The Dark Arts of Winter Mushroom Gardens
Mushroom grow kits. Photos by Ari LeVaux. winter garden, and also a bit more of a science project. Family farms, you could argue, are kind like a giant compost pile, where bacteria move freely from dirt to compost to crops. This is not an unsafe situation, as bacteria and fungus spores are everywhere, and we live with them – a truth that is especially obvious on the farm. But mushroom growers, while riding the same chaotic lifeforces, must be vigilant against contamination, so the wrong spores don’t take hold. While a farmer plants seeds in dirt that is essentially an extension of the compost pile, a mushroom grower inoculates substrate under aseptic conditions.
There is an important distinction, he shared, between commercial mushroom varieties like white button and portobello, which both belong to species agaricus, and the varieties that most small growers like himself prefer. Agaricus grows on compost, which could be made of a lot of different things, including manure, which raises the question of where the manure was collected. If it’s from the stable at a track where the racehorses do their business, there could be antibiotics, steroids and other chemicals. Whether the nitrogen comes from manure or chemical urea, using compost adds uncertainty.
Our mushroom grower only works with mushrooms that grow on sawdust-based “woody substrates,” which are dirt free, which explains why he looked cleaner than his dirtfarming neighbors.