Shiitake mushrooms are good for a lot of things. They're easy to grow, good for your immune system, taste great, turn grey hair black, add spring to your step, put pep in your pepper, etc. I'm also pretty sure St. Valentine would approve of growing your own, or sharing the experience of growing your own with the one you love, besides... we also have fresh loads of shiitake mushroom block ready to grow kits popping out of our incubators. So to stimulate your love for shiitake, we're knocking 20% off the price of these kits. Grow your own blocks for $15? Yep! Sale will run until the end of the week, because we know mushrooms are probably the last thing on your mind February 14th...

Interest in our mushroom kits and spawned product has picked up a bit this season! As a result, we're trimming back the hours we are available to walk-in customers at our Knoxville showroom. Our new showroom hours are Wed-Sat 12-4pm. 

With about 98% of our business being shipped on a daily basis; the packing, processing, and management of inventory takes a good deal of attention from our small and highly dedicated staff. We've been experimenting with ways to better serve all our customers and remain available for support at our local showroom. To be responsive to email inquiry, and available to take your calls throughout the day. The beginning of our week is always the busiest, as we are packing and shipping orders received over the weekend in addition to preparing fresh substrates and spawned products. Keeping the showroom closed Monday and Tuesday allows us to dedicate the time and attention needed to these tasks, while also continuing to develop new and exciting goodies for mushroom lovers.

Phone ordering support will still be available all week, Monday through Friday, from 11am to 4pm. Please be patient if you do not reach someone the first time you call, and perhaps try your call a little later. Better yet, send us an email... believe it or not, it is usually quicker! Our hope is that dedicating this time specifically to phone support will help us get to more calls each day. We don't do voicemail, so if you have something important to get to us, email is generally the best way to do so.

Our shipping office and mushroom production lab remains open to process and ship orders Monday through Friday 9am to 5pm. That means we're here, working the 9-5, trying to get your mushroom stuff to you as quickly as possible. We produce all our mushroom culture, spawn and grow kits in-house. Mycelium requires constant attention, and we're happy to have so much of it around us these days! We greatly appreciate the continued support of our patrons, and thank youf or your patience as we continue to grow and mushroom!

We've got a few extra 2012 calendars hanging around, so for the month of February: Free Beautiful Mushrooms of the World 2012 Calendar for all orders over $50! You don't need to enter any special codes, just spend over $50 (shipping not included) and we'll toss one in with your order when it ships! Taylor Lockwood's stunning photography makes for a very slick mushroom calendar. A great gift for anyone, or just something funky to grace your cubical wall!

You may have noticed for some time now that our mushroom logs have been listed as "sold out." This is a little misleading. We always have mushroom logs... or at least almost always have mushroom logs. The problem lately has been that Knox County Tennessee (our home sweet home) is currently under a hardwood firewood export ban as the result of Emerald Ash Borer infestation in East Tennessee. The regulation restricts the movement of firewood of all hardwood (non-coniferous) species. Our white oak logs are harvested fresh, plugged quickly, stored in our protected demonstration garden, and we believe them to be unaffected by the EAB.  Although our logs are not firewood and are not exposed to firewood lots, we still feel it is responsible for us to abide by this movement restriction. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, mushroom logs will not be available for shipping.

We still maintain a stock of mushroom logs at our demonstration garden and showroom in Knoxville. Customers are more than welcome to stop by for local pickup and purchase. We generally keep a selection of logs, and may have them in various sizes, shapes, prices, etc. 

Thanks to John Tullock from The New American Homestead for stopping by this last week and featuring us in a blog post. I always enjoy talking with folks like John, who are knowledgible about the subject matter and are interested in exploring fungi to fit a specific purpose. In his case, it is the focus of his blog: sustainaible, self-sufficient living in the urban environment. We hope to be working with John in the future, possibly through some expanded workshop opportunities.

We've also beefed up our bookstore inventory a little bit. We've added ten or so new and interesting titles, including: 

Wild Fermentation - The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods by Sandor Ellix Katz

The Fungal Pharmacy, The Complete Guide to Medicinal Mushrooms and Lichens of North America by Robert Rogers

The Mushroom in Christian Art, The Identity of Jesus in the Development of Christianity by John A. Rush

The Rainbow Beneath My Feet - A Mushroom Dyer's Field Guide by Arleen Rainis Bessette and Alan E Bessette

Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms of New England and Eastern Canada by David L. Spahr

Work continues on supplying fresh Ready to Grow mushroom grow kits. These are produced weekly at our in-house lab in Knoxville TN and are shipping as fresh as possible to ensure healthy and satisfying production from your kit. Check out what's currently available and shipping!

Taylor Lockwood is one heck of a mushroom photographer. His work has been well represented in a series beautiful books and posters. This year we were fortunate enough to grab a load of his slickly produced 2012 mushroom calendars. Now it is getting on towards the end of the year and we'd like to see these move on to happy homes, cubicles, dorm rooms, offices, kitchens, etc. So for the meantime we're pricing them as low as we can at $10.95 (over 25% off retail)!

We'd also like to take this opportunity to plug Taylor's other wonderful products. These include some very colorful mushroom mousepads, stationary, and very informative and well produced mushroom identifcation DVDs.  There are also several striking coffee table style books with stunning photography; Treasures from the Kingdom of Fungi, and Chasing the Rain. Taylor is a fun-guy and is great at what he does. Pick up some of his goodies and you'll see what we're talking about!

Mushroom Grow Kits make excellent holiday gifts! What better way to surprise that "impossible to buy for" friend or family member than with an odd, interesting, and rewarding mushroom growing experience! We've also revived our Great Gift Ideas product section for those that might need some hints or suggestions for interesting and fun fungal things we have on hand during the gift giving season.

Keep in mind that mushroom grow kits and other living mushroom material is best given as fresh as possible. Secure your's now and dispense the mushroom joy quickly! Quantity on hand represents actual shippable inventory, so you can be assured of your gift in time for the holidays.

Lately, we've been working extra hard to expand and maintain our offering of mushroom plug spawn. The fruits of our labor are paying off, so we now have a healthy selection of different mushroom species. Being that most folks tend to get wild with "Black Friday Sales" this time of year... we figured it was worth getting on board! Until midnight, Monday November 28, we're knocking 20% off ALL mushroom plug spawn! We're stretching this sale until Monday, so it'll technically qualify as a "Cyber Monday" sale too... Don't delay, be sure to take advantage of our bandwagon jumping, and flush inventory! Discount applied automatically during checkout.

It looks like the soaking rains from the likes of Hurricane Irene as well as reminents of Tropical Storm Lee are making conditions very ideal for wild mushroom harvests all up and down the east coast. NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday is reporting abundant wild mushroom fruitings in the Northeast. Harvests are so abunant as to even gardner a segment on NPR's Talk of the Nation. On the other hand, the Huffington Post is also reporting that these same ideal mushroom distribution and fruiting conditions will also bode well for a bumper crop of funkadelic fungi.

Either way, we wanted to make mention of this. If you have mushroom patches or mushroom logs working, get out and check 'em. We pulled a nice little late-summer crop from our logs just last week. If things have been mild and wet where you are, it might be worth lacing up the hiking boots and getting out to check some of the good wild mushroom spots. We always love seeing our customer's wild mushroom hunting photos and would love to repost them in the blog (with your permission). 

There is loads of stuff that we have laying around here, stuff we use every day. Not sure why, but we just now got around to packaging some of it up for our customers. We were already sort of doing this anyway, for the drop in customers that pickup locally. However now we have measured and portioned servings of raw substrates and casing materials. Available online now: one gallon bags of perlite, two quart bags of hard wood pellets, and 650gram blocks of compressed coco coir. 

We also had a wonderful bloom of shiitakes from the mushroom logs over the weekend. Check your logs! Cooler temps and frequent soaking rains should have mushrooms very happy all up and down the East Coast and South East.

Hello all and welcome to Everything Mushrooms version 2.0! As you can see, the website has a fresh, updated look. We've switched website platforms, moving to a system that allows us to manage our fluid inventory a little more effectively, while at the same time offering our customers a professional and easy to use online shopping experience. Our new website will also allow us to incorporate and produce more mushroom specific content.

This blog feed section will be updated regularly with posts from our staff about new and upcoming stuff, random mushroom musings, and mushroom related news items. Our Info Zone section will contain updated prodcut instructions, how-to quides, instructions videos, an expanding recipe section, and much more! Please check back with us often as our website's content will be updated and refreshed frequently!

We also want to take this opportunity to solicit feedback. Are features of the new system not working well for you? Need to report a bug or error? Something about the new system got you all hot and bothered? Please contact us with your feedback, bug reports, or suggestions!

Glowing "Ghost" Mushrooms Reappear in Brazil After 170 Years

Reposted from Treehugger

Photo: Panellus stipticus, one species of glowing mushrooms (Wiki Commons)

If you think glowing mushrooms are the figment of some trippy imagination, think again. After its initial discovery back in 1840, one of the most bioluminescent species of mushroom known to humans was not seen again until a pair of primatologists recently stumbled upon it in the Brazilian forests.

Known as Neonothopanus gardneri, it's one of the 71 recognized species of bioluminescent mushrooms -- out of 100,000 identified fungi species -- and can grow up to three inches in diameter. Sometimes called "ghost mushrooms" due to their eerie appearance, they are also poisonous to humans, and glow so bright that one can use their green light to read a newspaper in a dark room......

These are some great mushroom commercials from Japan.