The Patient Prince

Welcome to Piercing through the Veil. My goal for this blog is to share my progress cultivating a variety of mushrooms.

I embarked on my journey into mushroom foraging when the world shut down during the pandemic. A friend of mine put me on to the local mushroom clubs in my area: the Oregon Mycological Society and the Cascade Mycological Society. These groups shared a wealth of educational content online, and I absorbed as much as I could.

Back when I had morels

The real turning point came roughly two years ago when I discovered landscape morels emerging through the mulch in my own yard. I knew I wanted to move beyond just foraging and get serious about cultivation. I learned about a local shop called Urban Agriculture, where the owner generously granted me access to their laminar flow hood and taught me how to take clones from a specimen and transfer them to agar.

In those early days, my "lab" was a humble still air box cobbled together from an old storage tote. It served me well and allowed me to stabilize several cultures before I upgraded to a laminar flow hood I finessed from Facebook Marketplace. It was a modest investment, but pays dividends to this day.

For a long time, I shared these updates and photos on Instagram. I enjoy the community aspect of IG, but I really dislike feeding my data into large corporations. That is why I've moved on to this blog. I wanted an open-source space where I own the archives and the connection to the reader.

The Patient Prince

One of the most rewarding projects from this journey has been my work with Agaricus augustus, known as "The Prince." For those unfamiliar, the Prince is one of the most prized wild Agaricus species, legendary for a potent, pleasant almond and anise scent that acts as a diagnostic attribute. Beyond the smell, it's a gourmet edible that puts the common button mushroom to shame.

Last year, I successfully cloned a wild specimen and cultivated it indoors. Once the strain was established and healthy, I decided to try to grow it outdoors too. I took the indoor spawn and buried it directly into a raised bed, hoping the fungus would reclaim its role as a primary saprotrophic decomposer in an outdoor environment.

Then, nothing happened.

For a full year, the bed remained devoid of any signs of the Prince. In the world of fast-growing oysters or aggressive lion's mane, a year of silence feels like failure. But fungi operate on their own clock. Recently, after twelve months of dormancy and colonization, the first signs of Agaricus augustus have finally begun to emerge from the soil of the raised bed.

There is a profound satisfaction in witnessing a project that appeared to be a failure turn into a success. It is a reminder that in both mycology and in life, there is immense value in slowing down, owning your process, and waiting for the right moment to break through the surface.