MycoWizards Erik Lomen

The age old tale, or so it seems in these fast moving times seems to be Mycelium vs. Fruitbodies ... but what if you simple added both into your products, built out and followed through with scientific studies for publication and actually collected data after proceeding to test, test and test again. Steve and Sam of OM Mushrooms have been doing just that and growing fast into the myco-obsessed market over the last 5 years. But their stories didn't begin just half a decade ago. Steve Farrar an...

Round about two years ago the entire Cap N’ Stem crew hosted a massive bonfire at our newly acquired property in Lewiston. Many joined in the insanity, many bailed, motorcycles broke down, did burnouts or wrecked into dark Maine gullies, but the fire raged on and the partying continued through to the next morning! One of the most mysterious characters to show, arrived in a feathered bowler hat with a grin soaked in mycological-stoke…you know the kind of smile, paired with those slightly sunke...

Julian Mattucci, also know as @dedikaryotizationdaddy is a dedicated researcher and a talented mycologist. He has been in the throws of some of the more nerdy but important breeding work in the wild word of mushrooms. I came across his Dedikaryotization Protocol via a shroomery post offered up by the one and only @alan_rockefeller a few months back. Julian's work is focused on the development of a haploid culture bank for the purpose of getting folks into breeding his collection of isolates. ...

Welcome back the mighty Neil Brent of Columbia Mushrooms! There are a million and one hilarious things that can be said about Neil, but this batshit hero to the cultivation crowd knows how to grow gourmet mushrooms like the best of them. What I appreciate most about Neil is his split dedication to the stoke and the stone cold assessments of any given situation, object or attempt to avoid a phone call, delicately entwined with all the dark humor one might hope to muster in a lifetime. Japan, a...

Mike and I ripped up the coast of California towards the never-ending boarder-lands between the sandy dunes of the hot as hell desert and the perfectly temperate pacific blue until we came to the land of Mighty Cap Mushrooms in Paso Robles. Chris and Branden emerged from the first expansion of Mighty Cap, a super clean and well organized grow, to give us a tour around. There are two personalities that can compliment one another in an extremely beneficial way in this industry and Chris a...

Shortly before deciding to take the leap into commercial gourmet mushroom cultivation, I stumbled across a video of a young Hamilton Morris reporting on Magic Truffles in Amsterdam for Vice News. In this video Hamilton visits a farm that had to quickly pivot away from fruit body production and into sclerotia forming p. tampanensis cultivation sometime around 2008 due to the prohibition of magic mushrooms by the Dutch government. Years before the ban on the actual fruitbodies, my childho...