For most of us who are ignorant about which wild mushrooms are edible and which are not, warnings about poisonous varieties are enough to restrain our appetites as we wander through the forest primeval.
One would expect that well publicized deaths like that of Count Achilles de Vecchi, an Italian diplomat residing in Washington, after eating an Amanita muscaria, would deter the untrained from wild harvesting of mushrooms, especially as we can buy safe mushrooms from people who know what they’re doing. Mind you, fresh picked anything tastes better than store bought, but if we want that wonderful taste we need to educate ourselves, or learn to grow our own.
In her book Mycophelia, author Eugenia Bone states mushrooms often contain all the essential amino acids required to produce high quality protein as well as fibre, vitamins and minerals. As such they are a desirable content of our diets, and not merely delicious. They are, in fact, so tasty that some people have trained pigs and dogs to sniff out an underground variety called truffles, which can be sold for enormous sums. Those of us lacking a trainable swine can still content ourselves growing more mundane, easier to produce types like shiitakes, criminis or oysters, whose spores are available from local sources.
Grow Mushrooms Canada, for example, is located in Sayward, north of Campbell River. They also sell grow kits, liquid cultures, substrates and the tools needed for growing mushrooms.
In their book, How to Grow Mushrooms From Scratch, Magdalena Wurth and her father Herbert Wurth describe several methods to grow mushrooms. I plan on trying out the one using logs because David has some alder rounds that should work just fine. I’ll follow one expert suggestion and drill a spiral of holes around the top of the logs to impregnate with spores, so I’ll know which mushrooms are the ones I want to harvest. Given that wild mushrooms grow profusely in the wood chip paths between my garden beds I am fairly sure I can provide a nurturing environment, but even a complete failure will provide me with the subject for a future column.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.
