Category — Mushrooms

Mushroom Man | Leslie Iwerks from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Short video introducing his work

Paul Stamets believes we have entered into the 6th major extinction on our planet. He presents mushrooms as a solution to this problem, including cleaning polluted soil, creating new insecticides, treating smallpox and maybe even the flu.

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Robin Kort: “I grew up in Vancouver, so I’ve been foraging for mushrooms all my life with my dad and my grampa.”
Photograph by Vancouver Sun.

“Nibble on a begonia petal and it will blow your mind, they are so delicious,” Kort raved.

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
October 21, 2011

Excerpt:

Foraging is becoming popular with local young chefs as a way to find unique and truly seasonal ingredients for their diners, Kort said, rattling off the names of a half dozen chefs-slash-friends who like a free meal as much as she does.

Her backyard in East Vancouver is planted with indigenous berries and herbs, from Saskatoon and salmon berries to huckleberries and sorrel.

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What If a Mushroom Designed Your Kitchen?

By Nick Sowers
Good Magazine
March 15, 2011

Excerpt:

The first proposal is the “Shiitake Cabinet,” a temperature- and humidity-controlled container which inserts into a standard array of cabinets and drawers. The entire unit can be pulled out to load shiitake-inoculated hardwood logs in the rear. One must be patient in growing shiitake mushrooms (six to eight months or more to yield fruiting bodies is typical). So the cabinet can hold several logs which might be at varying stages in the fruiting process, guaranteeing a year-round supply of mushrooms.

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A Girl Chopping Collected wild mushroom. Photo by Tika Ram Aryal.

Mushroom poisoning is a great problem in Nepal

Tika Ram Aryal
Department of Science and Environment Education, Tribhuwan University, Prithivi Narayan Campus,
Pokhara, Nepal
E-mail:tikaramaryal2000 (at) yahoo.com

Abstract

Mushroom poisoning is a great problem in Nepal. Every year dozens of people died and hundred of people fall sick due to consumption of poisonous wild mushroom. Local people have been using wild mushroom in their diet as well as a source of income, but they do not have proper scientific knowledge about the identification of edible and poisoning mushrooms. This practice has caused severe poisoning and even death. Here is no any responsible organization to reduce the death of due to consumption of wild mushroom. An effort has been made with the aim to reduce casualty of people due to consumption of wild mushroom through different awareness programmes, training, and brochure distribution at the most vulnerable parts of Nepal which were identified from the published report in various national newspapers in 2008 and 2009.

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100% sustainable urban mushroom farm

By Sarah Henry
Berkeleyside
Nov 12th, 2010

Excerpt:

There’s so much buzz around the fledgling food business launched last year by two former University of California at Berkeley students, that you’d think they were pumping out premium honey.

BTTR Ventures, run by Hass School of Business grads Nikhil Arora and Alejandro (Alex) Velez, has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and on the BBC.

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Paul Stamets, mushroom maven, from Maria Keating on Vimeo.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.
Paul Stamets at the Hollyhock workshop.

Maria Keating, our in-house bug lady, recently took a very inspirational five day mushroom identification course with mycologist Paul Stamets, at HollyHock, an education retreat center on Cortes Island, B.C.  The fall course, now an annual event, was packed with information on the many fungal innovations and products that Paul’s company, Fungi Perfecti, specializes in. Paul’s latest book is titled ‘Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World’.

Link to Paul Stamets’ website, Fungi Perfecti, here.

Link to Hollyhock website here.

Watch a talk by Paul Stamets on the website TED, titled ’6 ways mushrooms can save the world’.
18 minutes long.

Our Maria is not just a Bug Lady, she’s a ‘Mushroom Lady’ as well. Hidden amongst the large squash leaves in the Youth Garden are some wonderful edible mushrooms she started last spring. Maria shows us how she grew her King Stropharia – Garden Giants.

See this piece about Garden Giants. ‘Grow edible mushrooms in your vegetable garden!’ By Carolyn Herriot

Maria’s ‘babies’ have finally arrived in large numbers. Carefully watched and nurtured since April, 2007, these Shiitake mushrooms are ready for harvest. They have grown on oak logs that were culled from Stanley Park after a devastating storm and delivered to us by the Vancouver Park Board. Hard to believe that anyone, that’s us, can grow such wonderful fungi in a city garden.

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Tika Aryal teaches farmers in Nepal how to grow mushrooms to improve their livelihood. His attached report describes his education program.

“In Nepal, mushroom cultivation began in 1976. Nowadays it is a fast growing business due to its high profit. Farmers can get output within one month from ‘pleurotus’ cultivation. Nepal is also a country where mushroom can be cultivated throughout the year under natural environmental conditions.

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