Jordan Weiss is Bemushroomed
Jordan Weiss is a 47-year-old self-taught mycologist who lives in Corvallis. He’s been in love with mushrooms since the early 1970s and enjoys sharing his low-tech approaches to mushroom cultivation with anyone interested in raising their own mushroom patches. This interview is part of the Oregon Mushroom Stories’ Community Reporters Project. Please participate if you … Read more
Tony Migas and Ed Foy Grow Lots of Mushrooms
For two weekends in April, I attended classes about how to grow mushrooms at home. The first was taught by local cultivator Tony Migas, recently the president of the Oregon Mycological Society and an intrepid home cultivator who once tended 45 shitake logs in one small room of his home. (He also claims that he … Read more
Doing the Mushwalk
As a contribution to the Oregon Mushroom Stories, artist Corey Lunn made this looped animation of a golden chanterelle speed-walking along!
Introducing our project
In my earliest memory of hunting for chanterelles, I’m squatting on squishy fir needles. (I would have been four, maybe five years old, so I didn’t have to stoop very low to reach the ground.) I’m chasing mushrooms from one to the next, always able to look up and find another golden bit poking out. … Read more
Lost hedgehog hunters, rescued!
Last week, with wonder and relief, I learned that the three mushroom pickers who had disappeared in southwest Oregon near the coast were found after six nights without food or shelter. Using a sheath knife and a dead cellphone, Dan and Belinda Conne, both 47, and their 25-year-old son Michael, signaled to helicopters overhead through … Read more
Cats crave mushrooms
NPR recently reported on why cats crave mushrooms (January 7, 2012). I didn’t even know that they do! [Source: Feasting in the Skagit Foodshed.] The story sheds light on that very meat-like quality of mushrooms, which are similarly high in protein and glutamate – one of the chemicals responsible for the flavor of umami, which … Read more
