Cultivating gourmet mushrooms is a finicky business. Even when you have read all about your chosen strains, worked out their optimal growing conditions and build a perfect little home for them, a couple of things can set you back.
We had a beautiful thing going with our King Trumpets (Pleurotus eryngii), we had found a strain that looked inviting, tasted delicious and fruited quickly. But then came summer and with it temperatures in the 80’s! Even with our “controlled” environment we couldn’t keep the temperature down in our cultivation house and so the Kings stopped fruiting.
Adam thought about our options for a while and decided that we should go back to the beginning! We started out with straw and oysters… And so, Monday was a super fun day, Adam cooked up a lot of straw, while basking in the sunshine and with the music blasting, we inoculated the straw with Pink Oysters*, Yellow Oysters**, Elm Oysters*** and what we call the Glen Cove Oyster Mushroom**** – an Oyster Mushroom found less than 100 feet from our house – it is a native fungi, found and grown locally – it’s doubly local!
Now comes the hard part, having to wait a couple of weeks before anything happens. But when it does, we will have wonderful, gorgeous and delicious fungi to enjoy.
Astrid
P.S. Around 8 PM last night we saw the weather forecast – in the 90’s all week – 20 minutes later we had bought ourselves an Air Conditioner unit for the incubation house, something had to be done!
*Pleurotus djamor
**Pleurotus citrinopileatus
***Hypsizygus ulmarius
****Pleurotus sp.
