Duped by a Spawn Artist

I need to embrace my failure.  I am no longer nurturing shitake mushrooms.  I continue to maximize an ideal environment for some sort of green mold colonizing my shitake mushroom mini-farm.  Colonization with all of its weight and imagery of subjugation is the only word to describe the green mold exploiting resources (water, light, wood detritus) to battle and nearly exterminate my poor, pungent shitakes.

The gentlemen who sold me the wood chip log full of spores warned that there may be some friendly competition for the shitakes, but also alleged their ability to fight this competition off.  The speed at which the fruits emerged from the wood unhinged me a bit.  I keenly felt them as a completely different kingdom of life, so very different from plants or animals.  Initially, they flourished, producing in three days about two pounds of the most delectable fungi I have ever consumed.  I dreamt of never purchasing a shitake mushroom again, and simply picking fresh ones to saute whenever I’m in the mood for some shitake (which is increasingly often, apparently they are quite the Superfood).  The idealized advertising sold me:

I now realize that this may be the best looking shitake farm that amiable Spawn Artist who sold me my spores has ever grown himself.  I wish I had the foresight to take a picture of my first beautiful fruiting of mushrooms, but since I was under the impression that they would continue to produce, I saw no reason to document their success.  You will just have to take my word that they were as vital, if not as large, as the advertisement.  

The second fruiting was when things started to dwindle.  The mold colonized more and more of the log's surface area and I was left with about 8 sad looking shitakes.  This whole experience gives me a sense of fear and foreboding of my future parenting abilities.  I am now at that age where becoming a parent is not some far away dream, but more of a logistical conundrum.  “When should we do it?” seems to be a question that my generation more than ever has the power to control with technologies to expand my gender’s ability to conceive later and later in life.

My failure with the mushrooms has scared a few more childless years into me.  I gave those mushrooms everything they needed to flourish, yet they lost out to green mold at only the second fruiting.  Parenting must truly be a selfless act.  At least I could eat my mushrooms.  If my children lost out to the green mold in this world, I would have nothing to alleviate my guilt and sorrow.  My guilt is the part that I cannot comprehend.  It is an illogical guilt.  I did everything I could for those mushrooms, yet I feel it is my fault that they lost out to the mold.  If the guilt is this bad for mushrooms, it is hard to imagine the weight of such guilt when confronted with the failures of your own children.  There is so much green mold in this world!  Selfishness, addictive substances, vanity, and greed all come to the top of my mind.  I think there is some truth to the whole idle mind being the devil's playground bit, where creating such a perfect environment for the shitakes also ended up being a perfect environment for the green mold to set in.

I’m letting the the shitake log go.  Today is the day that I bury it in a compost pile and give it a final attempt to fruit in nature, outside of my hermetically sealed biosphere.  Maybe all they need is to toughen up a bit.

So I have decided that rather than attempt mushroom cultivation, I shall attempt to forage for mushrooms.  I’ve never looked for mushrooms in the woods behind my place before, but I recently started hunting for morel mushrooms (it is that time of year in Wisconsin for a little bit longer) and all of a sudden, the woods seem to be teeming with fungi of all sorts.  Everywhere I look, I see interesting types of inedible and possibly poisonous mushrooms.  No morels yet...more to come on the shroom hunt soon.