Category — Fungi

I’ve started my moss garden.

And the beginnings aren’t quite as small as this picture implies. This little window moss-garden was inspired by having some very tiny pieces left, little shreds that happened as I was gathering moss, plus the small curl of oak bark you can see rearing up its mossy head. It’s very fun having a moss garden by my sink, though (and that’ll make it easy to remember to water it).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the house, I’ve started assembling some ingredients.

Here’s a photo of the kind of “soil” I’m dealing with (mostly shreds of old boards on top):

I’d originally thought that I’d just grind up moss and spray it all over the whole thing, voila, moss garden. Like all garden fantasies, this one was torn from me forcibly. George Schenk’s Moss Gardening (Timber Press), advised me that some mosses like wood, some like rocks, and some like to grow in soil. One moss does not fit all.  OK, so one little piece of knowledge rattling in the empty cauldron which is my knowledge of bryophytes (mosses and lichens).

What I’d have to do, if I wanted mosses on the ground, was to go and find local moss growing in a similar situation (there are shade mosses and sun mosses, another tiny bit of knowledge I’ve gained. I thought they all grew in shade). Then, at least if I wanted the easiest quickest method (I do), I was supposed to cut up divots, about the size of my hand, leaving plenty of moss to grow over the blank spots.

I went to the woods near my house and proceeded to moss-hunt. I’ve permanently misplaced my trowel (yes, I know, I could have replaced it in the ensuing years), so I took a pruning knife with me. Actually, for the moss that was growing on the face of banks, no knife was necessary; I could work off the pieces with my hands (that’s where some of those tiny ones came in; they just broke off). They didn’t come with the 2-3 inches (5-8cm) of soil that Shenck recommends; they weren’t (as some gurus say) that deeply attached. The ones I cut from flat ground didn’t come up with much soil, either, maybe because I was cutting them with a knife, maybe because I was cutting them out of pretty-much solid clay.

The clay aspect worries me. Because, when you clear the debris away from my moss-garden-site soil, you get this:

Sandy loam. Really rare in our area, and one of the best possible soils for growing most things - but it is very different from the clay soil my mosses were wrested from, and they were under oaks, not conifers.

Will this make a difference? I don’t know. Next post, I’ll show how I started creating my moss garden (with a little potential fungus involved, too.)

This post, I’ll leave you with a quote from George Shenck, on why more people in the U.S. think moss is something to be thoroughly cleaned out or scrubbed off. It’s a rather grandiose justification for my little moss garden, but, like moss, the concept creeps up on you, filling in spaces you didn’t even know were blank and unfurnished.

“At a certain level of mind, mosses and lichens are allied with owls, toads, bats, and things that go bump in the night, are in league with Nature at the downturn, at one with decadence and demise…Admiration of mosses and lichens, and interest in cultivating them, represents the attainment of a certain wholeness of the civilized mind, a roundness in understanding our environment.”

If you’re in the market for immediate gratification, consider an oyster mushroom kit.  I’m harvesting mushrooms twelve days after I started growing them.

Oyster mushrooms (there are several varieties and subspecies) are some of the most nutritious around. According to R.H. Kurtzman, PhD., they are rich sources of high-quality proteins and amino acids, B vitamins, and pro-vitamin D (the vitamin a lot of people are missing these days, as indoor jobs means little sun exposture).  Minerals such as iron and potassium are also present. And oyster mushrooms are high in chitin; he recommends them as a cleaner source for chitin than shellfish.

Medical studies show  benefits of oyster mushrooms. They’re  a good source of glucosamine, which often helps people and animals with joint problems. (Glucosamine works very well for some, but not others ) Several studies are now showing that oyster mushrooms lower cholesterol.

Besides these benefits, blue oyster mushrooms were my choice because they can grow at temperatures cooler than other oyster mushrooms: from 45F (a little over 7 degrees C)  to 65 degrees F (about 18 degrees C), and aren’t hurt by freezing. In my uncentrally-heated house, with a trip coming up, this sounded good to me. The mushrooms fruit at 65 degrees, which sounded about right for a cool place in my house this time of year. The final appealing aspect of this type of mushroom is that they looked like some of the easiest, quickest mushrooms to grow.

I reported earlier that I’d done some studying of Paul Stamets’s Fungi Perfecti catalogue, and ordered some mushroom plugs and a kit. A kit’s the easiest possible way to grow mushrooms, as the grower has done all the work in getting the mycelium in their right growing medium and ready to go. You just activate it by keeping it moist in dim light.

It was only a couple of days before I started to see the primordia poking through the microscopic holes in the growing bag (some professional mushroom growers use floor-to-ceiling-long versions of these bags, making little forests of them in their growing rooms).

In a day or two, the forming clusters looked like this, close up:

As they got bigger, my blue oyster mushrooms weren’t particularly blue; maybe this is because I let them dry out too much (apparently that can turn mushrooms brown), or get too much light (mushroom colors are darker in dim light, paler in sun).

Keeping the mushrooms moist enough has been hard; I’m starting to understand why there are special mushroom growing rooms. Mushroom kits need to be in a place prominent enough that I will notice and water them every day - but if that place is too light, I run into problems. If  it’s dark, it’s a lot easier for me to forget. While my wood stove leaves some nice cool spaces in my house where I can put plants that don’t like heat, it also dries out the air, as all heating systems do. If you had a house with a basement, that might be ideal: I could keep my mushrooms outside, where they’d get all the natural humidity, but I’m not sure whether they’d fruit, since the temperature needs to be at 65 F for that.

We had a good rain, so I did put the mushrooms out for a day or two to catch rain water, on the theory they’d like it as much as plants do. I’m not experienced enough to know if this slowed down the fruiting, or helped it, but it did mean they were as moist as they like to be for a couple of days.

Some mushrooms, like morels, are temperamental; you could wait two years to harvest those. But I got my first blue oyster mushrooms eight days after I started spraying it with water and cloaking it in its humidity tent. In fact, I might should have harvested them a little earlier; the information-packed pamphlet that comes with the kit shows a picture of ripe mushrooms as being still a little convex (I always have to remember: concave is caved in; convex is the one that bulges out, like those old bull’s eye mirrors, or a bulldog’s eyes).

Some of my mushrooms had definitely lifted their caps up and started to make cups, like this:

That’s when the mushrooms have apparently gone past their prime. Still, they didn’t look so bad, so I harvested them, too, with my little pointy flower shears; I got about a double handful in all, leaving many small and tiny ones still growing and popping up. Commercial harvesters gather oyster mushrooms by the bunch, but I have the time to be a little more conservative; I hope to grow all my mushrooms to their full extent.

I think some of the reason I let my mushrooms go was that I had an inner picture of the caps opening out from the closed cups to a flat spread; I see now that I was basically transferring the image of an opening bud to the mushroom world. Note to self: mushrooms don’t act like chlorophyll-bearing plants. You knew this.

The Fungi Perfecti pamphlet recommends cooking oyster mushrooms a lot longer than I have in the past. They cook down quite a bit, to half their fresh volume, or maybe less.  That’s okay: now they have nearly 20% protein and .1% niacin, among other vitamins.  While the pamphlet sugggests sauteeing in olive oil for 10 to 15 minutes, then adding butter, tamari, chopped scallions and wine, I’m taking a simpler course for now.  For reasons I’m too polite to mention in a blog, I can’t eat olive oil, so I sauteed the mushrooms in walnut oil (my standby oil for cooking and baking: it always tastes great, and has those healthy omega-3s). The rest of the recipe sounds great, but I didn’t feel like rushing out to get the missing ingredients.

So, using what I had, I sauteed the chopped mushrooms with chopped onions in walnut oil, until the mushrooms were golden brown. A great sauce on white fish, and it made rice and beans taste like a gourmet treat.

Do any of you  feel mushrooms don’t belong in a garden? Read any book or catalogue by Paul Stamets, and you’ll learn that mushrooms are already in your garden, in the form of mycorrhizae in the soil.

The word ‘mycorrhizal’ means root fungus (mykes is Greek for fungus, and rhiza is Greek for root). Mycorrhizae are the prefruiting stage of certain kinds of mushrooms: tiny, threadlike webs networking their way through every healthy soil, an enormous microscopic (I always wanted to use those two in a sentence together) network which protects plants from disease and allows them to send nutrients and water to each other, according to need. The Fungi Perfecti catalogue says that plants connected to this network also take up several hundreds or thousands of times more water and nutrients than they do without mycorrhizae. (Fungi Perfecti is the business side of  Stamets’s mushroom venture, and helps fund an incredible range of research and teaching.)

All over the world, underground networks of mycorrhizae keep life afloat. Forests are dependent on thriving mycorrhizae. Without them, we have no healthy plant communities. Without healthy plants, we have no air to breathe and no food to eat. So these microscopic beings  are very important parts of our lives. We may have to broaden our views of organic life to fully understand the world of fungi, which is also our world. **

Unfortunately, industrial land-clearing and farming methods kill off these invisible, vital members of our plant communities. The best thing would be to think about better ways to do our clearing and farming, so we preserve our local blends and varieties of mycorrhizae.  But meanwhile, we can start remediation in our gardens, by buying jars or packets of powdered mycorrhizae blends, and mixing them into our soil, starting a new network.  Or we can get fertilizers with mycorrhizae in them, which is how I got my own introduction to what mycorrhizae can do in a garden.  Suddenly my container plants looked fuller, greener, happier, and they seemed to take stress better, too. I’ve grown invisible fungus ever since.

But Stamets doesn’t just want us to have microscopic underground mushrooms. He’s also a missionary of big mushrooms in gardens. We can naturalize medicinal and edible mushrooms in woodland gardens, and grow edible mushrooms in with our vegetables: Garden Oyster mushrooms (Hypsizygus ulmarius) unlock nutrients from organic debris to feed underlying plants -and they’re reportedly delicious to eat. (I buy another species of oyster mushroom to cook with, and they have a lovely mild flavor and tender texture.) We can also grow mushrooms as a crop, establishing a morel patch (it can take a few years), or growing King Stropharia (Stropharia rugos-annulata), a mushroom that thrives in a huge range of temperatures on waste products like sawdust and wood chips, and fruits delicious mushrooms as big as five pounds.

Growing mushrooms in our gardens is a huge innovation in mushroom culture, which often requires painstaking and esoteric methods to work. A local mushroom grower once told me that he had to imitate thunderstorms in his mushroom growing area, so his mushrooms would fruit. Other typical mushroom-culture equipment includes sterile growing rooms, agar cultures, and matching the right growing media and techniques to each mushroom variety.

Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms goes deep into the strange cultures of the mushroom world, and it is here that we find out some of King Stropharia’s weird, secretive habits. King Stropharia mushrooms are bountiful, beautiful, and delicious, Stamets starts off, giving a few informal recipes to show he really enjoys them, and isn’t just talking theoretically. But he also reveals a deeper layer of the generous stropharia personality: eating them for more than two or three days in a row suppresses the enzymes we use to digest them.

For those who don’t understand how this might be a problem, Stamets offers a cautionary tale. A friend of his became enchanted by the mushrooms, once they were introduced: he grew them, ate them frequently, made new recipes for them. At last he culminated his love by throwing a huge summer garden party for King Stropharia, so that all of his friends would know the mushroom he honored with his love. He indulged that love privately also, eating the mushrooms as he cooked; by the time of the party, he had been partaking of King Stropharia for three days. While his other guests enjoyed the succulent fungus, he became violently ill. “To this day, he now views King Stropharia (and me) with great suspicion,”  Stamets concludes. (pg. 338)

The mushroom at the top of this post was growing in the woods near my house.  It’s probably edible, but all I could figure out is that it’s some kind of bolete, narrowing  it down to a few thousand choices. It’s certainly past its prime, as you can tell by looking at the yellowing drying spongy bit (my mushroom botany is pretty primitive) underneath the cap.

I have been on a few local mushroom hunts, but I don’t trust myself to identify more than a few varieties. I don’t play around with mushrooms. It could be deadly, or at least really sickening. My hope is that by going on more hunts and hanging out with mushroom hunters, I’ll build my mushroom vocabulary. Another way I hope to improve my mushroom knowledge is by cultivating them. That way, I can be sure of the variety, and learn more about the different forms of each mushroom.  I’ve already ordered some plugs and a kit of different mushrooms. I’ll be reporting more later.

*My title is derived from the title of one of Eleanor Cameron’s whimsical 1950s science fiction books,  The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, available through Fungi Perfecti. Her books are supposed to be juvenile fiction, but they’re  fun for older juveniles, too.

**For an impassioned and thorough explanation of the mycorrhizal network, take a look at the Las Pilatas Nursery site.

This staghorn lichen reminds me of a Patagonia catalogue.

Let me explain that.

It was years ago. I was working on an alternative-energy catalogue. Since this was back when most people hadn’t heard of solar panels, we were basically making it up as we went along. Some of the people in the office brought in popular, innovative catalogues to give the writing and art team ideas.

One of them was a Patagonia catalogue with a theme: the colors of nature. Usually, said the introduction, people tend to think of “natural” colors as low-key. Sober. Muted.

This catalogue was looking at the brilliant neon colors of nature, and made its point with photos.

I had always thought of natural colors as rather sober, too. That catalogue got me looking around and seeing that that isn’t entirely true. Staghorn lichen is one of the plants that proves that natural colors aren’t all quiet.

Lichens are a partnership of fungus and algae; the algae feeds the fungus. Staghorn lichen is a fruticose lichen, the most “advanced” form (according to whom? And what makes a plant advanced? And how can we humans be the judge of that, anyway, when we don’t even have enough judgement to keep our own planet clean and livable? Okay, next paragraph.).

Fruticose lichens have stalks with branches, and hang or stand upright, unlike other kinds of lichens, which lie in in flat rosettes or little curls and ruffles. Sometimes fruticose lichens commonly called mosses, since they look fluffy, but they are not.

Staghorn lichen is also called wolf lichen (the Latin name, vulpina, refers to a wolf). I can’t bring myself to call it that because its little branches remind me at least somewhat of a buck’s antlers, but not at all of a wolf. There may be some explanation for “wolf lichen” that makes it more palatable, but I don’t know it.

While many lichens prefer rock, staghorn lichen grows on trees. I’ve mostly seen them on the red firs, junipers, and ponderosa pines. They may grow on other trees, but I haven’t noticed it.

Western gardeners are inclined to think of moss and lichen as problems that must be fixed. What if we began thinking of them as assets to our gardens? A part of the tree and rock community? If they are not harming other plants, why not  revel in their beauty? The Japanese are way ahead of us on this, of course, and I have also seen some pictures of Italian gardens with sumptuous moss and lichened rock.

Seeing a plant in the wild puts it in a new light. Up in the mountains, in the dim conifer woods at dusk,  walking on soft duff in cool shadows, staghorn lichen glows like a beacon, a neon sign, a brilliant surprise.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with an updated version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

lichen.com