Indoor Gardening

The Lion's Mane Mushroom Looks Festive.

With the snow melting off of my garden beds, I have found myself thinking about the upcoming garden season. There is still much planning and purchasing to be done before I can break soil but I just want to grow stuff and eat it. I may have found a way to experience the joys of gardening indoors without the need for special lights. In fact, I won't need any lights at all if I start growing mushrooms. Territorial Seed Company has a selection of different mushroom growing kits available. Portoballo (crimini) and Oyster mushrooms would be nice but I am going to pass on the Lion's mane. Maybe I am not a real mushroom guy but I tried Lion's Mane, Hedgehog and some of the other exotics and did not like them. Chanterelle, Shiitake, Cepes (porcini), crimini and lobster mushrooms are favorites of mine and provide enough diversity that I don't feel the need to move beyond them. I have had high quality Masatake and found them to be rather uninteresting with their mild pine flavor. I could see how others would like them but I found it difficult to understand why people pay upwards of $200 a pound.
This year local mushroom man Kelly Chadwick's business of distributing fungi to local restaurants has continued to grow allowing him to hire another employee. I bought a lot of Chanterelles from him but I have had to resist buying Morels because the price this year is through the roof.
Kelly settled a debate we had in the kitchen last year regarding the physical make-up of a mushroom, Is it made up of carbohydrates, proteins, fats or is it so unlike plants and animals that it doesn't apply to that standard? He explained that mushrooms are mostly a protein called keitin. Strangely, this protein is most like the matter that makes up human hair and fingernails than any fruit or vegetable. My apologies to Kelly if I muddled up the retelling of the facts, but the gist of it is the fingernail/mushroom correlation.