Spring is in full swing, and wild harvests of morels and other wild fungi are right around the corner. If foraged fungus from Prospect Park is outside your comfort zone, there is still time left this season to start an edible mushroom garden in your home, cellar, backyard, or community garden. A wide selection of gourmet mushroom varieties from portabella to reishi (including morel) are suitable for cultivation in Brooklyn with accessible price points and learning curves. Whether you’re looking for a project easy enough for young children or something with the longevity to satisfy a learned gardener, the kingdom of fungi has something for everyone. This article surveys the techniques and mushroom species popular with home cultivators to get you started before Summer.
Indoor Kits
Indoor mushroom garden kits boast both convenience and guaranteed results. One popular product from the eco-conscious company Back to the Roots promises a harvest of oyster mushrooms within two weeks of purchase. Simply place their tissue-paper-sized box in a dark corner of your kitchen, add water, and wait. Similarly easy and small “just add water” kits are available from online vendors in the range of $20 – $40 for: portabella, crimini, oyster, lions mane, enokitake, king stropharia, maitake, nameko, pioppino, shiitake, reishi, and others. While packaged kits can deliver delicious, fresh mushrooms with minimal effort, they rather lack in longevity. Analogous to annuals of the plant kingdom, indoor kits will fruit once or twice, but are a short-lived pleasure. If you are up for a moderate DIY project, many of the above mushroom varieties may also be grown perennially.
Log Cultivation
Perennial cultivation of gourmet mushrooms on logs can yield harvests for ten or more years from the same log with slightly more than a novice amount of labor and know-how. Nearly any clean-ish shady place is suitable for log cultivation. Sheltered backyards, cellars, cemented areas like air-shafts between buildings- not to mention all the shady stumps since Sandy- are all good mushroom habitat conditions common to Brooklyn. If there’s a shady spot near you somewhere, you can probably grow a log mushroom garden there. As long as your log isn’t already inoculated with wild fungus, and you match the type of mushroom you want to grow with one of its preferred tree species, a log garden can start producing fruit in 6 months to a year.
Straw Mulch
Soil-enriching edible mushrooms like wine cap, a.k.a. king stropharia, fruit in humid late Summer days and can be inoculated into thickly layered matts of straw mulch between the plants in a garden bed. Bales of oat or wheat straw are soaked in water for three days before mushroom spawn gets mixed in between matts of the wet straw. Spreading inoculated straw mulch between corn rows and other crops helps retain moisture in the soil, boosts soil nutrients, and yields large meaty mushrooms for the grill. The perennial longevity of this method depends in part on the mass of straw available for the fungus to eat. To keep harvests coming year after year, gardeners will have to refresh the supply of straw in their mushroom patch annually.
Composted Beds and Lawns
It is also possible to sew mushroom spawn into thick beds of moistened wood mulch and richly composted lawns. Just imagine harvesting morels from the mulched paths of your community garden, or shaggy manes from around the compost bin. Maintaining a rich amount of well composted matter and perpetually moist conditions- even in dry seasons- are key to success with mushroom beds.
Symbiosis
Truffle cultivation is practiced by the most patient of souls who inoculate the seedlings of oak and hazelnut trees as they are sprouting to life. Planting them in the earth propagates a complex multi-species symbiosis that benefits the garden, the forest, and the kitchen. Successful truffle cultivation requires a more Mediterranean climate than we experience here in Brooklyn, but ingenuous gardeners from North Carolina to Oregon have been making inroads to this new frontier of American mycology. There may be hope for a truffle orchard in the neighborhood someday, but if you have the patience for that, surely you also have what it takes to hunt the wild morel in Prospect Park.
Happy mushrooming!
-by Shawn Onsgard for the PSFC Brooklyn Backyard Brigade
The Park Slope Food Coop's Brooklyn Backyard Brigade 