Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms

What Hacker News says

1. citruscomputingJul 2022
   Yeah, 1000%. I've grown almost half the species they list. The hard (and fun) part is agar work to clean up the culture, sterilizing the grain, and keeping it sterile as you inoculate it, knowing when a bag has gone bad, etc. Fruiting it is easy in comparison. Like, cut some slits in the bag and mist it, with a trash bag over it if you want to be fancy. Mushroom stand at former local farmers market sold said blocks direct to consumer, and they'll give you a hell of a lot more than these ones.

   I do have my own fruiting chamber, but it's not necessary.

   The main advantage of this thing (which is no small feat!) is that it looks pretty, unlike a mottled plastic bag, potentially with another bag over it. I can absolutely see a place for it as a fun, living table piece that gives you food. Also once you buy this thing you have an incentive to keep buying their blocks. I have never been impressed with "smart" fruiting chambers -- they just play up how ~hard~ growing mushrooms is and then do the easy part for you and claim it's solved.

   Call me when a chamber like this can detect mold better than my nose and eyes. THAT I'll shell out money for. It sucks to have mold sporulate, contaminating everything, before you know it's happened.

   Mushrooms want to grow! And once you've gotten to the point where they're the only thing growing, you're golden.

   Also, none of this is that hard if you read and learn! The mushrooms will tell you exactly where you went wrong, and there's TONS of info out there to get the hobby grower started. I highly suggest Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Paul Stamets, and reading up on The Shroomery (lot of good stuff in the gourmet forum, some stuff that's common between gourmet and magic, like agar or grain prep is in the other cultivation forum).

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2. tastyfreezeSep 2020
   If you don't have it already his book "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms" is an indispensable guide for growing many species of mushrooms, including morels, at any scale. Coincidentally, it contains his observation of bees sucking on King Stropharia mycelium before the insight they might be doing it to self medicate.
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3. wittedhaddockMay 2020
   Agreed! I spend a couple hours a week packing bags basically and have found it as a way to relax.

   I read Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Stamets and subject myself to public shaming on /r/mushroomgrowers, got spawn from North Spore (though there are other several good ones I can recommend if you email me, would probably not recommend going straight to inoculate/spores as you need a more sterile env), bought a fog machine from a mini golf course, racks from home depot, using wood pellets (which come pasteurized as a side effect of pelletization, compared to pasteurizing yourself which is a huge PITA unless you can do it with lime in bulk imho), and a raspberry pi controller to monitor humidity to turn on/off fog machine

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4. neverkn0wsb357Dec 2023
   Okay, but this has been known for a while hasn’t it? I remember reading a statement like this in “Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms” and that book was published in 1993.

   Is the reason this is note worthy the % amount calculated by the study?

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5. giantg2Apr 2021
   I mostly read to gain new knowledge or skills, or out of necessity. It's not all books though.

   Lately I've needed to do a lot of reading of statute, code, case law, and professional standards (found on state-run/official sites). I've also recently read some studies on PubMed related to a medical condition. So both of these are done out of issues I'm facing in life.

   Books that I've read recently are also nonfiction, but more related to hobbies and skills. Stuff like Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, Natural Pest and Disease Control, and Defensive Tactics.

   Maybe if you want to start reading more, you can pick shorter material. If you like technology and nostalgia/unoffical history, then you might like the articles in The Best of 2600.

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6. sentientforestDec 2019
   On my list to read in 2020:

       The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 
       The Rust Programming Language 
       Progressive Web Apps 
       Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability 
       Farming the Woods 
       Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms 
       Affinity Designer Workbook 
       The Age of Surveillance Capitalism 
       Walden 
       A Guide for Desert and Dryland Restoration 
       Ernest Hemingway On Writing 
       The Two Hands of God (Alan Watts) 
       The Anarchist's Design Book and/or With the Grain: A Craftsman's Guide to Wood 
       Dune 
       Some other fiction reading I'll decide on after I finish Dune
   
   

   Books/Authors I've read that I would recommend:

       Tao of Physics, Web of Life, Systems View of Life, etc. (Fritjof Capra) 
           ^Capra's work has heavily influenced my worldview and ability to think in systems
   
       Designing Data Intensive Applications (just finishing this week)
       Permaculture One & Two, Gaia's Garden, Edible Forest Gardens I&II
       Black Swan, Antifragile, etc. (Nassim Taleb) 
       Cloud Hidden: Whereabouts Unknown (Alan Watts, written late in life) 
       Ishmael, Story of B, etc. (Daniel Quinn) 
       You are Not a Gadget, Who Owns the Future, etc. (Jaron Lanier) 
       Goethe's Italian Journey   
       Vonnegut, Hemingway, Steinbeck 
       The Wheel of Time

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