Mushroom Seeds

We grow 13 varieties of wood-loving mushrooms on a regular basis: Reishi, Lion’s Mane, Turkey Tail, King Blue Oyster, Black Pearl Oyster, Golden Oyster, Snow Oyster, Italian Oyster, Chestnut, Pioppino, Shiitake, Pink Oyster and Elm Oyster. We rotate these with the seasons, depending on what temperature they thrive in.

To cultivate mushrooms, you have to emulate their natural growing environment.

Picture a mushroom on a forest floor. Once it reaches maturity, it launches billions of spores, all smaller than specks of dust. These spores catch a ride on a breeze, or perhaps they may hitch-hike on a nosy animal. If their journey ends in an acceptable environment, these spores will begin to grow into their first multi-cellular shoot of tissue. With proper nutrition, it will soon multiply rapidly and continue to spread in search for more food sources, expanding into a growth of mycelium.

If you must think of a mushroom like a plant, you could call the spore a “seed” and the mycelium the “roots”, although mycelium is much more complex than a normal plant’s roots.

Mycelium continues to grow beneath the surface — of soil, of tree bark, or wherever it is finding nutrition — until it completely covers its source of sustenance. Eventually, an environmental stimulus will trigger the next developmental stage: fruiting body mushrooms. These triggers could be a specific level of humidity, light, carbon dioxide, or temperature. The mycelium will begin to “pin”, and the pins will eventually grow into the mushrooms we see growing out of trees, roots, or a forest floor that is deep with tree litter. The fruiting process can take anywhere from a few days to many years. From there, the mature mushrooms will again release their spores in search of a new source of food. This is not how every single mushroom is produced, but from it, we contrive our basic process of growing our own mushrooms in a controlled environment.

So, how exactly do we emulate that?

Of course we could get incredibly technical here, and we will do that at some point in the future. For now, to keep things simple, I’ll tell you how we get to harvesting our mushrooms. We add mycelium to our substrate (growing medium), and once our substrate is fully colonized with the mycelium (the “roots”, remember?), we know it’s ready to begin fruiting! We expose the myceliated substrate to oxygen, which prompts the mushrooms to begin growing. Our substrate is comprised of a mixture of locally-sourced soy-hull pellets and hard-wood pellets, which is hydrated to 60%. This is referred to as “master’s mix” in the mushroom-growing community, because it provides excellent nutrition for the growing mycelium and subsequent fruiting bodies. In this way, we mimic the pattern of growth of forest fungi. Doing so isolates the specific mushroom strain we want to grow, while protecting it from contamination and encouraging healthy growth.

From there we harvest the mushrooms and either sell them fresh to restaurants or farmer’s markets, or we process those of substantial medicinal value and turn them into delectable drinks, to make assimilating their nutritive value easy and enjoyable.