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A Guest Blog Post By Field and Forest Products
Those of you who follow us on social media and read our TrueTreeTalk blog know we love mushrooms. Each Monday we tell you about them in our Mushroom Monday series. Mushrooms are vital to trees, our environment, and us.
We are fond of the fun fungi so much that we teamed with the good people at Field and Forest Products to have a mushroom kit giveaway. These were great kits that you could use to grow mushrooms at home. Field and Forest has a variety of different kits, mushroom growing supplies, and information. Check out their website, follow them on social media, and see what they have to offer.
Field and Forest, in addition to helping us with our giveaway, was gracious enough to write a guest post for our TrueTreeTalk blog. In it, they tell you more about the importance of mushrooms and let you in on three ways you can bring fungi home.
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Bringing Fungi Home: Easy Ways to Learn About Mushrooms
By Field and Forest Products
Mushrooms of every kind are in the spotlight now, even though in the past they might not have been looked at in the best light. Often thought of as something to be rid of, feared, or avoided, in the past we even put a negative connotation on mushroom-related words like toadstool, rot, and slime.
Recent years however have brought mushrooms onto a more welcoming stage; we now know them as having an endless list of functions that affect human life. Many plants have fungal relationships, with the fungi acting as nutrient lanes for them. Fungi’s ability to rot wood, reducing dead trees into plant food, is well known. Some mushrooms now are looked at as having positive health effects, others moldable into leathers or made into packaging products, and others are turned into substitute foods for meat and dairy. Of course, over the centuries people have used fungi as food as well as for medicinal purposes in different cultures. Only recently are we appreciating the countless ways all organisms rely and depend on fungi.
Fungi are all around us. Many of them are observable on trees, lawns, and gardens locally. Many of these are saprophytes, taking advantage of food sources that are already dead or dying. Others are parasitic or can cause plant diseases. Good arborists, such as specialists at ArborTrue, are able to identify these fungi and their implication for our trees. Good mushroom ID books or websites such as MushroomExpert.com, or Central Texas Mycological Society can help with learning your local myco-scape.
If you want to learn more about how mushrooms grow and develop, there are some easy ways you can bring fungi home. You can watch them grow, develop, and even have a tasty treat when you’re done. Here are three ways you can bring fungi home:
- Ready to grow culinary mushroom kits
These kits are an easy way to watch mushrooms grow and introduce you to the unique way many mushroom species produce a fruiting body meant to disperse spores for reproduction, plus, they are good to eat! Kits can be available in different varieties and seasons. - Grow “from scratch” mushroom kits.
These range from plug kits to plant into freshly cut logs (such as shiitake and oyster mushrooms), to seeding a substrate with mushroom spawn for indoor cultivation. - Mushroom garden kits
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Some mushrooms can be cultivated into the shade garden for eating, such as Wine Cap Mushrooms. These are popular mushrooms that you can grow in wood chips and straw. While the Wine Cap mycelium grows specifically on woody plant material, the mycelium will reach down into the soil and pull up soil-water nutrients into the developing mushroom cap. This is why Wine Caps are anecdotally known as “The Recycler” – because Wine Cap mycelium engages in movement of nutrients from soil to surface. This is a great asset in the garden and is an excellent mushroom to grow at home! (A good source for free wood chips is from a local tree service or through Chipdrop.)
Sources for the above products and further information are available at fieldforest.net where you can check out our YouTube channel, blogs, and lots of mushroom growing information!
Appreciating fungi helps us further relate to the connectedness of our natural world, and growing your own mushrooms provides a great start to gain that appreciation while keeping your mushroom identification book in hand.
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If you liked this post from Field and Forest, reach out to them and let them know. Also, be sure and check out the other posts on our TrueTreeTalk blog. Follow us on Facebook to keep up with these and other posts.
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ArborTrue is a science-based tree-service company in the greater Houston area. We provide a range of services including tree trimming, tree pruning, tree removal, tree planting, arborist consultations, and more. Call us today at 832-980-8733 or reach out to us online to schedule an appointment.
