In Which "Rotten Fungus" is NOT Redundant

I got a few comments on my post Wednesday in reference to my "throw away the bad mushroom experiment" item on my to-do list.

So, I have some explaining to do.

No, they were not psychedelic mushrooms, and no, it wasn't a penicillin expermiment, either.

Like many ventures gone terribly awry, my story begins with "So there's this website I saw...."

There's this site called Fungi Perfecti (no kidding, that's the name) which sells these "easy" mushroom growing kits. I looooove mushrooms.  (No, I am not a hobbit. I am short though. *checks for hairy feet* Yep, definitely not a hobbit. But I love my Elevensies!)

So we bought this Pioppino mushroom kit. Apparently, you get this bowling ball size of sawdust and mushroom spores. I figured this would be a cinch. Humans don't have to try hard to grow fungus, I reasoned in my reasonable way. Just walk through a boy's locker room barefoot and let the itching begin. Or ignore a loaf of bread. Or let your shower get steamy and watch that black stuff accumulate.

Easy peasy, right?

So I dutifully misted this lump of brown matter (that sounds gross. It really looked like a dry stump). And I kept this little plastic humidity tent on it. And voila! Wittle baby Pioppino mushrooms started to grow, like this:


Dang. I'm good.
But then, oops. Busy me, I forgot to mist it. So then they dried out and looked like this:


And then, in order to make up for my poor watering habits, I over-misted, over-humidified, and basically doused the lump. And then they looked like this:



Now, the mushroom experiment, a horrific fungus-on-fungus violence of spore-ific proportions, is residing in our back yard.

I'm so embarrassed. I can't even grow a good fungus.