This is a picture of some mushrooms.
…which were growing in my back yard. That burlap sack contains wood chips, twigs and leaf litter, and the equivalent of two of those “mushroom patch” brick things.
This is one of the bigger mushrooms I picked off of the bag. The mushroom in question is Pleurotus ostreatus var. columbinus, or the blue oyster mushroom.
This technique of growing mushrooms in burlap sacks was developed as a method of waste water filtration. These bags can be placed in a wash or low lying area and clean bacteria and excess nitrogen from agricultural runoff. They can also be placed against slopes and patches of eroding soil. The mycelium will move from the bag into the soil and bind it up. There are hundreds of miles of mycelium in a single gram of substrate! Eventually the wood breaks down, insects lay eggs in the mushrooms and larvae hatch, birds come in and eat the larvae, and poop seeds all over, which germinate and continue the process of building and binding the soil.
