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.

Now that we have received our spring rains, the Colorado mushroom season has begun. I have seen quite a few Coprinus comatus around the city, but if you look in your local riparian areas you may come across the infamous oyster mushroom, Pleurotus pulmonarius in most cases, growing on dead or dying deciduous trees and stumps. Pleutotus pulmonarius is the most common species in lower elevations, favoring cottonwood trees. Colorado also has a couple other species, Pleurotus populinus probably being the next most well known. It is found growing on aspen and has more delicate ‘shelves’. Another species, Pleurotus dryinus has also been found in Colorado. It is usually has less of a clustering habit, longer and larger stems, a mostly centrally attached stem and a very distinctive cap. All oyster mushrooms have a very distinctive shape, sometimes growing in fans that are shaped closely to an oyster shell. They also are known to have a slight shellfish odor, making the common name ‘oyster mushroom’ very fitting.
To make sure you have a Pleurotus species take a spore print. Put a mature mushroom cap on a piece of white paper and with your finger, moisten the cap with a little bit of water. Then put a glass over top of it to reduce air flow around the cap so the spores fall off of the gills and onto the paper. Leave it over night until the next morning. You should be left with a gray or gray/lilac spore print.
James and I have been finding quite a few oysters out already, as the weather is permitting them to fruit. They are just beginning as most of the logs we know have large amounts of mushrooms have yet to show major signs of fruiting. Nonetheless, there are still pounds of mushrooms already out and ready for picking!
Below is a gallery featuring some of the oyster mushrooms we have found in the past few days. Bert, the newest member of Amateur Mycology is shown above with a particularly large cluster of Pleurotus pulmonarius I found on a cottonwood stump yesterday in Boulder. He brought us to a couple other oyster mushroom spots as that were very interesting! Stay tuned for an Amateur Mycology Video Magazine episode featuring our early oyster hunts!
P.S. No morels seen yet, but we will keep you posted. Still to early.

The guys over at Kauai Fungi were kind enough to donate 2 petri dishes of Pleurotus djamor, the Pink Oyster Mushroom, to us here at Amateur Mycology for the Amateur Mycology Culture Library. Saturday they arrived in the mail! We quickly made sure they were not sitting in the mail box too long, as it is still very cold here in Colorado, and Pleurotus djamor is known to have mycelial die-back if temperatures go below 60 degrees F. This also brings up the question as to how you keep these tropical mushrooms in cold storage. We will ask Kauai Fungi this week and give you all an update.

If you look at the picture above, you will see a close up of the mycelial growth of the Pink Oyster, which to our surprise, was bright pink!! Dana said it looks like Pepto, and I would have to entirely agree. Interestingly, when I took pieces of it out in the laboratory and transfered them into test tubes, I noticed that it stains the agar that same bright pink! What an interesting fungi.

Now for those of you who do not know what this mushroom is for, James and I went to the Denver Botanic Gardens and spoke to the curator of the tropical plants at the gardens, who is in charge of the plants inside the glass conservatory/ atrium that houses most of the tropical plant specimens. He voiced interest in growing fungi inside this tropical environment, and James and I jumped on the project the first chance we got. When we met and talked about the project, and he explained how he would like tropical species of mushrooms if they were to be displayed inside the conservatory, and lucky for us we already had connections to Kauai Fungi in Hawaii. Despite his enthusiastic response to the idea, the Pink Oyster will not be displayed inside the DBG’s conservatory using our techniques. However, we have other botanic gardens who are interested. We are also developing other species of mushroom for display, but more research is needed.  Check back soon for more information!

Our trip was a blast. It was very nice to be looking for mushrooms so early in the year compared to what we are used to out here in Colorado. However, the drought conditions in Texas made searching for them a little more difficult than in years previous. We learned that last year’s Morel season was the best they had seen in 15 years. Had we known this, we would have probably waited to go out to Texas until a different year to look for Morels specifically. So we switched gears and searched for city mushrooms in heavily watered areas. This technique gave us some good success. We found quite a few different genera most all a little past their prime, but there were a good handful of edible and living samples that we brought back and cultured on Thursday of this week. I will give you a better summary of the mushrooms we found in the next article.

If you would like to see some of the samples of fungi that were found in Texas last week, make sure you attend the Colorado Mycological Society meeting this coming Monday at the Denver Botanic Gardens. The meetings start at 7pm and usually wrap up around 9pm. We will be displaying dried samples of Ganoderma, Pleurotus, various Polypores, Earthstars, Lentinus, Lactarius and a few others that were found last week in Austin, Athens, White Oak, and San Antonio. We will also be displaying a few fruiting grain jars of Pleurotus columbinus as well as bags of oyster mushroom spawn made with green techniques.

On another note, our Pink Oyster mushrooms came from Kauai Fungi yesterday for our project that we are doing at a few botanic gardens. Kauai Fungi was kind enough to donate a spawn bag of their tropical variety of Pleurotus djamor to our project. We plan to do a fungi demonstration inside a tropical conservatory. We also just acquired a culture of the Golden Oyster, Pleurotus cornucopiae. I think the two fruiting together would be stunning.

The bags of oyster spawn we made before we left for Texas are starting to form primordia! (primordia are baby mushrooms) This means they are already eaten through their substrate and are starting to want to fruit! We expanded them 12 days ago, so this says to me that our ‘Cold Pasteurization’ concept works just as fast as standard pasteurization methods! Stay tuned for a detailed description of this project, from start to finish, within the month! The bags of spawn are destined for Jackie’s Farm for expansion and fruiting, and if you take one of our seminars this summer, coming to a backyard near you!

This month, Dr Cathy Cripps will be visiting the Colorado Mycological Society to give a lecture on Montana’s fungi. Dr Cathy Cripps is an associate professor at Montana State University where she teaches Biology, Mycology and the Ecology of Fungi. She completed her PhD with Orson Miller at VPI on aspen fungi. Her current research is on Arctic-Alpine fungi and she is also examining how inoculation of seedlings with native mycorrhizal fungi can help restore whitebark and limber pine forests. She has numerous publications on Rocky Mountain fungi and edited “Fungi in Forest Ecosystems” and the newly published “Arctic-alpine Mycology 8” (online at North American Fungi). Cathy has collected in Colorado and Montana for most of her life and looks forward to sharing information on mushrooms in the Northern Rocky Mountains with her Southern Rocky Mountain friends! If you are interested in attending her lecture, visit the Colorado Mycological Society website for information on CMS meetings!

Our most recent project has been to expand our mycelium onto a large amount of substrate. We have been acquiring large quantities of wood-chip from the City of Littleton, as well as wheat straw that we have been inoculating with various mushroom varieties for use over the summer. This spawn will be used for many purposes including starting a brand new mushroom farm called Jackie’s Farm in Brighton, Colorado as well as for many types of mycorestoration and mycoremediation. Since Oyster mushrooms have been known to be great mycoremediators we have mainly been expanding an oyster mushroom that we have dubbed ‘the ground oyster’. It was found in Denver last year in a golf course growing in the middle of a green. At first James and I figured it was growing on a rotten root that must have extended into the green, however, much to our amazement it was growing from the dirt itself. Under closer inspection it was concreting the soil and rocks together with mycelium. Not only that, but it was one of the largest clusters of oyster mushrooms we had ever seen. This strain of oyster mushroom has shown particular vigor in culture and grows through it’s substrate with lightning speed and efficiency. The picture shown above is a handful of the ‘ground oyster’ mycelium holding the pieces of wood together with much tenacity. There is a little picture gallery to look at below showing some of the things we were doing yesterday. Check back soon for updates on this matter, as well as a tutorial on how to expand mycelium many different ways.

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The Olympia Mycelial Network is happy to announce plans for the first (inter)national Radical Mycology Convergence. A fungi-human relations congress of sorts, this convergence will be a unique opportunity for humans to build stronger connections with our fungal allies. They hope to create space for inspiring discussions on the future of radical mycological efforts and their implications. Proposed workshops include Do-It-Yourself mushroom cultivation, mushroom identification, and mycopermaculture. There will also be opportunities to put theory to practice by working on a mycorestoration project in a damaged habitat. But really, it will be what we all make it. Plus, this event is scheduled for September 2nd-5th, 2011 in Cascadia (aka the Pacific Northwest), one of the best times and places in the world to see mushrooms.

Amateur Mycology will be attending this conference. James and I will be giving two presentations, ‘Green Mushroom Cultivation’ and ‘Applications for Mycelium Beyond Mycophagy’. We hope to see you there!

The Olympia Mycelial Network is currently looking for general helpers, organizers, workshop facilitators, presenters, workshop leaders, cooks, and anyone else with an inclination towards fungi. If this sounds like you, please contact them via email at radmycology@gmail.com to let them know.

Recently James, Ashley, and I got the opportunity to visit The Sam Mitchel Herbarium of Fungi at The Denver Botanic Gardens. The herbarium is located at the York St. Gardens in the Capitol Hill district of downtown Denver. Ever since I was a child, I have loved to visit this place. The grounds are very extensive and cover many different landscaping techniques. But one of my favorite places is the impressive glass conservatory that seems to tower over the gardens. It is hard to miss. When you walk inside this giant glass bubble, the first thing you notice is how wonderful the atmosphere is, and all around you are the most interesting plants. Many visitors to the Denver Botanic Gardens are unaware, however, that many different types of fungi are just below their feet…

Ashley and I were running a little late. Unfortunately it still took us a while to find the staircase we were told about, and after several locked doors, looks from various confused garden staff, and walking in concentric circles, we honed in on the basement door. It then took us several more minutes to navigate our way through various hallways, until we came upon a sign next to a door that read, ‘Research & Herbarium’. I was thinking, “This place is awesome already”. We followed the signs for fungi, which was really easy for us. To me, it was like they put up signs that said ‘free ice cream, this way’ because I was resisting the urge to run down the quiet hallways. A sure sign of the truly obsessed. Finally we heard the familiar voices of James and Ellen. Ellen Jacobson is an absolutely wonderful woman whom we first met through the Colorado Mycological Society. She has been a long time member of CMS and is an indespensible resource on all things fungi… and other things too! She volunteers her time at the herbarium, helping Vera Evenson (author of Colorado Mushrooms) and others indentify and file all sorts of different fungi. In fact, The Sam Mitchel Herbarium of Fungi is the most complete collection in the Rocky Mountain Region preserving 22,000 specimens, covering 300 genera and 2,500 species. The storage system is pretty state of the art. Huge hanging walls of cabinets are suspended from the ceiling. Each set is on a track, and they move together and apart with motors to create a hallway between them. Inside the cabinets are many white boxes that house the dried samples of the mushroom species. Each has a card inside that describes the location found, date, collector, and any other information pertinent to the specific sample. These samples are all categorized according to their relationship to each other. The Sam Mitchel Herbarium of Fungi is one of the only herbariums of fungi that stores their samples in this manner. Most store them in alphabetical order, which doesn’t make it as easy to find the exact specimen you are looking for. Here, it is very simple to find a specific species because every type of fungi in the case you are looking at are all related to each other. The only downside to this method of categorizing the fungi is that if a species is renamed into a different group, usually due to the recent genetic mapping of the mushroom genome, the specimens in question must be refiled. Ellen said this happens quite often as she pointed to a stack of cards and boxes waiting to be refiled. It is a constant battle. There were also about a hundred books on fungi in their library whose shelves bordered the walls. One Ellen showed us in particular was the original log started by Sam Mitchel. On the first page, she showed us the very first mushroom submitted to the herbarium in 1964. The binding had completely worn away, and it was amazing to see how far the herbarium has come in the past 45 years. They are now working on entering all of this data into the computer which will make accessing the herbarium records much, much easier. But they still use the old method of storing information that Sam came up with. Each new specimen still gets a paper card inside its own preservation box, still written by hand. It was an amazing process to witness. While looking through several cases of specimens, I came upon a box with a fungus inside that I had never heard of: Battarrea stevenii. Because it is a puffball-like fungus (a gasteroid fungi) , it lives in very hot and arid conditions. But what I found most intriguing was its over 2 foot long, very fibrous stem that Ellen explained is almost completely buried in the ground. This is so they have a ‘tap root’ that allows them to access water very deep underground. How interesting is that? We would like to thank Ellen Jacobson for taking time out of her busy schedule to show us around, and the Denver Botanic Gardens for letting us visit. That’s all for now!

While walking through Whole Foods in Boulder, I noticed that they had a wonderful selection of mushrooms for the Thanksgiving season. Bluefoots from France, Maitake from Oregon, Oysters from Colorado, King Trumpets, Black Poplar mushrooms, Shimeji mushrooms, Shiitake mushrooms, Enoki mushrooms, but what got my attention, was the huge bowl full of Chanterelles. The wonderful orange and gold color and smell gets me every time. I had to pick out a pound to bring home for the holidays. But all this got me thinking about growing Chanterelles, so I did a little research and found out some interesting information. First let me explain a little bit about mycorrhizal fungi and give a little background on the genus Cantharellus before we get too far ahead of ourselves. The word ‘mycorrhizal’ comes from Greek; ‘myco’ (fungus) and ‘rhizal’ (root). Mycorrhizal fungi have adapted a clever way to survive, by associating themselves with a specific vascular plant or plants, so as to uptake various carbohydrates (starches and sugars) that aid in the fungi’s development. The fungi achieve this by encasing/injecting mycelia into the roots of the plant, while not harming the plant’s growth. In fact, through this symbiotic relationship, the plant receives various minerals and nutrients (some of which are generally unavailable in some climates, locked up in the rock/soil), a greater ability to absorb water, resistance to parasitic fungi (i.e. blight) and soil-borne pathogens, as well as resistance to many toxic heavy metals. As you can see, this situation is very advantageous for both the plants and the fungi. So beneficial in fact, that it is believed that this is the most widespread form of symbiotic association found in the entire plant kingdom and according to dated fossils, is a relationship that is at minimum 400 million years old (for more information, and something cool to check out, Google ‘The Rhynie chert’). That is a long time to live together. Can you imagine the connection plants and fungi must have? Do they ever get sick of each other? Are fungi and plants emotional beings? These are all questions for a different blog post. Let’s get back to the topic at hand… Chanterelles! Chanterelles are a part of the genus Cantharellus which abounds with many very beautiful and very delicious fungi, all which happen to be… you guessed it, mycorrhizal fungi. For a cultivator of mushrooms, growing mycorrhizal mushrooms is a very daunting task. As I just explained above, you need specific plants to partner up with specific fungi. Did you ever see that MTV dating show, ‘Next’? There are multiple ‘dates/contestants’ picked for one person to go on a date with. This person must choose which of the contestants was what they were looking for in a mate. The mushroom cultivator is like the matchmaker in this situation. The only problem is that just like dating, each species of fungi needs different things than others for the relationship to work. Just like in the show, some relationships are more compatible than others. But beyond just finding the correct partner plant to grow with, the cultivation of Chanterelle mycelium is more difficult still. As you probably already know, mycelium is the organism of the fungi that produces the fruiting body/mushroom. To grow the mycelium away from its host plant’s roots means the cultivator must have a medium to grow it on that contains all of the essential nutrients that the host plant and environment are feeding to the fungi. While searching for information on this subject, I found a very interesting patent invented by Eric Darnell (Chanterelle Mycelium US Patent #6173525) that explains a process of selecting a viable strain of Cantharellus cibarius, the golden chanterelle. If you would like to read it in its entirety, Click Here. In this process, he uses a media called Modified Fries Medium (a medium generally used in test tube plant culture) or Murashige and Skoog Medium with several of his own additions including activated charcoal. He uses these mediums because chanterelle mycelium has very slow/non-existent growth on the standard mediums, Malt Extract Agar (MEA) and Potato Dextrose Yeast Agar (PDYA). They just don’t contain the right types of nutrients for these mycorrhizal fungi. He then also adds several antibiotics that keep the co-inhabiting bacteria and fungi sequestered. These live in symbiosis with the fungi in the wild, but would proliferate in the Petri dish and slow the growth of the chanterelle mycelium. After 17-53 days, chanterelle mycelium begins to grow inside and through the agar. He is then able to transfer pieces of the mycelium to new MFM Petri dishes, this time without antibiotics as they are no longer needed. The co-inhabiting fungi and bacteria are left behind in the previous Petri dish. They then performed genetic sequencing on the mycelium they had isolated just to make sure that it was indeed Cantharellus cibarius mycelium they were growing. Sure enough, they had come up with a way to grow chanterelles in vitro. Cool and exciting stuff! But to top it off, in 1997, E. Darnell and F. Camacho produced the first ever successfully cultivated Cantharellus cibarius in a potted 16-month old Pinus sylvestris with a mycelium grown for only one year in culture. (In fact the photograph of the chanterelle at the top of the post is the first ever cultivated chanterelle) Hopefully with time, Eric Darnell can make this idea a commercially viable concept. Recently, Darnell started a Swedish company called Cantharellus AB to do just that, but has had mixed success. Many different animals and insects love his concept for chanterelle orchards, and have been giving him problems consuming and disturbing his mushroom harvest. They have planted thousands of inoculated trees that should start producing in 10 years. So far, the study of mycorrhizal mushrooms and their cultivation is still in its infancy, but is rewarding for those who have the patience to study these amazing and delicious fungi. For more information visit Eric Darnell’s Cantharellus Site or Chanterelle Mycelium US Patent. Another interesting pdf I found at David Arora’s site that he helped write is called A New, Commercially Valuable Chanterelle Species, Cantharellus californicus sp. You should check it out! Well, that’s all for now. Have a good and happy Thanksgiving!
References below:
Danell E & Camacho F (1997) Successful cultivation of the golden chanterelle. Nature, 385: 303. In the same issue of Nature on pages 299-300, Professor Roy Watling presents “The business of fructification”
Oh and all the pictures from this post were from Eric Darnell’s site with link above.

James and I have been spending the past 3 months amassing mushroom species in pure culture and putting them under cold storage. You might be thinking, “what the heck is he talking about?”. To explain a little more clearly, we are ‘cloning’ wild mushrooms. This process is done by extracting flesh or spores from mushrooms that we have collected in the wild, and growing them in petri dish or test tube on different types of ‘media’. This media gives them nutrients specific to the species of fungi we are trying to grow. Now, when we talk about growing mushrooms, you first must isolate the part of the fungus that produces the mushrooms. Mycelium is a network of hyphae, or chains of cells, that are able to uptake water and various nutrients, as well as excrete digestive enzymes to digest it’s food, which in turn produces the mushroom. The mushroom is actually the fruiting body or sexual reproductive organ of the mycelium that produces spores to grow more mycelial networks. Under cold storage (i.e. 38 degrees F) the mushroom mycelium’s growth slows to a crawl. This allows the cultivator to store the mycelium until it is ready to use. To see a complete list of the different species we have go to The Amateur Mycology Culture Library page. We update it regularly.