The further we get into mushroom cultivation, the more I realise just how useful and amazing fungi is. I’ve also found that it’s sometimes a little hard to find info that relates to growing edible mushrooms in Australian conditions. Finding local knowledge is crucial!
Luckily, there’s lots of resources that relate specifically to growing culinary mushrooms in Australia successfully. Which we can share with you, so you can learn too…
Fungi Down Under – the Fungimap Guide to Australian Fungi
Log-Grown Shiitake Mushrooms: An Australian Growers’ Manual – Parsuram Sharma-Luital & Rowan Reid – originally published by the Otway Agroforestry Network
Of course not all the mushroom cultivation info we have needs to be Australia-specific, so we’ve got the rest of the world’s fabulous resources to draw on also – three of our favourites are…
The Mushroom Cultivator – a practical guide to growing mushrooms at home – Paul Stamets
Growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms – Paul Stamets
The Fifth Kingdom – Bryce Kendrick
And of course, like anything, the learning is in the doing. Lately we’ve been plugging fungi into more and more systems at Milkwood Farm, most recently as inoculated soil when planting certain kinds of pine trees…
Or start by reading up on how you can integrate mushrooms into your home environment or garden, and create extra abundance and functional connections in your system. And also better soups, come harvest time…
awesome timing, thanks! There’s an oak tree just got cut down up here we’re hoping to invade shortly 🙂
I’m struggling to make the course, but I would add that mycology is like any other biology – know the wild to understand the husbandry. The wild season for pine mushrooms (saffron milk caps being the crazily abundant and delicious prize) is just ending – I came home from Belanglo last Tuesday with such a load that I stopped and bought a dehydrator on the way back to deal with it (and even then a load from a casual outing with grandmother and son) . Australia generally suffers from the fact that we have a limited rural foraging tradition (but… Read more »
“Fungi Down Under” just sounds wrong – it makes the little schoolboy inside of me giggle every time!
Thanks for posting a list of good localised resources. It’s often hard to adapt English or American books and ideas to our situation here, and many “Australian adaptations” of overseas books merely modify language and spelling, rather than adapt the concepts to suit Australian plants, animals and climatic conditions.