'Shrooms

Tonight at Whole Foods the Wrangler spotted a little mushroom garden kit by a California start up called Back to the Roots. The kit comes in a cardboard box similar to a milk carton. Unlike mushrooms in the typical grow-your-own mushroom kits, these mushrooms grow not on logs but in recycled coffee grounds.

The garden must be kept indoors in an area with good air flow and indirect sunlight. We put ours on the windowsill next to my wheatgrass garden (which is, I might add, growing like a weed. I planted the seeds last Tuesday, and the grass is already six inches tall!). The mushroom kit includes a misting bottle for daily watering.

Apparently, we'll start seeing growth in about seven days, after which the mushrooms double in size each day. A crop yields about a pound of mushrooms, and the little kit should give us two to four crops. We'll know by next week how this turns out.

Fun with Fungi

One of the Six-Button Cowgirls, a very enterprising sort, grows gourmet mushrooms in her living room. Contrary to popular belief, mushrooms don't have to be grown in manure--a fact for which Charmaine's fellow residents and guests alike are grateful, I'm sure. Mushrooms do, however, have to be grown in a relatively warm environment, which makes Charmaine's outdoor garden near the mountains less than ideal for her mushroom endeavors. Thus, Charmaine's sunny living room is the place to be if you're a baby bella or young shiitake.

Charmaine is a proud member of a mushroom-of-the-month club that sends her monthly mushroom patches (mushroom mycelium growing on a sterilized medium, or substrate), which Charmaine places under a humidity tent in said living room. She's also active in a mushroom growers support club. She reports that club members skew heavily toward the "grown-up Dungeons and Dragons nerd" demographic (Charmaine excluded, of course).

At any rate, she has grown beautiful and delicious mushrooms that taste far better than the grocery store variety. Pictured here are her pearl oyster mushrooms sprouting at the tender age of four days.