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Sprout It, 22 E. Center St., Douglas, MI (2026)

04/21/2026

Mushroom seasonality is about to shift.

On the right: my Polar Oyster — built for the cold. It thrives in winter conditions, but as temperatures climb, it starts to heat stress and loses the performance I rely on.

On the left: where we’re headed.

These are my summer oysters: • A classic Summer White strain from Field & Forest Wisconsin (not pictured)
• And a brown oyster — a farm-developed variant I cloned and refined from that same strain

This brown oyster is something special. It grows faster, yields heavier, and produces less stem waste, all while developing a deep, rich color and texture that stands out on the plate. It’s also exclusive to my farm.

From now through October, I’ll be running both the Summer White and this brown oyster at full production. When the temperatures drop again, we’ll transition back to Polar.

Different seasons, different strengths — same focus on quality. 🍄

03/14/2026

Coast 236 in Saugatuck!
We welcome one of our newest additions to our tasting and a la carte menu.

Lobster + Bear's Head Mushroom Risotto
old port Maine lobster, bear's head mushroom, arborio, parmesan, saffron, tomato, chili oil, mint oil, crisp shallot.

We look forward to having you dine with us. Book your experience via the link in our bio.

sustainability

05/18/2025

KxW 18
This is the heavyweight of the KxW lineup.

KxW 18 inherited its yield and vigor from the White King parent, regularly topping 3.5 pounds per block. It fruits in dense, mounded clusters similar to Black Pearl—but with some clear improvements. If the Black Pearl is close to 50% King Trumpet, I would estimate KxW 18 to be closer to 70%.

How it Stands Out

Color – Light tan caps with bright white stems—a striking contrast to Black Pearl.

Texture – Firmer stems with King Trumpet density. Caps are sturdier than Black Pearl, though not quite as firm as a true King.

Shelf Life – Holds up for a week or more longer once picked compared to the Black Pearl, making it significantly more market-friendly.

What Needs Work

Blotch Resistance: Slightly more susceptible than Black Pearl.

Colonization Speed: About a week slower on substrate colonization; fruits a few days behind.

Still, it earns its place through yield, texture, and shelf life.

Breeding Outlook

Next up: self-breeding KxW 18. The future plan will be to take spores of the original 18 and breed them together to refine its qualities.

So far, the KxW line has proven remarkably stable. I’ve already bred KxW 7 and KxW 10 to themselves, and their offspring have consistently resembled their parent lines—with minor differences in blotch resistance, colonization and fruiting speed, yield, and overall aesthetics. I’ll get more into this when we talk about 7 and 10 later.

The goal for KxW 18:
Improve blotch resistance and shave time off colonization.

It’s nearly market-ready—and with a bit of refinement, this mushroom could become the new standard against which all gourmet Pleurotus are judged.

Now officially named: Sprout Champagne Trumpet 🍾

05/15/2025

A new mushroom item at Borrowed Time in Douglas. Lion's Mane Steak!!!

No filter for Chef Max’s insanely vibrant and flavorful vegan mushroom dish. It’s on special now but we hope to see it on the summer menu if you think it’s as delicious as we do. Shout out to for the gorgeous Lion’s Mane.

📸: Birria Lion’s Mane Steak, chilled Lentil Salad, Pickled Tomatillos, Poblano Purée

05/12/2025

The KxW Line

This is the line that really blew me away.

I created the KxW line by crossing my Sprout Galaxy King Trumpet—my most blotch-resistant, visually striking King Trumpet—with the White King from the last post. The White King is fast, high-yielding, and presents like a 50/50 King-Oyster hybrid, similar to the Black Pearl King.

I dropped spores from both parents on the same plate, there were three possible outcomes:

Pure King Trumpet progeny

Pure White King progeny

Hybrids—ideally with King Trumpet-like form, but White King speed

After testing over 150 cultures, here’s what I found:

0 pure King Trumpets

About 120 pure White Kings

About 30 true hybrids

Among the hybrids, I saw three consistent phenotypes:

King-Dominant: Dense gray caps, thick stems—looked 90%+ King Trumpet.

Brown-Cap Types: Resembled Black Pearl, but with smaller caps and leggy stems. High yield (3–4 lbs. first flush), but discarded due to form.

Beige Hybrids: Tan caps, Black Pearl-like shape, but with dense King-like texture. I’d estimate ~70% King genetics.

In the end, I kept four standouts:
KxW 7, 10, 15, and 18.

Each has potential—and they’ll be both line-bred and backcrossed to push the genetics even further.

Next up: I’ll dive into each individual standout, starting with 18.

05/04/2025

The White King Line

After creating the 2019 hybrid by crossing a King Trumpet monokaryon with the Black Pearl dikaryon, I wasn’t blown away by the result. The mushroom wasn’t especially unique—firmer stems and a gray cap, leaning more King than Black Pearl—but it was a starting point.

What I was curious about was what would happen if I bred that 2019 hybrid to itself. I wanted to see which dominant and recessive traits would start to emerge.

The Black Pearl isn’t a simple cross. Thanks to the patent, we now know it carries genetics from at least three different oysters, three different King Trumpets, and one Pleurotus nebrodensis. That’s seven genetic contributors—eight if you count the new King parent from the 2019 cross. So when you start line breeding (breeding a strain to itself), you're shuffling a surprisingly complex deck.

The first mushroom from that line breeding that really caught my attention was completely white—white cap, white stem—and had a soft, marshmallow-like texture similar to the Black Pearl. It looked like a 50/50 King-Oyster hybrid, which confused me. I expected the genetics to lean more toward King, given the 2019 hybrid likely skewed around 66% King and 33% Oyster.

Instead, this new white mushroom expressed traits closer to a balanced hybrid—likely due to Oyster genes showing dominance in that particular recombination.

That first-gen White King wasn’t a blockbuster. It yielded around 2 pounds on First Flush, and nothing about it screamed breakthrough. But it was promising—and that was enough.

So, I bred it to itself.

I trialed around 50 new cultures, each one showing different expressions of the lineage. Some leaned Oyster, some resembled the original White King, and others landed somewhere in between. From that pool, one stood out.

This second-gen line was a major leap forward. It fruited faster than the original Black Pearl and consistently yielded over 3.25 pounds per block.

That second-gen White King became one of the founding parents of my next project:
the KXW line—short for King × White.

We’ll dig into that next. It’s one of the most exciting things to come out of this whole breeding journey so far.

04/27/2025

Black Pearl: The Lineage

This is part two of our dive into the Black Pearl story.
In the last post, we covered its pros, cons, and speculated about its lineage. I shared my belief that it was a cross between an oyster and a king trumpet, possibly with another oyster species mixed in.

Since then, some new information came to light. The Black Pearl was actually patented in Canada (CA2878902C)—and the patent itself lays out the juicy details.

After carefully digging through it, here’s what I found: The breeding process was a little more complex than I originally thought. It wasn’t just a simple oyster x king cross. Here's the breakdown:

First, they crossed Pleurotus ostreatus (Oyster) with Pleurotus nebrodensis.
Separately, they crossed two different strains of Pleurotus eryngii (King Trumpet).
From there, they backcrossed additional oysters into the line—at two separate points—and added another King Trumpet cross as well.

What’s not 100% clear from the patent is whether they used the same oyster three times, or if they brought in different oyster strains at each step.
Same question for the Kings: it could have been onekingg strain used twice—or two separate ones.

Either way, it’s a seven-generation project.

It’s important to note:
In mushroom breeding, crosses aren't a neat 50/50 split like you might imagine.
Even if you hybridize a pure P. ostreatus with a pure P. nebrodensis, the resulting offspring could lean heavily toward one parent—or land somewhere in between. There’s a lot of variability.

That said, if each cross did happen to split evenly (just for rough math's sake), the Black Pearl’s genetic makeup would end up around:

48% Oyster
47% King Trumpet
5% Nebrodensis

Pretty fascinating stuff—and seeing the actual lineage helps make sense of why the Black Pearl behaves the way it does.

Understanding this background also sets the stage for the next parts of the family tree—and for the new lines we’re developing today.
Next up: we’ll dive into the beginnings of the White King line.

Stay tuned.

04/19/2025

The Hybrid Cross

In 2019, I set out with a bold goal:
Create a new mushroom hybrid that combined the heartiness of King Trumpet with the speed and ease of oysters.

Since the Black Pearl King already contains hybrid genetics, it made the perfect genetic bridge. I took the Black Pearl dikaryon and crossed it with a monokaryon from a pure King Trumpet.

This kind of cross taps into something called the Buller phenomenon—a fascinating quirk of mushroom genetics. Here's the gist:

A dikaryon (like Black Pearl, which contains two nuclei—let’s call them A and B)
can actually mate with a monokaryon (like the King Trumpet, nucleus C).

But only one of the dikaryon’s nuclei joins the party. So, the outcome is either:
• A + C, or
• B + C
Never all three. There’s no such thing as a trikaryon—ABC is not possible.

This creates a brand-new dikaryon with a unique combination of traits. And the coolest part? You don’t get to choose which nucleus pairs up—it’s a genetic coin toss.

That simple act opens the door to all kinds of complexity:

Mitochondrial inheritance
Epigenetic changes
Even the possibility of horizontal gene transfer
Therefore, it’s not just a 50/50 mix—it’s a roll of the dice with some wild potential.

In my case, I believe the participating nucleus came from the oyster side of the Black Pearl.The result? A new hybrid that was roughly 50% King Trumpet (from the monokaryon) and 50% Oyster (from the Black Pearl dikaryon).

That very first hybrid—the one you can spot in the fourth tier of the family tree—was the start of everything. Sadly, I no longer have a photo of that mushroom. But I can describe it—and trust me, it won’t be gracing any magazine covers.

It had a gray cap, an extremely long stem, and a tiny cap relative to its size. The texture leaned toward the firmer, meatier feel of a King Trumpet rather than the marshmallow softness of Black Pearl. It had some truly weird features—rosecomb growths and other cap deformities that made it look like a mistake nature didn’t want to claim.

I took spores from that 2019 hybrid and bred it to itself to see what the new dikaryons would express. From that strange-looking start, I’ve now developed new unique lines.

04/13/2025

Mushroom Breeding 101 – The Basics

This post might make your eyes glaze over, but it’s important groundwork for the posts that follow.

Mushroom breeding is quite different from plant or animal breeding—though it still takes “two to tango.”

In animals: s***m + egg
In plants: pollen + ovule
In mushrooms: spore + spore (spores are propagules, or gender-neutral)

A single mushroom can produce millions of spores. Each spore germinates into a monokaryon—a type of mycelium with just one nucleus. At this stage, a monokaryon cannot produce a viable fruiting mushroom.

It takes two compatible monokaryons to mate. When they do, they form a dikaryon—a mycelium containing two nuclei. This dikaryon is what can finally produce mushrooms.

Side note: It is not possible to breed a dikaryon to a dikaryon, but it is possible to breed a monokaryon to a dikaryon. (How that works will be explained in my next post.)

If you see a mushroom in the woods, in a grocery store, or on a farm—it’s a dikaryon.

Self-Breeding vs. Crossbreeding

Most mushrooms can breed to themselves. For example, I can collect individual spores from my Galaxy King, germinate them into monokaryons, and mate those together to produce new dikaryons. This is an example of self-breeding.

But Black Pearl King is different.

Its spores germinate into monokaryons, but I’ve never been able to get them to mate with each other and form new dikaryons. It needs to be crossbred to form new dikaryons.

That challenge was actually the spark that started my breeding project.

That’s the genetic magic—and chaos—of mushroom breeding.

Part 2 coming soon: What happened when I actually made that cross...

04/05/2025

Black Pearl: The Mushroom That Started It All

I didn’t breed this mushroom. The Black Pearl was originally developed in Japan, and while its exact lineage is a bit fuzzy, it seems to include Pleurotus eryngii (King Trumpet), Pleurotus ostreatus (Oyster), and possibly another Pleurotus species.

As of this writing, it might be the most widely grown strain among small-scale mushroom farms in the U.S.—and for good reason. It produces tremendous yields, has the meaty texture of a King Trumpet, and looks beautiful with its dark caps and white stems. I think of this mushroom as an easier to grow King Trumpet version.

The Black Pearl is what first inspired me to start my own breeding project. It’s a fantastic mushroom, no doubt—but I believed there was room for improvement. That belief has driven years of work here at Sprout It Farm.

Positive Attributes

Yield: Consistently produces over 2.5 pounds per block. That’s my baseline—and the Black Pearl easily delivers.
Appearance: Striking contrast between cap and stem; very “market ready.”
Unique Identity: There’s nothing else that looks quite like it.
Colonization Speed: Colonizes in about 21 days—not as fast as oysters (14 days), but quicker than most gourmet types.
Fruiting Speed: Typically fruits in 10–15 days once introduced to the fruiting room.
It checks the boxes to make it a staple for a lot of small farms.

Limitations

Temperature Sensitivity: More resistant to blotch than a typical King Trumpet, but still struggles to fruit cleanly above 68°F. That can be a limiting factor, especially during warmer months.
Fragile Caps: Extremely brittle and prone to breaking during harvest or handling.
Short Shelf Life: In my experience, it must be harvested very young to avoid issues like cap mycelium reversion (when the cap surface begins to regrow fuzzy mycelium).
“Leggy” Stems: The stems tend to be overly long, creating a lot of trim waste in the kitchen. I’d prefer firmer stems with a better cooking texture.
The Black Pearl has been the backbone of my breeding project. It laid the foundation for many of the selections I’m working on now. Sharing its strengths and weaknesses helps show what I am aiming to improve.

Sprout It

04/21/2026

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04/05/2025

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Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm
Saturday	9am - 5pm
Sunday	9am - 5pm