Mushroom Showdown: Wild Mushrooms vs Home Grown Mushrooms

 Before I took my hiatus I shared my adventures in growing mushrooms at home, today we look at a large wild mushroom and my last harvest of my home grown Oyster mushrooms.

If you need a refresher on my growing method, check this post.

https://steemit.com/gardening/@jed78/home-grown-mushrooms-the-growth-and-harvest

First Up, A Large Wild Specimen

I was heading off to work yesterday and I noticed something large and white at the base of a tree, I thought at first it was a plastic shopping bag that someone had discarded. As I got closer I found a large mushroom growing from the base of an oak tree. 

 I'm not sure of the species of this particular fungus but it is one of the largest wild mushrooms I have ever seen. It appears to be some type of Oyster mushroom, I could be very wrong so I won't be taking this one home to eat, besides it was covered in bugs and ants. 

Home Grown Mushrooms

 Yep, I don't do a great deal of mushroom foraging, so when I get the hankering for some fungus I just grow my own. I have a shiitake log pile that has produced a fair amount and I have also had great results with Oyster mushrooms grown in buckets. 

 If you checked my post linked above you can see I grew them using straw as a substrate, I changed it up this time and mixed in cotton seed hull this batch at about a 65% to 35% ration straw to cotton seed hull. The results were pretty noticeable. 

Let's take a look!

Oyster Mushrooms

 These are a little more involved to get started, you have to sterilize everything, which involves heating the substrate up to about 180 degrees in hot water for an hour or so, It's not to bad for smaller batches. If you were going to do larger batches you will need to scale up your sterilization equipment. I use a propane burner and large stock pot that came as a turkey fryer kit. 

 The results from this run were obviously better.

 I was able to harvest three flushes about this size from this run, and the flavor was amazing. 

Shiitake Mushrooms

 The Shiitake mushrooms are a little less involved, but there is still some prep work to be done. You need some fresh cut hardwood logs or large limbs will work too. You will also need your mushroom spawn, I use inoculated dowel plugs. These are small wooden pegs that have been inoculated with the Shiitake spawn from a mushroom grower. You can make your own but that takes a good deal more knowledge than I have.  Then you drill holes in your logs and drive the dowels in and plug the top with some beeswax. Then you wait...

 The waiting is the tough part. The mushroom needs time to colonize the logs before they will start producing so this can be anywhere from a month to six or eight months depending on several factors, weather conditions, moisture, size of your logs etc.

 The wait may be long but the payoff is well worth it.

But How Do They Compare To Store Bought?

If you have followed my ramblings you know my feelings on fresh grown vs store bought, there is no comparison. Unless your buying straight from the farmer at a market you don't know the exact date of harvest or how long the product has been sitting on a shelf some where in a warehouse. I digress. They taste great, earthy, plump and delicious.

So there you go, a look at growing some mushrooms, If you have some time and some patience try them out, the rewards are great. If you like to forage your mushrooms, that's cool too. this wasn't really a post about the pros and cons of either one, just get you some mushrooms!

Thanks for looking and feel free to like and resteem if you enjoyed this post.

As always, keep on steeming!!

@papa-pepper makes cool stuff, like this logo!