Chicken of the Woods

Last year, knowing how we love mushrooms, someone brought a huge chunk of Chicken of the Woods to Andrea after finding it while GPSing. (Thanks guys!)

She brought it home, we cooked a bunch, ate a bunch, dried a bunch, and I cut up the parts that still had pieces of bark on it and spread it all over the yard onto various dead wood and stumps.

Well this morning as I headed out to our remote garden I saw this on a stump at the end of our driveway.



 Plant your scraps. Plant everything. When you buy mushrooms from the store,  cut off the bottoms and throw them into media that they normally grow in... coffee grounds or wood chips or something, Throw it around the yard. Button mushrooms grow in fields, like agaricus campestris, so throw them in your lawn. Chicken of the woods and oyster mushrooms grow on wood, so throw them onto logs or stumps (like I did) - or in your wood chip mulch. Those mycelia might take hold and spread, and you'll have free food.






Update: 9/21/2016
It's starting to lose some color and is definitely growing, so I thought I'd harvest some of the edges of the larger pieces before they start to turn old, but I left enough to keep growing (in case it does) and I definitely want it to drop more spores.

So I read in Wiki:

 Testing showed an hour of UV light exposure before harvesting made a serving of mushrooms contain twice the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's daily recommendation of vitamin D, and 5 minutes of UV light exposure after harvesting made a serving of mushrooms contain four times the FDA's daily recommendation of vitamin D.[13]Analysis also demonstrated that natural sunlight produced vitamin D2.[14]
Sooooo - I will leave them in a sunny spot today, and fry them up in vegan butter for my sweetheart and me this afternoon.
Yumm!