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I'm fairly new at harvesting mushrooms, and was wondering how much Fomes Fomentarius I can harvest sustainable from a fungal garden.

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black thumb
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  • You know it's not normally considered edible? (It's not actually poisonous, it just tastes vile.) But it did have other uses, if you want to harvest it for those. – alephzero Oct 02 '18 at 20:24
  • It's a great medicinal mushroom: http://www.medicalmushrooms.net/fomes-fomentarius/ – black thumb Oct 02 '18 at 20:45
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    I suppose you would expect the "The International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms" to say that. I love they way they use "prolonging life by dealing with malignant cells that cause debilitating diseases" as an euphemism for "curing cancer" ;) – alephzero Oct 02 '18 at 22:20
  • Related: https://gardening.stackexchange.com/questions/16189/should-i-remove-brown-cap-shaped-birch-polypore-mushrooms-from-my-tree – Stephie Dec 01 '18 at 05:45

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What we are looking at here is the fruiting body, the mycelium (what mycologists would consider the real fungus) lives in the wood of the tree.

The biological function of the fruiting body is to disperse the spores, just like apples or berries are seed carriers. So like picking all blueberries from a bush or all apples from a tree won’t harm the actual plant, you can take all shelves of the fungus and need not worry.

Stephie
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