Completely gutted, I may have ruined my black trumpet harvest, but I learned an important lesson...
This summer was great for learning about mushrooms, they were all over the place and they were growing in masses!!! I taught myself to indentify black trumpets and find where they grow rather easily. This yieled in what I thought was a nice first harvest. I even made a drying rack for it, but what I didn't know was that all that rain and humidity we've been hit with wasn't going to help dry these mushrooms...
We managed to have a couple meals with fresh trumpets and we wanted to save the rest of the harvest for later use. I thought we shouldn't eat all the mushrooms right away because our bodies aren't really used to wild foods, and thought it wise to slowly introduce new mushrooms into our system to make sure there was no alergic reaction.
We had been fine, and wanted more. Yesterday, I wen into my shed, where I hung our precious little mushrooms, to check on them. It had been almost three weeks and they were still very soft... Something was telling me that it shouldn't be that way.
I took a couple trumpets off the tray to examine them a little closer, there was this white and green sparkly texture on the outer skin.
That's when I started getting worried.... is that mold? Are they all like that?.... I think I messed them up... NO!!!!!
Let's see, I took the whole drying tray down from where it was hanging, and they were, every single one of them, covered in this sparkly dusts of green and white... so sad! I was so looking forward to having a fancy mushroom meal with my father who's in town for a month.
What did I learn in this whole drying and growing mold experiment?
The tray was fine, but I could have made a sort cube where whatever is drying there is protected from critters wanting to eat what I'm trying to save for a later date. (Mostly just something I was worried about, nothing seemed to want to get at our mushrooms this time around!)
Ventilation, the shed I put them in has a little airflow, as I never closed the top of two of the walls when we built it, but is wasn't enough, not in this humid climate. Perhaps instead of this cube idea, I should make a screened in shelter, with a door and all where we can hang our drying trays out of the rain but in the open air.
Sunlight, with more sunlight they would have actually dryed up before the mold even realized these mushrooms were there for the taking!
Conclusion: I need to build a screened in structure (with a door and all), large enough to hang a bunch of drying trays, out of the rain, in the breeze with a clear roof!
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