This morning I woke up to a delayed Mothers Day of pancakes, sticky kisses and… a bag of pink oyster mushrooms, just starting to fruit! How amazing are they?
The reason for the delay was that Nick was in Sydney teaching a mushroom cultivation workshop. But it was worth the wait to gaze apon such an intriguing terrarium of awesome edible fungi all morning. They’ll obviously get a lot bigger than this shortly…
The little world inside this bag combines nuances many of my most favorite things – terrariums, fungi, underwater reefs, miniature worlds, and of course food. Mustn’t forget that.
This bag of sawdust spawn (after being made via this process) has been slowly colonized by the pink oyster mushroom mycelium over the past couple of months, and now it’s ready to burst into fruit.
Once you see the fruiting bodies of the fungi (that being the mushrooms) start to appear, you cut a couple of holes in the bag where the mushrooms are, mist the holes daily, and await the harvest.
In a dry climate like ours at Milkwood Farm, it’s best to leave the spawn inside the bag, as this helps keep the block moist, and just cut a couple of holes for the mushrooms to fruit out of… if we were in higher humidity, this wouldn’t be as necessary.
Stand by for photos of the full harvest! I wonder how we should best cook such beautiful food… hmm…
Pink Oyster Mushrooms in full fruit. © Sherrie Thai of ShaireProductions.
Quick plug: If you’d like to learn how to clone any shop-bought mushroom and propagate yourself a lifetime supply (for very little setup cost) with a variety of indoor and outdoor cultivation techniques, we’ll be doing more Mushroom Cultivation workshops in Sydney soon.
We’re just finalizing dates currently so if you’re interested hop on our mailing list and we’ll announce the next lot of dates shortly – cheers!
wow how awesome.
That’s what pink oyster mushrooms look like? I am so excited as I’ve got some experimentally sculptural batches that I started last week.