Chicken of the Woods 2022

...es. That and our dry climate make this place not exactly a Mecca for edible mushrooms. This year a freak rain caused mold growth on the chicken of the woods that I harvested from my friend Lee’s backyard tree. There were also tiny mushrooms growing on the mushrooms (!). You have to hand it to nature to evolve a decomposing mushroom to decompose the decomposer. Better luck next year, I suppose. See last year’s post for more information on Laetiporu...

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Saturday Linkages: Will Your Next House Be Built With Mushrooms?

Fast Fungi Bricks via Dornob Gardening What I am reading from the Los Angeles Public Library: Organic Olives http://catalog.lapl.org/carlweb/jsp/DoSearch?databaseID=965&terms=5013187&index=z … Garden planter turns out to be Roman antique: http://boingboing.net/2012/10/12/garden-planter-turns-out-to-be.html … DIY North House Folk School http://lloydkahn-ongoing.blogspot.com/2012/10/north-house-folk-school.html#.UHTSPhsTC2o.twitter … HOWTO make a s...

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Of Mushrooms and Capitalist Ruins

You really should join your local mycological society especially now that fungi are finally getting much overdue attention in the academy and popular culture. The Los Angeles Mycological Society has a book club overseen by Aaron Thompson that’s explored both the biology and our complex social relationship to fungi. The last book we read was one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the Wo...

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Chicken of the Woods

...we foraged with no ill effects. It was, in fact, one of the most delicious mushrooms I’ve ever consumed. But one should not trust the musings of an aging urban homesteading blogger when foraging for mushrooms. Find yourself a local mushroom nerd or run it past your cats. That said, don’t be too fearful either or you’ll miss out on a free source of gourmet food. Chicken of the Woods is distinctive and still considered one of the easier mushrooms to...

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In the Zone

...ify and, at worst, ignore the wonder around us. We didn’t’ find any edible mushrooms, though morels pop up fleetingly in similar burn sites. But I’m happy to look at any mushroom and edibles are just the icing on the cake. In addition to mushrooms, the fire revealed opportunities for an archeology of late capitalism. Here a Wizard Charcoal Lighter can from maybe the early 1970s washed down from the nearby Buckhorn campground. And a vintage Pepsi c...

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