With the 2012 season finally coming to a close, let’s take a look back on all of this year’s happenings. As usual, Amateur Mycology was extremely busy with all of our usual projects this summer. We were also booked most of the season with Mycotours, our sister company, that provides private guided mushroom foraging with expert guides in beautiful locations across the United States. On these tours, guests learn to identify and use wild mushrooms and plants, all while exploring these outdoor locations. These hikes usually range from a walk in town, to a strenuous hike through the mountains, with an emphasis on the ecosystem’s flora. We also offer cook and tastes and lunch on a private chef basis. For more information on our tours, or to schedule an expedition, visit Mycotours.com.

Amateur Mycology attended the 2012 Telluride Mushroom Festival again this year, and all of our seminars were a major success. Bert Matthews, James Weiser, and I gave hands on demonstrations in our mobile laboratory  and did several classes about various sterile lab techniques. This also included cloning many of the mushrooms from the identification table as well! Bert also exhibited his Pleurotus mushroom sculptures to all of the class attendees. I gave a lecture entitled, “Mycophagy: the culture of eating fungi” in the Elks Lodge this year. I covered several interesting topics including information about many of the different types of edible mushrooms from around the world and their cultural uses, as well as delved into the many aspects of fermentation with fungi. We talked about fermentation with the fungi molds, but also talked about using the macro fungi to ferment food products as well (I will be writing an article about this topic soon). We also discussed the many meanings of the word ‘culture’, and how ‘cultures of fungi’ have shaped many human ‘cultures’ across the world.  Lecture attendees also got to look at various fungi growing on petri dishes that I brought with me that are used to ferment food products. These included Aspergillus oryzae (koji/miso/sake), Penicillium roqueforti (blue cheese), Rhizopus oligosporus (tempeh), and Penicillium camemberti (brie/Camembert). Mycotours also competed in the Annual Mushroom Chef Cook-off with our Porcini Sushi Roll with Porcini sauce. It was mentioned in Alisa Geiser’s blog article ‘The Curious Ways We Find Eachother: Day Two at the Telluride Mushroom Festival’ on elephantjournal.com. You can read more about the mushroom cook-off at TellurideInside.com or The Telluride Festivarian. For more information on this year’s Telluride Mushroom Festival, or for info about the event in 2013, visit shroomfest.com. You can also listen to an interview with Scott, the director of the festival on the new radio show I am working on called ‘A Fermented Affair‘! You can find it here, on BlogTalkRadio.com. You can also find Telluride Mushroom Festival and A Fermented Affair on Facebook!

I also presented at Syntonic Music Festival that featured over 40 different electronic music artists and about 20 workshops. I gave a lecture entitled ‘Introduction to Fungi’ where we discussed how mushrooms can be used for more than just a great side dish in a meal, they could maybe help save the planet!! For more information about the 2012 Syntonic workshops or the music artists visit their website at syntonicfest.com.

As always, stay tuned for more pictures and video of these events and information to the upcoming events Amateur Mycology is working on.

This quick update will cover our recent project with Dr. Rytas Vilgalys, Professor of Biology at Duke University. Dr. Rytas was kind enough to do some PCR DNA and get an ITS sequence of some of our various collections of Pleurotus that were found growing on pine wood.

Over the past 2 years, James and I have been on the hunt for an oyster mushroom that grows on pine. To explain, I should first give a little background about these particular fungi. They tend to favor deciduous wood, especially poplar trees in Colorado. To most fungi, pine wood isn’t something easy to eat. Coniferous trees contain natural resins that tend to contain chemicals that are quite anti-fungal. This does not mean that fungi cannot eat coniferous wood, it is just quite difficult for them to do. However, Pleurotus are special fungi. They have discovered a quite efficient method of decomposing their substrate, excreting powerful digestive enzymes able to breakdown many different types of freshly cut wood. There is even a type of Pleurotus that can grow on cactus skeletons! The Pleurotus that James and I had found were growing from the cut stumps of pine trees and a spruce log growing at 10,000′ in elevation. These were cultured in our lab in Denver and were eventually sent to Dr. Rytas. He was interested in them because of their unique habitats they were found growing in and was wondering, as we were, if they were a possible new species of Pleurotus. He also received a few control collections of Pleurotus pulmonarius from various locations in the state, growing from cottonwood trees. These were tested against the mushrooms that were found growing on conifers. This testing is basically done by taking known sets of genes from a specific species of fungi and testing samples of DNA against those genes to see if they are similar enough to be the same genetic group (hopefully that wasn’t too over simplified?). Much to our surprise, every specimen came back as P. pulmonarius! It is well documented that P. pulmonarius grows occasionally from conifer, but these specimens also had unique morphological features that were distinctly different, even with indoor grown mushrooms in a controlled environment! Just goes to show that morphology sometimes can tell you very little about what type of fungi you have. We now know that our cultures of oysters collected from these conifer habitats are P. pulmonarius, but have somehow developed a unique set of digestive enzymes to deal with the oils in the wood that tend to inhibit fungi.

The reason James and I are extremely interested in pine loving oysters is because the Rocky Mountains are plagued with a pine eating beetle that is destroying our forests by the entire mountainside. The general way to deal with this problem (due to the extreme fire danger it creates) is to cut down the infected trees and pile them in large piles. They are used mainly for fire wood, but the pine loving  mushrooms would decompose the wood much faster, creating larger soil depth. Paul Stamets has a discussion in his book, Mycelium Running, about the honey mushroom and its method of creating a deeper humus depth. Many of these plagues, whether they be a fungus or an insect, may look very disastrous to the environment to humans. This is only because of our perception of time. The trees that once stood as a forest are now decomposing, increasing the potential of the forest to create more life. As soil depth increases, the forest can house more and more plants. We would like to make these Pleurotus part of the solution to this large problem we are facing today.

We will be hosting a foray this weekend with our friends from the Arkansas Valley Mushroom Club on Saturday, June 12th. The fearless leader of AVMC, Irv Broudy was kind enough to ask us to lead an expedition into the high country to look for snow melt fungi and hopefully find some black morels! We will be gathering at the campground at the top of Kenosha Pass at 10 am and will be driving to our final hunting grounds. If you live in the Salida area, meet at 8:00am at Stop and Shop parking lot in town. For all the folks out in Buena Vista, meet at 8:30 at City Market in case there are people there who need a ride. Since it is a pretty long distance to Kensosha Pass, let’s try and maximize carpooling and chip in for gas for those who drive. If you are coming from Denver and would like to carpool or need directions to the meeting spot, shoot me an email at graham@amateurmycology.com and we will coordinate from there.

Weather conditions have been dry, so it’s likely that we will be looking for shrooms near or at the snow-melt zone, so dress accordingly and bring a lunch. James and I have recently found a few black morels, oysters, and many other snow melt fungi. We have been scouting and will select a specific location to hunt by Saturday. Hope to see you there!

The last Saturday in April in the small Nebraska town of Peru, there is a gathering of people from across the country all hunting for one mushroom… the elusive culinary delight, the Blonde Morel! James and I have plans to visit this festival, film our trip there and back, and plan on hunting the Morel the whole way! Our trip will start here in Colorado, but we plan on driving there because we will be following the Platte River almost the whole way there! For those of you who haven’t hunted Blonde Morels before, that means we are driving past Morel habitat during the entire drive! If you would like to visit the Great Nebraska Mushroom Hunt visit their website, www.nebraskathegoodlife.com for a schedule, driving directions, as well as any other information about the festival. And if you can’t make it and wish you could, check back soon for a full episode of Amateur Mycology Video Magazine all about this trip. Hope all is well out there, and if you are in Colorado and haven’t already, get out there and start looking! There is fungal life about!