You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
Yellow oyster mushrooms at Smallhold, an indoor farm in Brooklyn that sells at-home grow kits.Credit...Chris Maggio for The New York Times
Supported by
SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT
By Zoë Schlanger
It happened faster than seemed right. One day, the tiny gray pinheads of mushrooms were just beginning to emerge from a two-inch cut in a bag of sawdust; the next, they were huge, scalloped hand-like lobes. They looked practically in motion, like muscular forearms reaching out of a wormhole.
It was early summer and I was growing blue oyster mushrooms on my kitchen counter. It was more dramatic than I could have imagined.
It started out benignly enough. About two months into lockdown, the ecology of my Instagram feed began to shift away from sourdough bread and toward mushroom grow kits. These kits are blocks of compressed waste from sawmills, which have been implanted with the mycelium of wood-eating fungus. (Mycelium are the fine, hairlike tendrils that are the principal part of any fungus; mushrooms are merely the fruiting parts — similar to apples on a tree.)
The mycelium, delighted to find themselves nestled in a cocoon of their favorite food, grow threads, digesting sawdust as they go, probing for a bit of air and moisture, which they cannot find, because the blocks are encased in plastic bags.
Image
That is where the fungal gardener comes in: If you cut an X in the plastic and spritz that X with water a few times a day, the mycelium will find their way to that spot, communicating across their many tendrils to coalesce into solid flesh, and will burst forth as mushrooms.
Advertisem*nt
SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT
