As you may have guessed from the photo, despite my plans to the contrary, I didn’t manage to harvest the first crop of chestnut mushrooms whilst they were still small. The problem was that they grew so much faster than I expected. I posted on Thursday that they were almost ready to be harvested. Then on Friday they looked just about there (by which I mean they were nearly the size of the chestnut mushrooms that the supermarkets sell). Then on Saturday morning they already looked bigger than the supermarket ones. Joe and I were very busy in the garden on Saturday, and Liz was out for the day. I wanted Liz to be here when we harvested them, so I waited. Every time Joe and I came back to the kitchen where they were growing, we commented in wonder how they looked even bigger than when we last looked a couple of hours before. When Liz came home that evening it was straight out to the garden, meaning I didn’t harvest them until Sunday. By Sunday morning they were enormous!

I (with the kids’ help), harvested them all on Sunday morning. Our son asked in excitement whether we could have mushrooms for dinner. Better than that I thought, we can have them now! So I made up a quick mushroom omelette to share. Typically our son only picked at his portion, but his sisters enjoyed theirs, to the point where they also ate what he had left, and then started asking to share mine. Our first meal from our own mushrooms enthusiastically consumed, we also had them in our dinner the next day. Fried in last year’s home grown garlic, they were also popular with the children.

Now it’s a case of waiting to see what comes of the second crop. If the warnings in the instructions are correct, then we can expect much smaller mushrooms next time, as a result of letting this first batch get so large. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed growing these mushrooms. I’m seriously tempted to try the log method I mentioned reading about in the Practical Self-Sufficiency book by Dick and James Strawbridge. Another method they talk about is planting spore plugs into the stump of a felled tree, as the roots will still be drawing moisture up into the trunk. I’m seriously considering this, as we are considering felling one of the plum trees beside the vegetable patch. It is self-seeded and is trying to grow in between two larger and better established plum trees. The location would be ideal too, as it is quite shaded and damp in that immediate area. There is definitely more to follow on this subject.

The first mushroom harvest

The largest mushroom, with a clothes peg for scale.