Your Questions About Gardening

GardenersCardiff answers:

The secret is keeping a pure culture going. This is easy to do with a pressure cooker and the proper technique. Mushrooms grow from a mass of filaments called a mycelium. It looks a bit like bread mold, but is more compact and there are no dusty spores of any kind. A small piece of this tissue is carefully placed in a sterile growth medium of some sort. Potato agar is frequently used in large labs, but ordinary gelatine can be mixed with molassis and a little plant food. Boiled and cooled, it sets into an appropriate growth medium. If things work as they should, the fungus will eventually cover the medium with a blanket of mycelium. Sometimes however, too many bacteria also enter the culture and out-compete the mushroom. This is easy to see because the medium liquifies, darkens and rots. A good culture will remain solid with only a white covering of mycelium. Stock is best kept in the refrigerator when not in use. Most mushroom stocks can even be frozen.

Having established a stock culture, it can be used to innoculate growth cultures. Many edible mushrooms grow on some cellulose base. Shitake are fond of hardwood sawdust, especially oaks. Oyster mushrooms are more tolerant of compost and can be grown on straw. The important thing is to insure the compost is sterile before placing any stock on it. After being i9nnoculated, the compost is re-sealed and incubated a month or so. Properly innoculated, the compost will fill with a thick mat of mycellium. At this point, the compost container is opened and exposed to fresh air and light. This will trigger the mature mycellium to produce fruiting bodies. These expand into full sized mushrooms fairly quickly. The mushrooms can be harvested and a well grown compost can produce several crops of mushrooms before exhausting itself. The material can then be added to garden soil as mulsh to enrich it. Some soil mushrooms can colonize the garden by doing this, like shaggy mane mushrooms and even morels.

Another popular way of growing wood mushrooms is to drill holes in logs and stuff stock mycellium into them. This will eventually grow into the log after the holes are capped with a wax plug. After 6 months to a year, the log will begin to sprout many mushrooms.

The white button mushrooms most common in stores are grown on sterilized manure and wheat straw. A bed of sterile compost is laid down in a barn and stock is applied to it. The bed is covered, kept moist and a flush of mushrooms is harvested.

Truffels are the rarest and most expensive fungus in the world. They are impossible to grow in a lab and have to grow naturally in oak forests. The mushroom lives on the roots of oak trees and dogs or pigs have to be used to find them undergound.

FYI: The Fungi Perfecti company sells mushroom kits, books and most everything else one needs to grow their own mushrooms at home.

GardenersCardiff answers:

You can’t without killing the lawn too. When it runs out of cellulose, it will just die out on it’s own. Until then, just mow them off as they come up.

The actual mushroom is growing underground. It is a white fibrous organism that eats cellulose in your lawn. Stuff like dead grass and dead tree roots or shrub roots. As long as cellulose is present, and moisture conditions are just right, it will grow and send up Caps (which are actually the flower of the mushroom). When moisture is taken away, or it eats up all the cellulose, it dies.

GardenersCardiff answers:

I would wonder if your tree is dying? If it’s on the roots and in the bark you might end up killing the tree rooting it out as suggested by that one person, sounds like it’s being kept too wet around the base, perhaps you have mulch or dirt mound up around the trunk? You might want to get rid of that. I doubt the salt would work and that would definitely harm the tree and surrounding plants and soil. If you had all my snails they’d probably gobble it up lol. Whatever you do don’t tear off the bark that will kill the tree for sure, its lifeline of “arteries” is right underneath. Fungacide might be harmful to the tree as well although maybe they sell something you can spray on the surrounding soil, I’d ask an OSH or other garden store expert. From my own experience mushrooms growing on the ground are either growing on dying or dead tree roots or grass or if they’re on the trunk, they’re doing damage to the tree