Eating Wild Mushrooms. These are some ripe Pleurotus I photographed for this article. Pleurotus is a genus of gilled mushrooms which includes one of the most widely eaten mushrooms, P. ostreatus. Species of Pleurotus may be called oyster, abalone, or tree mushrooms, and are some of the most commonly cultivated edible mushroom in the world. The first thing you need to know is, when walking through the woods you are walking through a sea of food. Some of it is of little or no nutritional value to you, some is toxic to you, and some is good for you, it just may be disgusting.
Anything you see, you can eat. It just may make you sick if it is the wrong thing, or be of no value to you. That does not mean you will live to eat it a second time. How to start your very own Garden Giant Mushroom Patch! Gourmet mushrooms in an old coffee cup. The best part about this project is that it is dead simple and most of the materials can be acquired easily and for free. Really all you need is: Empty coffee cup(s) Enough coffee grounds to fill your cups Oyster mushroom spawn I'll assume you can manage to scare up some empty coffee cups.
Ideally you want the little plastic lid part as well. It will make things simpler. Coffee grounds are really easy to procure. You're gonna need a decent pile of grounds so the best way to get them is just to head to your local coffee shop with a 5 gallon bucket. The mushroom spawn is something that you will probably have to buy. An Alternative To Plastic, Grown From Mushrooms. Ecovative is taking on an important, intractable problem: foamed polystyrene. The question, as with many of its peers, is whether it is can take a good idea, and have a real impact on the way things are done. The single greatest contributor to landfill, polystyrene is ubiquitous, practically non-biodegradable, toxic to marine and other life, and not really recyclable (it can be re-used, but the secondary product is often thrown away). And, until recently, there were few alternatives, save for not using it. New York-based Ecovative is mixing agricultural waste, such as rice husks and oat hulls, with “fungal mycelium” (mushroom roots) to create super-strong materials that are fire-resistant, and use no heat, electricity, or oil to produce.
It is already working with Dell and Steelcase on packaging materials, with Ford on bumpers and side doors, and getting into the construction materials and furniture markets. Chief scientist Gavin McIntyre is confident. [Image: Flickr user born1945]