BY RACHAEL DUPREE
Growing mushrooms is an area of food production that intrigues and mystifies the home grower. While mushrooms are treated like a vegetable in our kitchens, their cultivation is like nothing that comes out of our gardens. Mushroom cultivation can be particularly appealing to sustainabilityconscious farmers wanting to complete a closed-loop system of production. In the farm ecosystem, fungi play an important role of decomposing materials and providing nutrients to other organisms. When that fungi is also an edible mushroom and the material it decomposes (the substrate) is part of our waste stream, that can make growing them even more exciting.