The Mysterious World of Mushrooms

Mushrooms are part of an often little-known world, surrounded by mysteries and legends. Let's discover the main bases of the life cycle of mushrooms to understand this fantastic universe...

To begin with, mushrooms are a kingdom all their own. They are neither plants nor animals, but a little in between: it is the reign of Fungis.

They share a number of common characteristics with the animal kingdom:

• In terms of respiration, they breathe oxygen and give off carbon dioxide.
• At the level of food, they are heterotrophic: that is to say that like us, they depend on the plant world for food. Plants are the only ones that can make their own food with sunlight.

Unlike animals, mushrooms cannot move. Their stomach is external: they lie down and live on their food, which they break down to extract the nutrients necessary for their development.

They therefore play an essential role in the decomposition of dead matter, the formation of humus, the carbon cycle and the renewal of ecosystems.

What we generally call a mushroom is actually just its fruit, its reproductive part. This is the visible part of the iceberg in a way. And in the dead wood, under the dead leaves, around and in the roots, hides the mycelium which constitutes its actual body.

Mushroom mycelium is made up of a network of small filaments called “hyphae”, which extend over their substrate, breaking it down using a multitude of enzymes specific to each.

1. Some mushrooms live in symbiosis with plants. These are the symbiotic : they provide a series of nutrients and benefits to the plants with which they associate at the root level. In exchange they receive sugars produced by the plant.
2. Other mushrooms will also take sugars from living plants, even decompose their tissues, without giving anything in exchange, these are the mushrooms parasites. They accelerate the end of life of diseased trees and also play an important role in the regeneration of forests.
3. Finally there are the mushrooms saprophytes, which only decompose dead matter. The vast majority of cultivated mushrooms are saprophytes because they can be grown independently of a living tree and decompose various materials.

Commonly used substrates for growing mushrooms are generally sawdust and wood shavings, straw, manure, compost.

To reproduce sexually, fungi produce spores (micro-particles invisible to the naked eye) which disperse in the environment to produce new colonies of 'people.

Under the right conditions, the spores germinate, meet and fuse to form a mycelium which can in turn produce new fruiting bodies (mushrooms) and continue the cycle.

In mushroom cultivation, we generally propagate mycelium by removing mycelium and seeding new substrates.

The seed is what we call the “ mushroom spawn ”. It is simply a material which has been colonized with mycelium of a fungus and which will be used to seed (“inoculate”) larger quantities of substrate.

We generally produce and sell mycelium on grains because the grains are very rich in nutrients for the mushrooms, which guarantees them maximum vigor and energy to colonize new substrates.