d_thomas02 Member

The newest acquisition on the Mushroom Farm. A professional quality downdraft Laminar Flow Hood. I've been working on this hood for several months now, but this last week has seen a big push to get it up and running in the mushroom lab. I still need to install Plexiglas side shields around the hood work area but, as of…

Been single digits F here, mostly negative (-20 to -15 C), in SW MO USA for the last 48 hours or so. Today the high just breaks double digits (10 F, -12C). We won’t rise above freezing until Wednesday. We’ve collected only a couple of inches of snow as the wind is up in the double digits (mph), sometimes hitting up in the…

I've been way too busy since my 2023 "busy" season ended, so I thought I'd do a little catch up. This is a photo from my wife's school's Thanksgiving parade on the last school day before the Thanksgiving break. Guess who they roped into putting on a Santa suit. ;) It was a parade and we walked down one hall, then outside…

I got another flush of shiitake mushrooms off my dozen inoculated logs that I was not expecting. Over a pound. Since I wasn’t expecting another flush this year I hadn’t been checking them regularly. As a result about a third had started drying out. No worries though. I ran them all through my dehydrator and they’ll be just…

It started outdoors with little exercise and end indoors with a lot of exercise. Enough for me to work up a good sweat after three nonstop hours of cooking. Maitake steaks on the left and sautéed Maitake fronds and stems on the right (chef knife for scale). Now cooling before being placed in quart freezer ziplocks. Still…

If you identified it as the true Turkey Tail, I’d keep it for making a medicinal tea. And if the jelly fungus is Wood Ear, I hear they make a great snack when candied. The guy in the YouTube below gives a fairly scientific discussion on identifying jelly fungus.

Here is where the real exercise comes in from foraging mushrooms. Cleaning and cooking the haul. I clean a small cluster last night to go with the tortellini, but I only used about half of it. Still have the other half to sauté and freeze. The discussion below is just for cleaning the largest clump. The first clump I…

Cheese tortellini with sauteed maitake mushrooms, sun dried tomatoes, massaged kale, garlic and garnished with grated parmesan. YUM!! (Never thought I'd say "yum" to anything with kale in it.)

Tuesday, a regular day outside mowing for my part time job. Moving to Fall hours so showed up at my first mow around 9 AM. Three yards in a row. I got the first two done and then started on the largest of the three and guess what I found… Give up? A nice cluster of Hen of the Woods (also called Maitake), Grifola frondosa…

While outdoors, also not exercise. Is it too early to start drooling? Just button sized but give them a few more days. I have about a dozen shiitake logs spilt more or less evenly between three varieties;* WR46 which is has a wide temperature range but has an "H" stamped on its ID tag and was the first to fruit a few weeks…

@mtaratoot My truck does have differential locks. Normally in these parts, one only needs 4WD two or three days out of the year for snow and chains are an unneeded luxury that just tears up the roads. The Rogue has highway tires that were on it when we bought it used a few years ago, and the other two have all season…

No pictures but certainly outdoor exercise. I had some work done on our long country gravel driveway. I also had a concrete pad poured where it meets the road as I'm tired of filling in peel out divots from the family (and perhaps myself as well TBH) accelerating onto our quiet country road. Pour happened last Wednesday.…

Update on the mushroom farm. Production is ramping up nicely. We currently have one non-paying customer. Non-paying simply because they'd like 5 lbs. a week and my business partner and I wanted to be sure we could supply a reliable 5 lbs. a week for at least two weeks in a row before we started charging them. That means…

Reminds me of an old TV drama called Northen Exposure. The intro had a beautiful video clip of a bald eagle soaring above a pristine wilderness but the audio they used was of a red tailed hawk.

Currently in my slow season at work. Things will start moving again in mid March.

Nothing more beautiful than the desert after a rain. (I lived in El Paso, TX for a bit.)

My well water is very hard, around 300-350 mg/L (17-20 grains/gal). Monthly maintenance on electric tank water heaters consists of flushing the sediment out of the bottom of the tank. A chunk of sediment can get trapped in the drain valve causing it to leak a bit when you shut it down. A hose end cap can solve that issue.

Have your water tested for hardness before pulling the trigger on tankless. Tankless have no ability to deal with scale buildup. If you don't have soft water, I'd be surprised if the installer didn't want you to have a whole house softener before selling you tankless. And home softeners have their own list of cons, ion…

Growing season is over. Leaf cleanups are almost done. It's after Thanksgiving so the pressure is off. I was told to stay warm at home today as the high is only supposed to be 40 F (4 C). So, I get to work on mushrooms today. (Yes! [fist pump]) Truthfully, my nine cultures of liquid culture have suffered from neglect over…

@KyleDavid0313 Hey Kyle, This group is semiactive but generally doesn't hit on weight loss subjects. A good group for that is Lose a pound a week and keep it off. It's a very active private group but open to new members year-round. ETA: Almost forgot the mention the bold text above. If paying works for you, great. It's…

The only house spider I kill on sight is the brown recluse with its necrotic venom. Don't open if you have a thing about spiders.

Looky what I found growing on a walnut stump in a client's yard. My first harvestable wild mushrooms. Three guess what kind of polypore mushroom these are and the first two don't count.

Quick update from the mushroom farm. The oak chunks I inoculated Saturday; March 12 are doing well. Here is a chunk with maitake growing over it. (The white is the mycelium. The orange is the sawdust substrate the spawn grew on.) And one with chicken-of-the-woods. (Note the finer texture of the mycelium and an orange…

Thanks @mtaratoot I read somewhere that you have to wait for the tree's natural antimicrobial functions to die before inoculating. But what do I know. I've never done this before. LOL

Update on the mushroom farm. The pins on the king oyster aborted, probably the result of too little water in the 5 lb block. The seller did say they'd only guaranty a first flush. I finished soaking and chilling the shiitake block before putting it back in the grow tent. I let the chestnuts get too mature and they…

I guess I can see her point. Both growing methods have advantages and disadvantages. The grower using blocks may have to change certain growing conditions depending on what species he wants to grow, but that really isn't hard to do. Mostly it's a matter of adjusting the mix of the substrate base (50%/50% wood pellets to…

I harvested my Shiitakes yesterday, ten days after going into the grow tent. They started out looking great but stalled around day five and I'm not sure exactly why but I'm guessing they need a higher humidity than the 80-85% I was keeping in the grow tent since the plastic bag is stripped completely off for fruiting. I'll…

I'd prefer to wild gather too, but it seems my area is just too dry most of the time. They do grow in areas that retain moisture, river bottom and such, but I live on the ridge tops (no worries about flooding). @mtaratoot I'm not sure what you mean by "a lot of waste" when growing on sawdust and grain. All of the spent…

I thought I'd post a photo of the Chestnut mushroom pins. These are about the size of those sewing pins with the round colored plastic heads, all in clusters. When ready for harvest they should look like these.