Harvesting Garden Goodies

Our shiitake kits are fruiting beautifully. We harvested almost a pound for dinner last night. Yum! We expect to get a couple more like this over the next few weeks/months.



Our purple string beans are starting to produce as well. They taste similar to regular green beans, and upon cooking switch from purple to green. Its an easy way to tell they are cooked because they change colors. Neat.



The radishes I planted a couple weeks ago are also ready to harvest. We sauted them with some soy sauce. Very tasty, and I prefered it over the usual raw method.

More Mushrooms: Indoor Shiitake Kits

Our outdoor log isn't growing mushrooms fast enough and our innoculated logs won't fruit until next year. We purchased two Shiitake kits from fungi.com for $26 each after shipping. Each organic kit is supposed to grow two or more pounds. Shiitakes for sale locally go for $13-20 a pound, so this might work out if we can grow them successfully.



The two kits ready to grow in their humidity tents aka plastic bags with a couple holes. We hope they fruit in the next week or two. We're hungry for some Shiitakes.

Lion’s Mane Mushrooms

Lion’s mane is also known as Hericium erinaceus, sheep’s head, bear’s head, and yamabushitake. Two months ago, I had never heard of this mushroom, and now I enjoy eating it. While browsing around on fungi.com I for mushroom kits to grow, I found this one. It’s goofy look charmed me into buying it an giving it a whirl.

It looks like a giant fluffy hunk of cauliflower to me. Apparently, it is best picked when young as several other mushrooms I’ve tried recently are as well. It’s also good to pick them before the spines get too long or they get a slight bitter taste. I’ve read ‘too long’ starts at 1/4”.

If you look closely at the picture below or above, you can see a slight discoloration on the ride side where the mushroom is going from white to yellowish. It is a sign the humidity wasn’t high enough for it, and it was getting a bit dried out. Dried out also leads to a slight bitter taste.

As a new mushroom grower, I’m still learning what they like. I found this one very easy to grow. Read: I didn’t screw it up completely on the first try like I did the pink oysters! It also grew rather quickly. The growth above only took about two weeks and weighed about six ounces. The kit should flush several more times. You can see in the last photo all the white fuzziness is the mycelium. They are still alive and healthy. They only need a bit of water and some light to fruit some more mushrooms.

Paul Stamets, mushroom guru, wrote a nice article about some of the medicinal properties on the Huffington Post: here which includes memory and mood improvement and maybe nerve regrowth. Neat.

So how does it taste? I’d read that it tastes like lobster or other seafood. Neither of us thought it tasted like lobster, but it did have the chewy texture of lobster. We both enjoyed it, and would eat it again. To read more about how I cooked it, check out the recipe I posted on my food blog: Everyday Tastiness: Poached Lion’s Mane Mushroom.

Mushroom Growing Update

The shiitake from the log outside was delicious. The squirrels agree and ate our last fruiting before we could. I purchased some wire mesh which I hope will protect our next fruiting.


The pink oyster kit in the house turned from bright pink to white in ine day, and then it started to smell fishy. I need to do some reading to figure out what I did wrong, but I am guessing it got too wet. Maybe I watered it too often. I took off the humidity tent, and pulled off all the mushroooms. New pink ones are growing now.


The Lions Mane is coming along nicely. They should get to softball size before we pick them for eating. The black stuff is tape to keep the plastic tight against the growibg material. I found it strange the mushrooms are growing around the skewers to hold the humidity tent, and not out the side of the bag. The mycelium must like the taste of the bamboo.