the mushroom species, and I was curious to know what sort of things you other mycologist out there use to get decent IDs.
So far we have thought of
Habitat (where it is growing, i.e. forest, grassy field, by a stream)
Plant species near by- (this is because we are a mycorrhizal lab)
Substrate: (in the soil, on rotting wood, dung)
Spore color:
Mushroom features:
Its suppose to be fairly concise so once we get to the lab we can ID it better using a microscope and key, but I'd like to know if there is anyone out there who does this, and perhaps is willing to share their handy little field strip.
current mood: nerdy
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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6:07 am - Mycoremediation?
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acy
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So does anyone follow Paul Stamets' work with mycoremediation? I've been reading Mycellium Running and there's loads of interesting information on the subject.
Houston's Buffalo Bayou is a slimy mess that's loaded with dioxins and bacteria, yet I still see people fishing it every now and then. I'd be interested in seeing how effective using 'bunker spawn' methods for treating this sort of problem, as well as nitrogen runoff from farming and feedlots. I sure as hell wouldn't eat a mushroom grown in steriod and antibiotic laden animal waste, but this sort of thing could potentially help rehabilitate many "dead zones" that are caused by agricultural runoff, like the Chesapeake Bay area or the Louisiana coastline near New Orleans... although that issue could be better addressed by wetland restoration.
Also, anyone here grow mushrooms for eating? I have a small hill of partially decomposed goat manure and leaf litter, a half dozen milk crates, and spores from blue and phoenix oysters. I sense a project in the works! Also going to give growing shimeji/beech mushrooms a shot, but I think it's too warm for them here.
And finally... go to Youtube and search for "Matango." I think this movie is more documentary than horror film!
current mood: sleepy
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
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7:12 pm - weird mushroom
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2:44 pm
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| Sunday, June 29th, 2008
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7:38 pm - Fungus... farming?
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acy
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I have a fungi problem. A dozen of my tomato plants have died from the stress of recent drought, coupled with a really bad powdery mildew infection. I'm considering a spray containing Streptomyces lydicus bacteria, but I fear I could kill beneficial fungi living in the soil.
So... yes, my question is, would using this treatment harm mycorrhizal fungi? I've had this problem two years in a row, and I'm getting very frustrated.
current mood:  frustrated
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(comment on this)
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mycology
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