Growing Wild Mushrooms: A Complete Guide to Cultivating Edible and Hallucinogenic Mushrooms [Paperback]

Bob Harris (Author), Susan Neri (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1989

This step-by-step guide introduces the beginning mushroom cultivator to everything he needs to know, from sterile culture procedures to indoor bottle gardens to indoor/outdoor compost gardens. Ten chapters cover equipment, growing media, compost, small indoor quantities, starting cultures, and incubation. Black-and-white line drawings and half-tones complement the 16 full color photos taken by the author, founder of the mail order business Mushroom People.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Homestead Book Company; Revised edition (1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0930180127
• ISBN-13: 978-0930180126
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,301,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Quite Worth The Price, December 26, 2000

By 

Gregory McMahan (Tottori, Japan) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Growing Wild Mushrooms: A Complete Guide to Cultivating Edible and Hallucinogenic Mushrooms (Paperback)

Apparently, this book was written to cater to those interested in hallucinogenic fungi. I initially bought this book in the hopes that it would teach me how to set up a cultivation operation focused primarily on edible, gourmet mushrooms. What I got instead was a poorly organized book rife with errors. The text has almost nothing to say about growing edible mushrooms. Rather, it is basically little more than a souped-up underground manual for the cultivation of hallucinogenic or so-called 'magic' mushrooms.

To demonstrate how erroneous this book is, the author begins the book by saying that fungi are plants! As any good student of biology knows, fungi lack chlorophyll, thus can not be considered plants, and occupy their own, separate kingdom. These and other gross errors throughout the text make it unfit as a starting point for those interested in mushroom cultivation.

The book is poorly organized, and places way too much emphasis on the psilocybe mushrooms, with passing reference to the cultivation of Pleurotus (oyster) mushrooms. In addition to some gratuitous color photos of a variety of Psilocybe mushrooms, and a few poorly placed black and white photos, this unremarkable book comes without an index, references, or supplementary materials. Furthermore, for the money you spend, you will not get much more than eighty six pages devoted to terse methods for locating, identifying, and cultivating the Psilocybe mushrooms (and this even is at a very low level).

The title of this book should actually be: 'Growing Hallucinogenic Mushrooms'. For those interested in Psilocybe mushrooms, this book may serve as an adequate reference. For individuals interested in the edible and gourmet mushrooms, a good starting point is Paul Stamets' utilitarian book 'The Mushroom Cultivator' and his comprehensive, though sometimes off-beat 'Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms'.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Growing Wild Mushrooms, March 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Growing Wild Mushrooms: A Complete Guide to Cultivating Edible and Hallucinogenic Mushrooms (Paperback)

Growing Wild Mushrooms is a good book for a biggining Mycologist. It runs through the basic procedures from making an agar medium to harvesting. But what makes this book worth a four star rating is it's wonderful color photos. It's one thing to read text, but quite another to to see clear illustrations. I would recocgmend this book to any aspiring Mycologist

2 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mushrooms Galore!, August 4, 2000

By 

Mark Nuckols - See all my reviews

This review is from: Growing Wild Mushrooms: A Complete Guide to Cultivating Edible and Hallucinogenic Mushrooms (Paperback)

This is a great book, and at no. 137,000 this Bob Harris' book on Mushrooms seems all set to pass the other Bob Harris' book on Chomskian analysis of how dumb all those journalists are, excepting of course Mssrs. Cohen and Solomon.