It's all my standard 4 teacher's fault. When she sorted us into nature study groups, the other girls got flowers, ferns or trees. I got lichens, liverworts and fungi.
There was quite a "yuk" factor at the start: I had to work with slimy things - and with boys.
But I quickly developed a fondness for fungi, especially mushrooms, (and for boys, but that is another story).
However, since school my interest in mushrooms has been mainly in eating them.
Portabello and button mushrooms can be bought in the supermarket, but the season is short for wild fungi.
And farmers don't like people raiding their paddocks for field mushrooms and puffballs, any more than townies like people raiding their vegetable patches.
You also have to really know your stuff if you are foraging: some fungi will make you quite ill and others can be deadly.
But you can grow your own mushrooms at home in about the same space as a tomato plant, and it's not difficult at all.
For advice, I contacted Mushroom Gourmet, a Northland company that supplies mushroom-growing kitsets.
But what did I want? There were field mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, shiitake and others I hadn't heard of.
I could buy a spawn matrix, a complete kit or pieces of dowel inoculated with agrocybe (poplar mushroom), oyster or shiitake.
These are used to inoculate logs, which can become a productive feature of your garden.
I opted for oyster mushrooms, which are recommended for beginners, as they grow quickly and have a mild flavour. (No, they don't taste like seafood.
Their name comes from their shape.) They grow on straw in bags, so there's no smelly compost to deal with.
There is a complete kit available, all ready to fruit, but I went for the spawn option.
I was also intrigued by the idea of inoculating hardwood logs, which would fruit after six months or so, then go on to be productive for many years.
So I ordered some dowels, of all three types on offer.
The spawn, when it arrived, looked a bit like popped popcorn.
I put the bag in the fridge and put 2kg of straw to soak in lime water (lime was supplied with the spawn but I had my own straw) in a clean, new rubbish bin, to soak for 72 hours.
The drained straw was then packed layer by layer into a plastic sleeve and spawn was sprinkled throughout before the ends were tied off.
Though hardly taxing, making up the bag was the hardest part of the process.
Slits were cut in the bag, through which the mushrooms would grow.
Then the whole thing was wrapped in a clean sheet to keep out insects and left for what was expected to be 14-21 days.
Mine sat in a corner of the kitchen and I waited. And waited, and waited.
Three weeks went by and there wasn't much to see, though mycelia (the thread-like vegetative part of a fungus) must have been spreading through the damp straw.
Humidity is important to fungi so, suspecting the kitchen might be too dry, I set up a mini-greenhouse on the lawn, moved the bag there and watered everything.
Another week passed. I covered the fungus-house each night to keep it warmer and watered it to keep up the humidity.
And then, success! One morning, little brown-topped mushrooms had sprung out through the slits in the bag, and in a couple of days they were big enough to eat.
Oyster mushrooms can be used just like field mushrooms, and I fried mine in a little butter.
The taste was mild and delicious - all the better for being home-grown, I thought.
Once the bag has finished fruiting for the first time, the mycelium-inoculated straw can be used to start new growing bags or, after a week or so, watering the original bag will produce another flush of mushrooms.
Meanwhile, I have been drilling holes in hardwood logs, hammering in inoculated dowel and sealing the holes with wax.
These logs should supply crops of shiitake, agrocybe and oyster mushrooms for years to come.
This is really fun, guys!
