GROWING GOURMET - Anto2ni.it

CHAPTER 9
The Mushroom Life Cycle
When a collector finds mushrooms in the wild, the encounter
is a mere coincidence, a "snap-shot" in time of a far vaster
process. The mushroom life cycle remains largely invisible to most
mushroom hunters; not so to cultivators. The mushroom cultivator
follows the path of the mushroom life cycle from beginning to end.
Only at the completion of the mushroom life cycle, which may span
weeks or months, do mushrooms appear, and then they occur for but
a few days. The stages leading up to their appearance remains fascinating
even to the most sagacious mycologists.
For mushrooms to survive in our highly competitive world, where
legions of other fungi and bacteria seek common ecological niches,
millions of spores are often produced per mushroom. With the larger
agarics, the numbers become astronomical. Since mushrooms reproduce
through spores, the success of the mushroom life cycle depends
upon their production.
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