It’s better than bad, it’s good!
Bought this at a smallholding fair. It’s a grow-your-own ‘shroom kit.
Dude sells wooden furniture pegs — you know, like the ones you bang together Ikea furniture with — covered in different varieties of mushroom spores. Sells ’em in little burlap bags, along with instructions and a correctly-sized drill bit.
What you do is, you take a freshly-cut hardwood log (needs to be fresh because the mushrooms live on the moisture and sugars), about four inches by two and a half feet, and drill a series of holes in a diamond pattern. The holes are a little deeper than the pegs. Bang the pegs in, plant the log in a cool, damp spot and…wait a year, eighteen months.
I bought hericium Erinaceus, which is supposed to taste like delicious lobsters.
But where in the Sam Hill do you get freshly cut hardwood logs? Anyone who sells wood will swear on his granny’s silver noggin that everything he’s got is two years old or more and seasoned all to hell.
We had begun eyeballing out neighbor’s orchard and planning a midnight raid when we remembered a local smallholder who sells apples. He had a perfect pile of wood…only it was six months old. Two months or less is optimum.
Oh, well. It’ll have to do.
Then the drill bit snapped off in the log before I got all the holes drilled.
Well, hell. This shit grows wild. In the woods. How hard can it be?
September 22, 2010 — 10:34 pm
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