{sol} sustaining ourselves locally

Why grow mushrooms at Sol?
Like any food plant in an urban garden, growing mushrooms in the city enables urban people to eat locally. Eating locally means that food is fresher, eliminates the pollution caused by transporting food, and lets us see and understand how our food is produced. Additionally, growing mushrooms improves the health of the rest of the garden. Mushrooms are good decomposers (they are generally grown on whole or partially broken down organic material) and produce wonderful compost. They also strengthen surrounding plant roots.

Another good reason to grow mushrooms is a new method called mycoremediation. Mushrooms are apparently very good at breaking down toxic materials. So if you have a city lot that has toxins in the soil, you may be able to make it suitable for growing food crops by growing mushrooms first. That said, don’t put the food in until you get the soil tested….

How is growing mushrooms different than growing plants?
Mushrooms have many of the same needs as plants - water and the appropriate medium to grow in. However, they don’t like sunlight the way most plants do. When you grow mushrooms and plants together, you generally place the mushrooms at a lower level than the plants, so the mushrooms get more water and the plants shade the mushrooms.

The structure is also very different - plants are generally autonomous beings, while mushrooms are simply the fruiting bodies of a larger fungal web. When you grow most plants, you start with a seed for each plant. When you grow mushrooms, you inoculate an area with spores, which form a mat or web of fungi, which produces many individual mushrooms.

Is cultivating fungi dangerous?
There are tons of varieties of fungi. Some fungi are bad for garden plants. But some are good for garden plants. Some plants have special relationships with certain types of fungi that other plants wouldn’t like or care about. Some mushrooms are poisonous to humans. Some are delicious and not poisonous. Some have medicinal qualities. Its important to know what type of fungi you’re dealing with and how its going to react in your particular situation. Fortunately, there are some smart scientists out there who have figured many of these things out.

Where can one learn how to grow mushrooms?
One of those smart scientists started a company, Fungi Perfecti, which sells mushrooms growing supplies and information. They have a website: fungiperfecti.com. They have great books all about mushroom growing, including Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, and Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save The World.

Other local resources include the San Francisco Mycological Society, which I think does some educational programming. There’s also a mushroom class at Merritt College in Oakland.

Here’s a photo of a mushroom bed being built at Sol. We were filling it up with woody debris, in this case newspaper, innoculating the bed with spore, and then watering it.