"How mushrooms will save the world"

I used to live in London, and spent a fair bit of time on the Tube, travelling to and from work.

Before Blogs, RSS and blog readers were invented, I used my Palm V with AvantGo software to download and read articles for these journeys.

One of my favourite sources was http://www.salon.com/; one of the most interesting articles was this one about Paul Stamets, and his drive to bring mushrooms --and fungi in general-- to a wider audience.

The article contained (amongst other things) a fascinating vignette about how Paul had used a strain of fungi to clear up a brownfield site contaminated with oil.

It's taken me about 10 years to do so, but I've finally placed an order with http://www.fungi.com/, which is run by Paul's company. Thanks to Christian Olsen for his help with the order, which was:

• Fungi to help the vegetables grow in our veggie patch;
• Fungi to help my Brother experiment with how they might help him improve the yield of his apple trees (he's a keen cider maker);
• "Plug spawn" which goes into holes that you drill in wooden logs, and gives a harvest of edible mushrooms; and
• Mycelium Running, Stamets' condensed answer to the challenge in the title.

So, inspired by this article, I now need to find the time to get my head around all this and work out what small contribution I can make in the countryside of Northumberland!

More on this anon, I hope ;-)