My name is Sam Morgan, I am the owner and operator of High Tide Mushroom Farm and this is my take on mushrooms.

Mushrooms are the plant-like structure of fungi.

They have a stem, they have a cap, some have veils, but all are pretty great.

(upbeat music) We have a plethora of different mushrooms that we grow, dependent on the season.

If it's cold weather, we focus more on cold tolerant species of mushrooms, whether it's golden enoki, king oysters, blue oysters, chestnut mushrooms.

And then, when the weather starts warming up, we kind of try to switch our rooms over to warmer weather tolerant mushrooms, whether it's pink oyster mushrooms, yellow oyster mushrooms, pioppino mushrooms, phoenix oyster or the Italian oyster mushroom, king blue oysters, and so on.

I got into mushrooms for a few reasons.

I was a firefighter and paramedic 10 years prior to getting into the agricultural realm of mushroom cultivation.

Mushrooms are like the coral of the land, they're great remediators and filtration devices, for not only our land, but they're great filter devices for our water as well.

- Welcome to "The French Chef".

I'm Julia Child, we're doing mushrooms today.

All kinds of ways to use them.

You know, you can hardly think of French cooking without mushrooms, the French call them champignon.

- So when people hear the term "gourmet mushrooms", they usually think of blue oyster or anything within the oyster family of mushroom, which are great mushrooms, they are protein dense, full of umami flavor, they add a nice texture to whatever you're cooking, they can take center stage of a meal or they can be an accessory to a meal to add some flavor.

There are other gourmet mushrooms.

We have lion's mane, we have pioppino mushrooms, we have golden enoki mushrooms, and all these mushrooms have different kind of flavors, different kind of textures, and they add something special to every meal.

There's two, I would say, two different schools of thought when people first look at lion's mane, like, oh, what's that?

Or, ooh, what's that?

(lion roaring) It's a pretty cool mushroom, it's neuro adaptive, so anything to do with the brain, it helps stimulate NGF growth in the brain, so anything with, you know, motor function, sensory perception, ADD, ADHD, OCD, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and dementia, lion's mane's being studied for because of the compounds within it.

(buzzer blaring) Not all mushrooms are edible.

If you're gonna go out foraging, go through the woods and start looking for mushrooms 'cause you're excited to get into the realm of mushrooms and mycology, I would say, you know, start with getting to know your environment, start to get to know your trees, what locations you're looking to start searching and what kind of mushrooms you're looking for.

It's not necessarily too hard if you start to zone in and focus on one or two mushrooms you wanna find in your area, and you can do so in a couple different ways.

I would say pick up an encyclopedia that, you know, deals with mushrooms, or also, there's apps nowadays that you could take a photo of a mushroom and it'll give a statistical probability of what that mushroom is.

So if you're doing a little bit of cross-referencing and you're getting out into the woods and you're seeing some mushrooms you like, or you, you know, wanna take home, maybe take some spore prints, I would say you need to be a hundred percent confident on your choice before putting it in your mouth.

Mushrooms are a hot topic right now, and, to me, that's no surprise, mushrooms are not only delicious, but the mycelium of mushrooms, which is the root-like structure of mushrooms that connects the mushroom to the ground or its fruiting substrate has several applications.

Packing peanuts are gonna be replaced with mycelium, alternative leather for shoes and clothing is gonna be mycelium-based, NASA is also studying to use mycelium as their structural basis to any kind of housing structure, whether it be on Mars or our interplanetary travels.

Mushrooms or the spores of mushrooms can live in the vacuum of time and space.

My name is Sam Morgan, and this has been my take on mushrooms.

(bright music) - Finally tonight,