Experimenting with 'shrooms

When SP and I went to the Royal Show the other day, I couldn't resist buying myself a mushroom kit. To be honest, I don't even like eating mushrooms very much, but I've wanted to try growing them for ages and the temptation was too big to resist (I did, however, manage to resist buying any show bags full of chocolate or sweets, go me!) I went for a combo kit: half white mushrooms and half Portabello Swiss brown mushrooms. I got it home, eagerly unwrapped it and found... this:

Now, the instructions say that you are to keep the mix covered until it goes white and 'frosty' and then, after that, you open it up, spread the bedding material over the top, and then spray it with a water mister judiciously. It's pretty clear, even in my dodgy photo, that one type of mushroom has taken off whilst the other is lagging behind. What to do, what to do?


I decided to put the bedding mix over the white side and fold the plastic and box leaf over the side that was still brown to see if it will catch up. Such a glam photo too, with the B-grade camera (my good camera is out of action, poo) and the recycling in the laundry in the background... So here goes nothing, or here goes $18 worth of mushroom kit anyway, grow, mushies, grow! Hopefully soon I'll know if the brown side is brown mushrooms, and if the white side is white mushrooms, or if the brown side is white mushrooms and then the white side is brown mushrooms. Or something like that.

Never mind.

Appropriate now to share my most favourite poem of all time?

Mushrooms

Sylvia Plath, 1959.

"Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door."