Blog Post The Beginning
Heirloom Fungi had is beginning here , in the forest . Like most people, all I really new about mushrooms was Morels. Every spring was anxiously awaited to hunt the elusive, mysterious Morel Mushroom !
Was it too cold, too hot , too dry ? There about as many theory’s and myths about Morels as there is Morel hunters. I was determined to learn all I could and dispel the myths. Along the way , I got sidetracked !
A few people had told me that there were many more good mushrooms in the woods than just Morels. I started noticing those other different mushrooms and made an effort to find out all I could about them .
Wild Oysters, Chicken-of-the-Woods, Hen-of -the-woods (two as unalike mushrooms as can be !), Lions Mane, Dryads Saddle (smells like watermelon), Reishi , the list goes on . All were good , some awesome !
Meanwhile in the midst of my fascination with Fungi, my brother started growing Shiitake mushrooms on small oak logs. I thought, wow, that’s pretty cool . Just grow them , beats stomping around in brush .
We inoculated Shiitake into about 80 logs that first winter along with several logs and totems with Oyster. By spring the Oysters had popped the Shiitakes were a few months to a year later.
By that next fall , I was hooked . We built a crude plastic enclosure in our garage and proceeded to grow Oysters ! Success was fairly rapid , we were growing enough Oysters that we needed somewhere to get rid of them.
We began making the rounds to a few local restaurants ,they were happy to have fresh locally grown mushrooms. Our little “learning” facility was a great teacher, what it taught us was if you wanted to do this on a regular and consistent basis you needed something better !
The following year I was retiring from the business I had run for almost 40 years, and needed something to do. We made the plunge and built our “Mushroom House”. The goal was to do everything possible to give the mushrooms we grow a perfect world .
Consistency has been our goal since we started, to consistently grow quality mushrooms and to consistently deliver quality mushrooms. we are having fun doing this and learn something new every week. that’s what we are doing with this blog.
The very definition of “Heirloom” is, “to pass something of value on”, in this case it’s knowledge. The more you know about fungi the better off we are !
Till next post !
Allen