Forest Grown Gourmet Mushrooms

[Peter Smallidge]

The webinar by Steve Gabriel on 4/17/2013 about Forest Grown Mushrooms for Forest Health was well received by participants, and I think exceptionally well done. The topics ranged from production expectations and enterprise budgets to mushroom biology and production techniques.  Steve shared numerous great ideas based on his experience as a producer and educator. 

Noteworthy was Steve's encouragement to be more generous in selecting defective trees in the woods for use in mushroom cultivation.  He indicated the broad range of tree species that are suitable for some type of mushroom.  Further, that this diversification was good to offset variation in production associated with weather and age of substrate.  There were also many good ideas about strategies to grow mushrooms in a variety of "incidental" (my word) locations, such as Stropharia grown on wood chips beneath fruit trees. 

The presentation is included here.

A link to the archive is here.

Cornell mushroom link 1 = http://blogs.cornell.edu/mushrooms/

Cornell mushroom/forest farming link 2 = http://farmingthewoods.com/

Feel free to contact Steve Gabriel by email at [e-mail]

Now, a couple mushroom pictures just to add some pizazz to this blog :)

Picture 1 - Low A and High A stacking for shitake mushrooms, with totems in the background.

Picture 2 - Oyster on aspen totems

Picture 3 - Extension educators drilling beech bolts at the annual FRESH in-service