Magic mushrooms

In Paul Stamets book Growing Gourmet & Medicinal Mushrooms, he discusses interesting uses of mycelium, from eating through to pretty much everything to do with the planet.

Here´s one of our favorite, mycelium does marvelous things with petrocarbon pollution. In Bellingham piles of toxic soil were treated by remediation scientists. A number of treatments were used on different piles; enzyme/chemical, mushroom inoculate, and bacterial treatments, for instance. Four weeks later the black tarps were pulled back and five piles were dead … but not the Oyster mushrooms. The mushrooms grew happily then, after being exposed, died of old age and began to rot, drawing flies that created larvae. With the maggots came birds, and with the birds, seeds and droppings. In ten weeks the mushroom heap became an island of life in the middle of a dead petrol-toxic dump. Mushrooms have the ability to break the link between carbon and hydrogen — the carbon chains that give petrol products their characteristics — and leave sugars…

This is pretty marvelous and supports Paul Stamets’s assertion that mycelium can “save the Earth”.

This book is a fairly weighty tomb, and rather technical, but it´s really enlightening and definitely deserves a place in your libraries.