From the forests to a multi-million dollar business

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Created on Thursday, 24 February 2011 07:05

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He started out by picking wild mushrooms in the forests of the Okanagan then he began selling his mushrooms directly to restaurants.

Now Gord Weighill’s Kelowna-based company has expanded into a multi-million dollar business.

Mikuni Wild Harvest sells organic produce and specialty food products annually to hundreds of the top restaurants across North America.

The company has benefited from increasing consumer demand for organic food across the continent.

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Fungi and Ants

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Created on Saturday, 18 December 2010 06:25

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Long before humans started farming, in fact long before humans even existed, the first farmers were ants. Some tropical ants collect leaves which they use to grow fungi in their underground nests. The ants cannot digest the leaves directly, and so they feed exclusively on the fungi that they farm. The leafcutter ants, or attine ants, include the genus Atta and they eat a significant amount of vegetation - typically 12 - 15% of all of the leaves produced in South American forests. They may have been eating fungi for up to 50 million years, and during that time they have co-evolved with their fungal partners.

Mushrooms Play a Role in Cancer Research

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Created on Saturday, 18 December 2010 06:22

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The statistics are startling. One in three women get cancer. Half of all men do. With odds like that, it is understandable why millions, if not billions, of dollars are spent every year in this country on cancer research.

And that research involves everything from the largest pharmaceutical firms to state of the art medical complexes and even one man in the Ozarks and his crop of mushrooms. His name is Tim Hite and he's lost both friends and family to the disease. For that reason, he's dedicated his life to looking into alternative forms of medicine.

Hite lives in Ozark, Missouri. But he spends most of his time in his greenhouse. That's where Hite grows 25 varieties of mushrooms. "Most of the mushrooms we're growing in here are drying. We're blending them into teas," says Hite.

Hite grows the precious fungus at an amazing rate. He is able to grow 2,000 pounds of mushrooms in a month. "What we're involved in is growing gourmet mushrooms. Oyster, European variety," Hite notes.

Island's a dream for mushroom hunters

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Created on Wednesday, 15 December 2010 08:13

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Erin Fletcher The Star

The next time you got out for a walk in the woods, look down. You may be stepping on a great meal.

Vancouver Island is home to more than 2,000 mushroom species and many of the more common ones are delicious sauteed in butter and garlic.

But when it comes to mushroom hunting, the challenge is not in the hunt but in knowing which ones are edible and which ones will give your intestines a terrible turn.

Last week a group of eager mushroom hunters gathered at Wildwood, a Land Conservancy forest in Yellowpoint, to learn how to identify and cook the delicate fungus we are all so fond of. Rob Countess, owner of Vancouver Island Nature Exploration, an eco-tourism company based out of Port Hardy, hosted the one-day workshop.

Countess, a biologist, did his masters thesis on Vancouver Island mushrooms. He said the majority of Vancouver Island species have not yet been catalogued, studied or classified according to edibility.