May The Earth Bring The News Of The Sun And The Frost

Lessons learned from growing mushrooms.

A few weeks ago I started a first foray into growing my own edible mushrooms.

Mushrooms are really having a moment right now. They’re everywhere, literally and figuratively: not just beneath our feet but in wellness products, gourmet foods, popular documentaries, even a prestige television series.

I’ve been really into fungi since I first learned about mycorrhizal networks—the “wood wide web”—a few years ago. Because of this organic (ha) entry point I like to flatter myself that my fixation is “authentic,” whatever that means, although really I’m sure my tastes and desires are no less subject to the zeitgeist and savvy advertising than anyone else’s.

Whatever the case, the process of trying to start a mushroom colony from scratch has been both healing and educational. Golden oysters, the variety I’m trying to grow, are supposed to be easy for beginners. That’s appealing to me as someone who is constitutionally incapable of delicate precision, a trait demanded of those who would deign to cultivate the more finicky species of fungi.

The process itself is relatively simple, albeit time-consuming (especially when that lack of precision and attention to detail I mentioned manifests itself in forgetting to charge both drill batteries you own). After a big wind storm a few weeks back I dragged some big maple and sycamore branches back to my house from the park across the street. I sawed them into manageable pieces, drilled holes in them to a 1” depth, hammered in the plugs inoculated with spawn that I got from my grow kit, and then melted wax over the plugs to seal them into the logs.

This took two full afternoons. I had a lot of logs and a lot of plugs.

Snow has come and gone so many times this winter that I’ve lost count. I’ve found that it brings me great peace to look at the flakes whirling and settling on my mushroom logs. To know that the snow will melt and soak into the wood over and over again, and the sun will dry it out over and over again, carrying out the natural rhythms necessary for both growth and its necessary companion, decomposition.¹ From that decomposition—if I’ve done everything right—new fruiting bodies of brilliant gold fungus will grow, sometime in the next three to fifteen months.

Primo Levi, “Bear Meat”

If your education was anything like mine, you were taught at a young age that there was a tidy division of labor in the biosphere: producers, consumers, and decomposers. Plants produce, animals consume, and fungi decompose.

With the perspective of a few more years it seems to me that it is all less tidy than we might have once thought. Animals who spent their lives consuming certainly produce, in death, the food that fungi, the decomposers, consume. And in humans, at the level of our capacity for abstraction, the divisions break down even further, as though they themselves were being eaten by fungus. Some people seem to do nothing but consume, it’s true. But most people seem to have an inclination toward making things,² too. In making art what are we doing if not some alchemy of production and decomposition—bringing brand new things into the world, fed and fueled by its extant material?

My friends Gina and Huck are builders here in Detroit who renovate and restore home interiors. While that usually signifies doing hasty “flips” with shoddy practices and cheap materials and awful HGTV colors, they put all their considerable skill into making things look great while preserving the essential character of the house. (And what a treat it is just to see houses with anything resembling essential character again after living in Seattle, where any building older than twenty years is a prime candidate to be torn down and replaced with luxury apartments!)

I think this is a good way of approaching any kind of creation: putting in the time to do things right, not being afraid to express yourself within the form, and maintaining an understanding and appreciation of what came before. Grow something beautiful out of what you consume and break down.

Be a mushroom, in other words.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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1. There was a time before fungi, and without them there was no decomposition. Dead plant matter amassed in such insane quantities that there are whole layers of it beneath the earth, compressed into what we now call coal. Sort of fitting that it still carries so much death inside it.

2. People have been (rightly) clowning on a recent story from the BBC about how coronavirus had “minimal” impact on people’s mental health by sharing all the weird stuff they made or did in the early months of the pandemic. But I think there’s room for an additional explanation alongside the obviously true mental health crisis: that when left to our own devices, without work or obligations, most people have both the need and the ability for artistic expression. That gets lost in the constant noise of regular capitalist life, but it seems to me that 2020 is proof it hasn’t been eradicated from our deeper being.