Growing Wild Mushrooms

Rating:
Summary: Not Quite Worth The Price
Review: 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'.

Rating:
Summary: Growing Wild Mushrooms
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Mushrooms Galore!
Review: 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.