Growing mushrooms

I love mushrooms. When I'm waxing eloquent, I attribute it to my Lithuanian heritage where they have a love of forests and all things found within. So when I was buying seeds a few months back at the garden center, and I saw this, I thought, why not?


I've never attempted to 'grow' mushrooms, so this was an interesting (albeit slow) process. Inside the box were two bags, one with a woody wet substance and the other with a rich dark soil.



The instructions say to spread the former in the box, wet it, and put the box somewhere warm. I did this on April 15th. What a great celebration of American tax day! As I owed money this year, perhaps I was feeling poor and that I would need to depend on my wits and grow my own food.

After 10 days, the 'regular' dirt gets added and mixed with the woody dirt, and the box lid gets propped up to allow for air passage. It was a right good mess to mix the soils. Good thing I wasn't depending on this for my survival. As of May 1, not much was happening:

Finally, on May 15th, the little white specs which had appeared somewhere along the way became actual mushrooms (the small, white blobs on the right). I think I may have overdone the watering or I excel at growing mold:

I became busy with work and other stuff, so the mushrooms were off doing their own thing. I thought perhaps that the other little pinheads in the box would have done the same as the first bunch who would be patiently waiting. Not quite. Not only did none of the other little mushrooms decide to grow up, but the original bunch appeared ready to take over the house:

For size comparison purposes, here they are next to a box of tissues:


At the end of the day, they went into a Malaysian sauce:


I wasn't sure if they would really be edible or would be too woody as they were supposed to be button mushrooms, thus the 'back up' serving of broccoli and tofu. However, they actually turned out to be quite good.