The book
Grow Mushrooms at Home
Eight species you can eat without ever having to identify one
Every guide to wild mushrooms asks you to become certain about something in your hand. This one removes the question.
M.B. Healy · 181 pages · 16 original diagrams
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A paperback edition is coming.
Who it is for
- You want to eat interesting mushrooms and have no intention of learning to identify them.
- You have a shaded corner of a garden, or a windowsill, or a shed.
- You want to know what a method actually costs and what it actually returns before you buy anything.
Who it is not for
This is not a foraging book and it will not help you identify anything you found. If that is what you need, learn from an experienced local forager and a current regional guide. Chapter one explains at length why this book takes the other route.
What is in it
- 01
Why grow instead
What identification actually asks of you, why the information supply is compromised, what you cannot grow, and what it costs.
- 02
The methods, by honest difficulty
Kits, straw and coffee, outdoor beds, hardwood logs, sawdust blocks, grain spawn and sterile work.
- 03
The eight worth growing
Oyster, king oyster, shiitake, lion's mane, wine cap, maitake, enoki and cordyceps, one chapter each.
- 04
Contamination
What got there first, how to tell it from your own mycelium, and when to stop.
- 05
The kitchen
The three mistakes, and how to keep four pounds of mushrooms that arrived in three days.
- 06
The functional question
Sixteen claims across seven species, each graded by the evidence behind it.
Then the appendices: The eight at a glance, a symptom index, a shopping list, a bibliography with printed DOIs, and a grow log to fill in.
How this book handles evidence
Every species description, season, spore print and poisoning syndrome comes from the reference data behind this site, which is published and can be checked against what the book says.
The final part grades sixteen functional-mushroom claims by the strength of the evidence behind each one, with the papers cited and their DOIs printed. Two reach the standard of a licensed drug in narrow clinical uses. Five rest on animal and cell studies. The book says which is which, and never tells you what a mushroom will do for you.
There is also an appendix listing what the book does not claim, because on this subject the shape of what an author declines to say is part of the evidence.
Get the book
181 pages. ePub, $9.99, delivered the moment you pay.
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