A Low-Tech Experiment in Growing Oyster Mushrooms

...k sawdust which just happens to be one of the ideal substrates for growing mushrooms. While I love looking at mushrooms and attending lectures about mushrooms via the Los Angeles Mycological Society, I don’t know anything about growing them and my two previous attempts were complete failures. Techniques for growing mushroom range from simple to extremely high tech. For this experiment I wanted to try the simplest method I could find that would not...

Read…

Growing Pink Oyster Mushrooms

...Tek that we learned about in a class taught by Peter McCoy. We grew oyster mushrooms, the Angelyne of fungi. Growing oyster mushrooms is a four step process: Harvest spores or clone tissue and grow out in a petri dish. This must be done in a sterile environment, usually with a laminar flow hood. I have not tried this yet and it’s the most difficult part of growing mushrooms. Thankfully you can skip this step by purchasing liquid culture online. Ta...

Read…

2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

...agar’s Are We Having Any Fun Yet? and Al Roker’s Big Bad Book of Barbecue. MUSHROOMS MUSHROOMS MUSHROOMS I grew blue oyster mushrooms and . . . pearl oyster mushrooms and . . . pink oyster mushrooms. I also went to the LA Mycological society show in the spring. A new world dawns Why do people put up DIY slow down signs in LA? This is why. We have dangerous, ugly streets. Partly to deal with those ugly streets, Kelly and I spent most of 2022 volunt...

Read…

Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

Read…

When Mushrooms Attack

...et me just say that my first impulse would also be to communicate with the mushrooms to just ask them, like, what the hell are you all up to? Daisuke, unfortunately, gets prodded by a bunch of hoodlum teens to eat one of the mushrooms and a seriously bad trip ensues. Daisuke becomes a mushroom monster and, due to the spores, turns the whole town into mushroom zombies. Ultraman Taro returns to combat Mushra and this time drys up the giant mushroom’...

Read…