Mushroom logs! That's what we'll be doing... just one last time this spring. Join us for a casual and hands-on mushroom cultivation experience starting at 4pm on Saturday May 4th. All participants will create their own shiitake mushroom logs. Materials provided. Cost is $25 per log, couples or friends are welcome to share the experience.

Instruction will include a brief tune up on using powered drills. We will demonstrate the proper techniques for drilling and plugging recently cut hardwoods with fresh mushroom plug spawn. The "mushroom log" will require about one year of incubation time before it begins production, but once it gets going... expect mushrooms several times a year for years to come!

We'll discuss proper care and maintenance, along with tips on provoking mushroom harvests, harvesting techniques, and more. Shiitake mushroom logs are an exciting way to recycle recently cut hardwood and make use of shaded garden areas to produce a healthy and nutritious food!

Space is limited, advanced registration is required. Call 865.329.7566 or stop by our Knoxville showroom for more information. For those that want to wrap up their reservations quickly, we have an easy way to purchase tickets online... just click here for more information.

We're officially open every day 'cept Sunday! This week marked the beginning of expanded hours at our Knoxville showroom; now open noon - 6pm Monday through Friday, and noon - 4pm on Saturdays. We've long had the showroom closed on Mondays, and even more recently on Tuesdays... generally using this time to catchup from weekend Internet orders, or as project days to work on new material, etc. However recently we've noticed more and more folks stopping by anyway, and we figured it is probably a better idea for us to be ready for y'all and have some bright smiling folks on staff to assist you in your mushroom endeavors.

This brings us to Ryan. New guy Ryan is the most recent addition to our staff, taking on customer service responsibilities early in the week, and some lab related tasks (cough, cough), chores later in the week. You'll also likely see him here on Saturdays, when Jessica is either at Market, or working her culinary magicks at Organicism Farms and Foods. Here is Ryan, make him welcome. He's a mellow guy, with a great attitude and is enthusiastic about growing mushrooms. Ryan's been working with a variety of mushrooms for a while now, so he has some great insight to share and can assist with just about anything we have going on here...

We're also expanding good times for everyone at the Mushroom Shop. This past weekend we hosted our first Spring Open House, which featured a workshop on growing oyster mushrooms from straw, and a fantastic dinner prepared by Jessica. We opened our doors at noon on Saturday and saw a good number of folks throughout the day! Jessica prepared some tasty snacks, including smoked shiitakes stuffed with savory blue cheese granola, mushroom pate with crispy crostinis and freshly picked green onions, and goat cheese, caramelized onion, and mixed mushroom flatbread.

At 4pm we closed shop and moved to our warehouse where Bob held a workshop for about a dozen students, detailing the steps and processes involved in growing oyster mushrooms from pasteurized straw. The 55 gallon drum was filled and fired up, straw was soaked and drained, and students filled and prepared their own oyster mushroom grow bag to take home.

After the workshop, Jessica prepared a fantastic dinner, serving: greens and sprouts salad with porcini vinaigrette, freshly baked, locally fermented molasses sourdough with truffle salt oil, and mushroom and arugula lasagna with homemade porcini noodles and a black morel cream sauce. For dessert, a wonderful chaga-honey ice cream!

We are hoping to do these combination type events at least two or three times a year so please stay in touch, sign up for our email announcement list, follow us on facebook, or check our workshop and events announcement page for more details. We're expecting to announce one last shiitake mushroom log workshop this spring, likely for sometime in early May. 

We're excited to announce final details for our Spring Open House at Everything Mushrooms HQ! We are looking forward to a fun, casual, and informative afternoon of mushroomy nerdiness. Festivities will begin at noon, when we open for normal store hours. We'll have extra staff on hand, so come on down and visit, poke around, ask questions. Light mushroom snacks for tasting, warm chaga mushroom tea, and other goodies on hand throughout the day.

Things will get "serious" at 4pm, when we fire up the burners and hold court on growing oyster mushrooms from straw. This workshop will feature discussion and a hands-on demonstration. You'll learn about what it takes to properly chop, prepare, and pasteurize straw for oyster mushroom production. It's fun, and everyone will get to make their own oyster mushroom bag to grow at home! Space for the workshop is limited, $20 per person, so please call ahead or purchase your tickets online.

At 6pm we'll tidy up the straw mess and prepare for a spectacular dinner presented by Jessica Hammonds of Organicism Farms and Foods. Jessica is also the most recent addition to staff here at Everything Mushrooms, so she'll be flexing her mushroom culinary skills for all this evening. Food will feature mushroom themes, and we'll have other super local adult bevs on tap. Seating for dinner is also limited, $20 per person, so please call ahead or purchase tickets online.

For those that want to warp up their reservations quickly, we have an easy way to purchase tickets online... just click here for more information.

We are exciting to meet new folks interested in growing and gardening with mushrooms. Please make plans to join us at the Open House!

We are fully into log plugging season! Cathy has been busy in the lab staying ahead with culture and spawn production, keeping fresh plugs and sawdust rolling out as often as possible. Despite long days in front of the laminar hood, she's also managed to kick out one helluva blog post, tackling many of the questions we receive including when is the best time to plug logs, and other nitty-gritty on mushroom log cultivation.

We are updating inventory on a weekly basis, adding fresh spawn as it becomes available from the incubator. The inventory you see listed online represents our real-time, shippable supply of spawn or culture. Some varieties have been selling out on a weekly basis, and as a result we recalculate future runs based on increasing or seasonal demand. Please check back with us frequently, as many of these selections will be back online and should remain so as production is adjusted. We greatly appreciate your patience!

We do have these neat little "single log packs" of mushroom plugs that were made up for a few early season expos. This isn't a normal inventory item, and we don't see ourselves doing more of these in the future unless it is for more trade show type things. These are a great way to plug a log on the cheap, or they make very excellent and seasonally appropriate gifts! Supplies are limited and they are currently only available for shiitake, blue oyster, and king oyster mushrooms.

We're very excited to announce our Spring Open House and Dinner for Saturday April 6th! Activities begin in the afternoon and will include discussions on mushrooms in your garden, a hands-on workshop demonstrating how to grow oyster mushrooms from straw, and a tour of our demonstration garden. We will wrap up the evening with a delightful dinner prepared by Jessica Hammonds from Organicism Farms and Foods. Everyone is invited to come on down for the Open House, however workshop space and dinner seating is limited and will require advance purchase of a ticket, $40 per person. More details to be announced shortly!

There have also been a good number of additions to the catalog since our last update. We're expanding our bookstore to carry some new titles, including The Sibley Guide to Trees. SO, what do trees have to do with mushrooms... pretty much everything when it comes to foraging for wild mushrooms. Knowledge of tree species, including winter identification is a great way to hone your mushroom locating skills. The Sibley guide is fantastic, with great illustrations. We've also added a fun new children's title, Theodore and the Talking Mushroom.

If you follow our blog or updates, you've probably noticed some recent gushings about chaga mushroom. We love our chaga 'round here. We keep a tea brewing in our slow cooker just about all the time. It is always "on tap" for folks that stop by our retail store, so if you are curious about it, stop on by! It's a wonderful warm beverage on these cool late winter days! While we've had ground chaga available for a short time, we recently started carrying chunk form chaga supplied by sustainable domestic foragers. (In this case from Minnesota). These chunks are just the right size to make it is easier for us to portion out, so we are able to offer chunk chaga in approxomately 2oz portions for $6. Mix the chunks with desired amount of water in slow cooker and set to "keep warm." Using fresh chunks, you will have strong tea within 6-8 hours. Using a slightly hotter "low" setting (silly, we know)... you can cut the brew time down a bit. The more water you start with, the longer it will take to get up to strength. The chunks can be left in the slow cooker with the water, and reheated each day. The longer the chunks sit under heated or warm water, the stronger the brew.

At the mushroom shop, we keep a large, 8-quart slow cooker on the "keep warm" setting all day, topping off the consumed liquid and turning off the heat each evening before we leave. We often add as much as 8-10 new cups of fresh water on a daily basis, Monday through Friday, and we still find our chaga chunks to be producing a flavorful tea after 10 days. The tea becomes weaker, usually after about 2 weeks. Your milage may vary, but you get the picture. The chunks can be used over and over until they are too weak to satisfy. You'll get many quarts of yummy tea from your $6 bag of chaga chunks!

In the latest installment of Cathy's Lab, Cathy shows us her take on a traditional baked good with roots in Appalachia. Pepperoni rolls were a lunch favorite of Italian coal miners in northern Appalachia. Rolled pepperoni breads were a hearty lunch that didn't need refrigeration. They are tightly packed which made them easy to carry around during a hard days work. Cathy's recipe replaces the pepperoni with protein rich mushrooms to make a satisfying and delicious bread roll... bread rolls so good they didn't even make it to the mushroom shop from Cathy's home kitchen.

In her recipe, Cathy made use of a surprise winter crop of phoenix oyster mushrooms grown from burlap sacks in her garden. I suspect these rolls would be as good with just about any savory shroom, and we're looking forward to the next round of shiitakes from our mushroom logs to give it a go with something different. Hopefully we'll get to taste test them here at the shop... Cathy?

Cathy has also been tremendously busy in the lab producing healthy spawn and expanding our selection of available species in plugs, sawdust, and liquid culture. New material is coming online pretty much on a weekly basis these days, so while we are doing our best to update and maintain news announcements here on the webspace, we also highly recommend y'all consider signing up for our email newsletter. We'll be using this tool more frequently in the coming months for product announcements, helpful tips, and seasonally appropriate suggestions.

We've finally managed to find and stock a decent impulse sealer to support those using autoclave bags for mushroom spawn and block preparation. We've used all manner of sealers over the years and have settled on these units, which feature a 12 inch long element (wide enough for any of our bags) and a 5mm wide seal. That's the important part right there, a 5mm seal. Most of the available impulse sealers have a 2-3mm seal, which is just good enough to do the job when it comes to sealing autoclave bags. However, we find the 5mm wide seal to be superior in reliabiy producing air-tight, completely sealed bags. Furthermore, we're able to offer our 5mm sealer at the same price, if not cheaper than our competitors, who all use the narrower 2-3mm seal. Everything Mushrooms, For The Win! We also have replacement teflon and sealing elements, so you can easily service and repair your sealers to keep them running like new and in working order for many years.

We're also rounding out our selection of replacement parts for All American brand pressure cookers and sterilizers. We've generally kept a few of the more important items on hand and available for purchase, but with these new additions we should be able to service just about all the common replacement parts for these units. Keep in mind, we have access to special order ANY and ALL parts for these canners and sterilizers, so if you need something and don't see it listed, please contact us and we'll get you sorted!

Been cold out, and Knoxville got its first good snow in some time. Despite the chill in the air, we find ourselves looking forward to spring and projects in the mushroom garden. Plugging mushroom logs is a great seasonally appropriate endeavor to take advantage of the downtime and ready more productive material for the garden. Secure freshly cut hardwood (white oaks for shiitake if possible), use pieces about as big around and long as your leg, order up some plugs and waxing supplies... drill, tap, wax, and stack. We tell people all the time "it's not rocket science," and we mean it. Slightly more detailed instructions can be found here. Logs inoculated in late winter or early spring can sometimes have enough good incubation time to be producing by the fall. Generally it will take about a year before most mushroom logs are productive.

Cathy's also been very busy in the lab, bulking up our supply of mushroom plug spawn and adding some new species to the list. She's added beech clam mushroom, a cool weather shiitake, and pioppino mushroom. By expanding the mushrooms varieties available in plugs, gardeners can select varieties that may be more appropriate for the wood they have available. We're looking forward to experimenting with many of these mushrooms in our demonstration garden, so please stay tunes in the coming months as we catalog our progress and share the results. If you are interested in pursuing log culture of some of these non-traditional mushroom log varieties, we highly recommend picking up a copy of Paul Stamets book, "Mycelium Running." This title is full of useful suggestions for approaching log culture using a variety of mushroom species. It also details many other approachable mushroom gardening projects and is a valuable resource in any shroomer's library.

About half our space here in mushroom shop central is open unheated and uncooled warehousey-like space. It's real pleasant most of the year, but when temps get down in the 20s at night, it gets downright nippy in there. To combat the chill in the air, Everything Mushrooms staffers have been keeping warm and infused with freshly brewing chaga mushroom tea. It's really neat how you can just toss a chunk of chaga mushroom in a slow cooker full of water, let it go at low for about eight hours and produce such a tasty, healthy, warming beverage. No other additives needed and the flavor is quite pleasant. Honey definitely helps, but we've also been pushing this off on folks who stop by, and most of them comment that it really needs no sweetening. You can read more about chaga mushroom and it's medicinal benefits in David Wolfe's book "Chaga, King of the Medicinal Mushrooms" We have freshly ground chaga available in 2oz portions. The ground chaga is added to water and allowed to rehydrate for 30 mins. Heat at low temp for 30 more minutes to several hours. The tea can be allowed to simmer but never boil. The ground chaga will brew a stronger tea a bit quicker than the chunk form. It can be strained out and reused for several brews or until it no longer brews a tea to your strength preference. We have the chunk form available at our retail store, however its irregular shape and weight make it difficult to "meter" for online sale. If you are interested in purchasing the chunk form and having it shipped, please give us a call, that's about the easiest way to handle it. Our 2oz ground chaga is $8, the chunk form is priced at $3/oz and available in store or by phone request.

Happy New Year! We welcome 2013 with expanded store hours, a fresh face on the team, and a January long special on Beautiful Mushrooms of the World 2013 Calendar by Taylor Lockwood. We're hoping to clear out what remains of these beautiful calendars full of spectacular mushroom photography, for for the rest of the month we're taking 40% off and letting them go for $9 each! Not only that, but ALL ORDERS OVER $75 will receive a FREE calender. This is a great way to treat yourself with some of that extra Christmas money (gift card) you've been meaning to spend.

With the coming of the new year we also make welcome our newest team member, the talented and enthusiastic Jessica Hammonds. Jessica comes to us with a great deal of experience in farm to market, and more recently farm to table endeavors as owner/operator of Organicism Farms and Foods. She's done a good deal of oyster mushroom farming, having produced them at Organicism for sale at Knoxville's Market Square Farmer's Market. Jessica will be generally taking over duties in our Knoxville showroom, keeping shop and providing expert advice to our walk-in customers. She'll also be involved with phone and online customer support, so our frequent callers and customers will recognize a new voice on the other end of the phone. We're also excited to take advantage of her gardening skills as we begin continuous seasonal mushroom production at our East Tennessee facility.

And finally, with more hands on deck we'll also be expanding our retail show room and phone availability hours. Our show room will now be open Wednesday through Friday from noon until 6pm. This gives us, and our customers, an extra two hours to get more mushroomin' done in the day! We're also still open from noon until 4pm on Saturday.

Just a quick note to update y'all on our holiday hours and shipping schedule. Our offices will be closed December 24 and 25, as well as December 31 and January 1. UPS doesn't even really pickup on these days anyway... so as a result, our phone support may be dead, and orders placed over the weekends may be delayed a little until shipping resumes. Our Knoxville showroom will be open during its normal hours for the rest of the month: Wednesday through Saturday from 12 until 4pm. As a side note, we're expecting to expand our showroom hours in the new year to accommodate more of our East Tennessee customers as well as visitors from afar. For the next two weeks, please be patient with email responses, as well as availability for phone support. What little staff we have on hand for the next two weeks will likely be pretty busy trying to stay caught up!

We will also not be producing any sterilzed rye product the week of December 24. All our sterilized rye product is prepared weekly, to customer's order and as a result any orders for sterilized rye based product will be delayed for shipping until the next run is produced on Dec 30th. You can place your order now and be placed in the queue for orders shipping after the New Year's holiday.

Cathy's been busy playing with Kombucha Tea lately. We've tried quite a few wonderful concoctions based on secondary ferments, fruit juice mixes, and most recently this wonderful sparkling ginger kombucha tea. Be sure to check out the latest addition to her Cathy's Lab blog for more information and recipe! For that matter, you really ought to be checking out her blog pretty often, she's producing new entries about twice a month now and has many exciting projects in the works!

Cathy has also been hard at work producing some fun new mushroom kits. For the winter season we're now stocking Enoki Mushroom Block ready to grow kits. These are very easy to produce in the colder winter months, we just leave them out in our chilly-ish warehouse and they start fruiting around 50F. They'll even grow in the fridge! Commercial enoki is produced in clusters with elongated stems, which is easy to reproduce in the bag based grow block we provide in this kit. We're also working with a new (to us) oyster mushroom: Pleurotis cornucopiae. We have a limited amount of "experimental" blocks available for this mushroom, so if you're adventurous or just want a new oyster to play with, check out our Popcorn Oyster Mushroom Grow Blocks. 

As always, have a safe and Happy Holidays! We know a lot of folks out there are going to be enjoying some pretty bizarre and mushroomy goodness as gift recipients!

The season of gift giving is upon us... whether you're into traditional holiday type stuff, or just enjoy giving to friends and family in celebration of all things wholesome and yummy. If that's the case, then we've certainly got some interesting stuff for you. Hey, who doesn't like getting a nice big piece of East Tennessee white oak incoulated with shiitake mushrooms! (well, it's actually kind of hard to wrap). Unfortunately these mushroom logs are only available for local sale, but for our friends across the globe we've also got loads of neat mushroom grow kits for simple and easy table top mushroom gardening (think "mushroom chia-pet"). For the mushroom enthusiast who already has a host of mushroom books and other goodies, there's also wonderful mushroom photography in Taylor Lockwood's Beautiful Mushrooms of the Year 2013 Calendar as well as these neat little (made in the USA) wooden slide top seceret boxes with mushroom engravings. 

We've always had a section of our website dedicated to Great Gift Ideas... because gift giving is really an all season's affair. You never know when you might want to pickup a fungi based gift for that mycophile in your life. During this holiday season we've periodically updated, or changed out many of these items to reflect recent arrivals, neat gifting opportunities, or seasonally available goodies. Please check it often for things to tickle your fancy.

Every year about this time, I look at the remaining supply of our seasonal organic rye harvest and think, "it's time for this rye to move on..." Our current inventory of raw organic rye berries originates from fall 2011 harvest. We exercise great care sourcing and shipping our rye, maintaining it under refrigeration 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We take every precaution available ensuring freshness and cleanliness to extend the usefulness of this product as a spawn media. It's time for us to order in the next round of rye, but we still have a good bit of inventory to clear out from last year's harvest. This rye is still PERFECTLY suitable for spawn production, and will likely last another 3-6 months if stored properly. In an effort to free up some space in the walk-in, we're BLOWING OUT this rye to make way for the next shipment. Discounted over 40%-off standard retail price! Supplies are limited to the current stock, and once it's gone we'll be ordering in the new harvest and prices will return to normal levels. Don't delay! Sale price is applied to 5lb bags as well as 25lb sacks.

Being that our humble mushroom company is primarily an internet based business, we feel a little more than obligated to participate in a some solid Cyber Monday type shenanigans. So, for this week only, we're knocking 20% off all sterilized substrates and mushroom grow media. Sale includes Sterilized Rye Mushroom Grow and Spawn Bag w/ injection site - 2lb, Supplemented Sawdust Block w/ Rye Grain Pocket, Mushroom Grow Bag w/ injection site - 3lb, and all varieties of our PF Tek Mushroom Cake Substrate Jars - half pint wide mouth , sterilized. Remember, all sterilized substrate is cooked to order, on a weekly rotation, so please allow some delay in shipping your order. This ensures you will receive the freshest possible sterile product for your mushroom growing experiments! Discount is applied at checkout, so don't worry if it is not displaying until you are wrapping up your order.

Sale expires midnight Friday November 30, so yeah... it's a Cyber Monday sale that lasts all week. We know your inbox has been bombarded with "quick take 50% off everything, today only type sales." We don't play that way, and realize you have a lot of important shopping to get done while those type of sales are in progress. Take your time with ours... you have until Friday. Or place multiple orders throughout the week and really stretch it out and get your money's worth!

So I know we said we'd be closed over the holiday week, but a last minute change in plans has fortunately allowed us to to keep shop some normal shop hours. We will be CLOSED Thursday and Friday, but will be OPEN normal show room hours from 12-4pm on Wednesday and then again on Saturday. Come on down and see us, we have lots of great mushroom gift ideas for your holiday gift planning!

Ever wonder what to do with your mushroom grow kits, or sawdust spawn blocks once they are "done" producing mushrooms? How about recycling them into an exciting outdoor mushroom garden project! This week, Cathy has posted a wonderful write-up about her experiements creating oyster mushroom towers using spent grow blocks and sawdust spawn. The mycelium is still very active, and when given a new source of nutrient it is more than willing to thrive and continue producing tasty. Be sure to check out Cathy's Lab regularly for more interesting experiments, gardening tips, mushroom recipes and more!

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, our staffing is a little lighter than normal. Please be patient if you are attempting to contact us by email or phone this week. Postal Mail will not move on Thursday, so we will not have any outgoing mail after today. Also, UPS will not perform any Ground deliveries on Thursday or Friday, but Air shipments will be delivered on Friday... as a result of all this, expect some short and minor delays in shipping and package transit for the next few days. Thanks for understanding and have a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday!

Frequent visitors may recall we recently posted and interviewed for new positions at Everything Mushrooms. The fates brought us a tremendous group of applicants, but none more qualified than Cathy Scott. Cathy, who's managed a lab or two in her day... has quickly stepped into the swing of things, taking on the role of Chief Science Officer at our humble little mushroom factory. She's also a tremendous cook and enthusiastic fungal fanatic. We're dedicating a whole new section of web space specifically for Cathy to share her recipes, experiments, trials and tribulations. This little corner of space will be called "Cathy's Lab" and you can find it under the Info Zone menu on the left hand side of your screen. Cathy will be making updates frequently with new recipes, mushroom growing tips, and exciting experiments... so please check back often!

We've also been doing a lot of experimenting with Kombucha tea, attempting secondary fermentations, infusions, etc. Cathy's been creating some nice concoctions, so we should see some great recipes and brewing suggestions from her soon! In the meantime, this has led us to create some more options for our customers looking to brew Kombucha tea. The first is a kit for Continuous Kombucha Brewing - Manchurian Mushroom and Glass Beverage Dispenser. Continuous brewing is easy in these nice wide mouth glass dispensers. When you get low on Kombucha, just add more sweet tea. it'll take a few days of brewing for the SCOBY to ferment the fresh tea addition, but that's it! The dispenser makes it easy to taste the beverage throughout the fermentation cycle, or use it as a base beverage to mix with other juices and drinks. We've also made our Kombucha Starter Culture available in a Kombucha Kit that includes just about everything you need to brew: one half-gallon glass jar, one 90mm filter disc, and starter culture. 

Holiday Hours Update: We're a small shop, with a small staff, and we all love our families... yes, even more than our mushrooms! Unfortunately the stars did not align properly this year for us to have any staff available to man the shop and ship during the Thanksgiving holiday break. As a result, our retail showroom will be closed from Weds-Sat, November 21-24. We will be available for phone orders, and shipping will continue through Weds November 21. We will reopen and commence shipping again on Monday November 26. UPS takes a few days off too, so that also delays shipping during this week. We have restructured our sterilization runs accordingly, so customers will still continue receiving fresh sterilized substrate orders within the normal shipping timeframes. We deeply regret any inconvience this may cause, and hope to hear from you with your order (or see you in our store) before the break, or when we get swingin' again on the other side!

We've been preparing and shipping sterilized mushroom media for a good many years now. Experience is an invaluable teacher when it comes to this sort of thing, even with the guidance of wonderfully crafted manuals, mushroom resource books, and other references. One thing we have learned through the years, especially when it comes to the preparation and utilization of rye berries as a spawning media: FRESH is king. Forr this reason we have enacted the following policy in regards to the prepping and shipping of the Sterilized Rye Mushroom Grow and Spawn Bag w/ injection site - 2lb:

All sterilized rye is prepared to order and shipped early each week. As a result, sterile rye only moves through our sterilizers early in the week to ensure we can ship requested orders between Monday and Tuesday. Most orders will make delivery by the end of the week, providing you with the freshest possible sterilized product for spawn preperation. We do not hold this product on our shelves. Customers will experience a related delay in shipping. The cut-off for submitting orders to be included in the weekly sterilizing run is Sunday noon EST. Orders placed later in the week will be delayed until the next run of sterilized rye. Sterilized rye is prerpared every week, so you will wait no longer than 7 days before receiving shipment notification (worst case scenario).

So basically, any order we receive before noon EST on Sunday will be prepared for shipping Monday-Tuesday. If your order comes in after Sunday, it is likely your request will be delayed until the next weekly run of rye the following week. Customers should not experience any delay longer than 5-7 days for rye to be prepped for shipping. The preparation and shipping schedule ensures all our customers will receive the freshest possible product for their mycological endeavors, with no product lingering on the shelves or being held up during weekend transit. Many of our substrates are prepared to order, including our popular Supplemented Sawdust Block w/ Rye Grain Pocket, Mushroom Grow Bag w/ injection site - 3lb. However, we have found the PF Tek Mushroom Cake Substrate Jars - half pint wide mouth , sterilized to be a bit more shelf stable and will generally have these stocked for immediate shipping, as we prepare them often throughout the week.

We have also suspended preparation and shipping of the quart jars containing 500ml of pre-sterilized agar media. These were quite honestly a pain in the rear. They were heavy, unstable in shipping, and not easy to use. The goal of this product was to provide the home/hobby mycologist with access to easy materials for tissue culturing on nutrient rich agar petri dishes. So to tackle this problem we extensively tested preparation, storage, and shipping of pre-poured nutrient agar petri dishes and found we could supply this more suitable and easier to use product for an attractive and reasonable price. We use our in house Malt Extract Agar Light - MEA to prepare, seal, and vacuum pack these dishes in our sterile lab. The Pre-poured malt extract agar petri dishes, pack of four are supplied in sealed packs of four, allowing you to only expose four dishes at a time for quick tissue culture, cloning, inocuation with culture in syringes syringes, streaking spore prints, etc. We've also modified the Agar Culturing Kit - Basic to now include two packs of these pre-poured dishes, that's eight pre-poured dishes. Adding these, and removing the previously supplied sleeve of petri dishes and jar of pre-sterilized agar has allowed us to reduce the shipping weight of the Basic Kit... and make it a few bucks cheaper!

We're excited to bring some new products into the store as we continue expanding our selection of crafts, books, and other mushroom gardening and foraging gear. We have some woderful friends who run a store in Charleston, SC that specialize in wood puzzles, games, boxes, and gifts. The place is called Turle Creek, and they have a beautiful retail store on North Market Street, and setup daily in the Charleston city market. Steve, puzzle box guy extraordinaire, recently turned me onto these neat little slide top secret wood boxes made by Heartwood Creations in Rockford, IL. Heartwood does a variety of these boxes with wonderful inlays, carvings, patterns, etc. Heartwood also just so happens to have a neat laser engraved mushroom scene secret box that they dug out of the archives. Not sure you can find these in many places, but we placed our order and are now stocking these boxes in four sizes, with two selections of wood. The small sized box is pretty tiny, maybe like a vitamin or pill box. The x-large still fits in the palm of your hand and has enough depth and volume to hold something about the size of a tube of lipstick. The small, medium, and x-large are available in padauk (an African rosewood) or cherry. The large box is available in padauk or teak.

The bookstore has found a new titles on the shelf. We have two new wonderful cookbooks to mention. The first, The Wild Table, Seasonal Foraged Food and Recipes, by Connie Green and Sarah Scott, is an amazing selection of recipes and information about commonly foraged food. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves to gather wild food... mushrooms and much, much more. Mushrooms are also king in Mediterranean cuisine, and for that reason we found an excellent cookbook featuring mushroom in many recipes: Modern Mediterranean Cooking, by Elena Balashova. Be sure to check out both of these titles, and the many more finding their way to our shelves.

With the exception of the last few days, most of July has been pretty wet here in East Tennessee. A blessing, considering the state of drought in much of the country. We got a little skunked on Chanterelles earlier this summer, when things got hot and dry very quickly. We saw a short season, with much of it dying back. Even with the rains in July, we haven't really seen them recover... however we have been blessed with some great looking clusters of chicken of the woods. The mushroom pictured here were found less than 3 miles from our South Knoxville shop. Cathy has been busy testing new recipes and is honing up a good garden style veggie burger using the chicken as its base. Trim the tender outer rings of this mushroom for best eats, leave the tough center section for the stock pot. Treat it just like chicken. Grill it, sautee it, it will take flavors well. Goes great in crepes. Get out and find some while the gettin' is good!

We're off for the next week, so ya'll enjoy the last bits of Summer. We'll hit the ground running when the full crew returns and look forward to gearing up for the Fall and holiday seasons. New mushroom kits, cultures, spawn, and accesories will be making their way to the website soon, so please check back in with us frequently!

We also wanted to take a minute to thank the folks who attended our workshops this year at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester Tennessee. We are lucky to have been asked to teach in the Academy at Planetroo as part of the sustainability team. We presented a hands-on mushroom log workshop on Friday at 10am and a collaboration on brewing Kombucha Tea on Saturday. The workshops were well attended, and we appreciated the enthusiam of our students! We hope to see you again next year with some new and exciting mushroom workshops!

The first week of June finds us traveling to the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester Tennessee. We will be teaching several workshops at the Planetroo Academy, including mushroom log gardening on Friday June 8th at 10am, and a tutorial on kombucha tea preparation and care at 10am on Saturday June 10am. These are hands-on workshops with take away goodies and guided instruction. Hope to see some of you there!

Work also continues in the demonstration garden. Irrigation is installed and on a timer. The tomato plants in the north bed are thriving. Our peppers in the north planter are showing. Mushroom spawn blocks for maitake mushroom, black poplar, and king stropharia are all working in our incubator, anxiously awaiting planting in the raised bed soil. We'll soon be restacking our mushroom logs and making way for outdoor mushroom greenhouses. Check in with us frequently to follow their installation.

May has been fairly dry, but we had a good soaker about mid-month, which led to a nice spring shiitake crop. We're always excited to find mushrooms popping from the logs, discovering this most recent batch "just in time" as we came into work one Monday morning. More recently, May has also been a scortcher, with several days already over 90F here in the Tennessee Valley. Imagine our surprise to come in to find a few shiitake's popping off after an especially hot Memorial Day weekend. This is one awesome mushroom!

Everything Mushrooms is constantly experimenting with new and interesting mushroom kits for the home gardener. We especially like kits that require very little care or upkeep. For these warm summer months, we thought to give the milky mushroom a try. Preliminary tests have been very successful and we hope to bring this excotic Indian mushroom to market very soon. It will have limited seasonal availability as this mushroom will suffer in cooler temps. We also plan to make culture of Calocybe indica available, likely on petri dish or as slants.

Please check in with us frequently over the next few weeks. Exciting new items will be released, including some biolumenescent mushroom kits!

Previous or current experience with mushroom cultivation and gardening, or basic lab biology and sterile procedure is a serious plus. Applicants should possess basic computer and customer service skills, familiarity with social media, and be comfortable in a retail sales environment. We are seeking hard working, self-motivated, independent thinkers who can operate productively in a dynamic work environment.

Job responsibilities may include:

• Interfacing with customers through local show room sales, internet, and phone ordering

• Maintenance of retail show room, product stocking, and inventory tracking

• Preparation of sterile mushroom substrates and spawn

• Maintenance of mushroom culture in sterile environments

• Participate in mushroom cultivation and gardening projects

• Packaging and delivery of fresh mushrooms to local kitchens and markets

We are accepting resumes at 1004 Sevier Ave, 37920 or via email to bob@everythingmushrooms.com until 5pm Friday, May 25^th. Please supply a resume, interest letter, or other supporting documents showcasing your unique skills. Interviews will be conducted the week of May 28^th.

Work continues on our demonstration garden. It's likely you'll see a link pop up in the navigation menu on the left hand part of your screen. This will contain a link to information about our garden and the projects ongoing. The veggies and ornamentals seem to be doing well. With little rain the last week, we've begun watering daily and are updating our irrigation system for drip and spray emitters. Blocks of mushroom spawn are getting ready in the incubator and we hope to be planting maitake, king stropharia,  and black poplar mushroom patches shortly.

And lastly, a bit of unpleasant news... we've experienced a round of price increases, primarily with our lab supply products. We generally see these annually, but have been ordering in quantities that have helped us avoid being too reactive to rising supplier costs. We held out as long as we could, but some of our basic lab staples are jumping up a little. If you notice some things are a few bucks more, this is why... primarily hit are the nalgene erlenmeyer flasks as well as the larger agar culturing kits. We will continue to keep prices as low as possible for as long as possible on many of these items.

We've had an exciting week! This previous Saturday we were very fortunate to place the winning bid at an absolute auction to purchase the building we currently lease on Sevier Avenue in South Knoxville. This will allow Everything Mushrooms to throw down some roots and really get comfortable. We're excited for the opportunites! We're also excited to become a permanent part of a wonderful community, and hope the energy and spirit we bring to our pursuits helps in any way possible to improve our environment. Look for new and exciting things coming out of the mushroom shop!

One such project on the short list is the establishment of our outdoor demonstration mushroom garden. This garden is designed to showcase mushroom growing and cultivation techniques, demonstrating proper installation and care of mushroom logs and mushroom patches. We will also be hanging a few oyster mushroom bags in our shadehouse and showcasing other popular mushroom gardening techniques and procedures. 

This week found us cleaning up and prepping our raised garden beds. These wonderful large stone beds were laid for us by our good friend Dave Curry. They offer two large planting areas, with two smaller stepped planters. The two large beds will be planted with vegetables in the larger North Bed (gets more sun), and we'll put ornamentals in the smaller South Bed (much more shade). We have two large round planters as well. One will get an ornamental tree, probably a Japanese Maple... under which we plan a Japanese themed mushroom block bed featuring maitake mushrooms. All the beds are filled with fresh topsoil and compost mixture. We had a lone survivor from last year, so we just tilled around her!

Veggies and ornamenals will be installed over the next week or two, with mushroom patch blocks and wood chip beds going in shortly thereafter. We want to get them in before it gets too warm. Then we'll turn our attention to filling out our shade house with oyster mushrooms, and possibly expanding into an outdoor greenhouse that can be controlled for seasonal mushroom block production (shiitake, enoki, lion's mane, etc).

If you're local, come on down and check out the progress! If you're not-so-local, keep your eye on our website for new updates, pictures, instrucstionals, videos, etc... all made possible by the work we'll be doing in this demonstration garden.

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!

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. 

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!

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

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.

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). 

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.

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!

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......