And the word of the day is: AGRARIAN!
DR MBarnum finally has a date!?!
Once-exotic mushrooms -- king trumpets, maitake and shimeji -- get ready to rise on Southern California turf...Agaricus mushrooms are so popular because they are so easy to grow. Though plants grow in the earth, mushrooms are grown on different bases, called substrates. Sometimes this is very simple. Agaricus will thrive even on straw.Other mushrooms such as oysters and shiitakes grow on dead logs, making them only a little more difficult to cultivate. The specialty mushrooms Hokto is growing take that a step further, growing on a specially composed substrate -- primarily sawdust, ground corncobs and wheat and rice bran.The holy grail of fungi culture is the cultivation of such treasured wild mushrooms as chanterelles, porcini, morels and truffles. Though experiments are ongoing and hope springs eternal, this is an exceedingly difficult process because these are mycorrhizal mushrooms. That means they grow only in community with the root systems of living trees, something that is much harder to manage on a commercial scale.Waste not, want notOF COURSE, farming mushrooms is nothing new. They've been cultivated for centuries and the introduction of large-scale mushroom growing in the U.S. dates to the 1890s.It started in the little town of Kennett Square, Penn. -- not far from Philadelphia -- where a Quaker carnation grower named William Swayne began growing mushrooms in the dark areas under the growing tables in his greenhouses.Because of the town's proximity to the major markets of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Boston and New York, this soon became a thriving regional business.It was also a pioneer in recycling. In those days, most public transportation was by horse, and cleaning up after the beasts was a major problem in urban areas. Since these fungi grow well on straw and manure, the wagons would leave Kennett Square loaded with mushrooms and return loaded with the material with which to grow more.To this day, even though transportation is not the same sort of issue and horse manure is no longer widely used for growing, Pennsylvania still accounts for more than half of all the cultivated mushrooms grown in the United States. California ranks second with less than 20%.
And that would only be if Nader gets elected
