Oyster Mushrooms

Hunting for oyster mushrooms - pleurotus ostreatus – late last autumn, I visited several of my favourite haunts. In the wild, these mushrooms colonise dead trees which are cut down, mainly for safety’s sake and sawn up for firewood. You guessed it half my secret oyster mushroom patches might be already neatly stacked and ready to fruit in your own firewood pile. I muttered darkly to my wife about decimation of habitat, forestry rapists and the like, and that I would have more luck if I grew them myself. As if on cue, two encyclopaedic volumes on how to grow mushrooms appeared under the Christmas tree. Although potentially an expensive and time consuming process, requiring basic training in culturing techniques, in truth I have thought of little else since. The upside is that for very little money and an ability to follow simple instructions, grain spawn of the oyster mushroom is available without having to start with Petri dishes. When mixed with pasteurised straw and pressed into high density polythene bags the spawn will run through the straw and fruit from holes cut in the side. 71oc in water for a couple of hours is enough to pasteurise the straw.

As this time of year offers little for foraging not already covered in previous issues, I have been applying my energies to a little cultivation of gourmet mushrooms. Here in Norfolk we have an abundance of cheap straw, wood chips, wheat, sawdust and logs. All these are easily colonisable by a variety of fungi. You can grow your own morels but these won’t fruit until Spring 2009, if at all. Oyster mushrooms, king stropharia, cauliflower fungus and hen-of-the-woods – grifola umbellate – can be induced to fruit within weeks in the house or garden shed wherever the temperature and humidity is controllable. Even old corrugated cardboard boxes can act as a substrate for the cultivation of oyster mushrooms. As a matter of interest, this form of doubly beneficial recycling greatly accelerates decomposition by pulping the wood and returning it to the soil instead of up the chimney.

Clive Houlder is a professional greengrocer and forager, responsibly and sustainably harvesting wild food from Norfolk’s fields, woods and coast supplying some of the county’s best chefs with wholesome natural provender in season.
T: 01328 738610