I nabbed me a book by Paul Stamets called Growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms.
Looks familiar.
Yeah, good, that's where the pics are from.
Great book with tons of essential info.
The problem with that book is that it's geared towards large scale commercial operations. It can be intimidating, almost seems impossible to set up all the needed infrastructure and equipment. There are lots of DIY, low tech tricks that make it possible to grow on a personal small scale level.
Back to growing for medicinal use. It's useful to know that a lot of medicinal fungi have the same active compounds in the mycelium as they do in the fruiting bodies, more so in some cases.
Look at the Fungi Perfecti supplements, most of them are mycelium derived.
This saves the trouble of fruiting the mushrooms which is a big deal, fruiting chambers with controlled conditions etc are not easy or cheap to build.
You can just grow the mycelium on quality grain, dehydrate and grind into powder.
Reishi has a very fast and aggressive mycelium run, colonizes quickly then is very slow to fruit.
The drawback is that if you don't know what you're doing you may grow and consume unwanted potentially harmful contaminates, mold, bacteria. If you fruit it you know it's Reishi at least!
