Speaking of growing fungi.........I remember one particularly hot, humid summer in Missouri. Our old house had several bathrooms near the bedroom area and a toadstool started growing at the base of one of the commodes. Probably because of condensation off the porcelain bowl. We carefully cleaned around it and left it to grow just on general principles. A stool with a toadstool under it. Morels are picky......hunted them all my life when in areas where they are indiginous. Being careful not to harvset so many that the spores are not left for future colonies. They can be found in certain conditions, preferring to grow under the decaying logs of particular species of trees. In our state, May would be way too long to wait to harvest a morel........one watches for particular weather conditions too. It hits here more around a late Easter time.

If you are going to go into production the easiest are among the many Oyster varieties; they are not as photogenic as domed fungii, yet taste is fine. You can grow them on waste cardboard - they degrade (eat) lignan, even sawdust. Turn over can be quick & even massive if you scale up. Most practical initially is to buy their prepared grain spawn & innoculate your fruiting medium. Oysters waft plenty of spores so find a place other than your favorite room. Shitake have become very well regarded & you can (again) buy their prepared innoculant. Dowel plugs are practical to stuff into a log & wait around for colonization. Buttons are what most people have seen. This is not a gourmet mushroom & usually their grow medium entails manure. Commercial buttton growing operations can not be competed with. (If you buy their spent medium as "mushroom compost" be aware it may be ridden with industry chemicals used to control crop contaminants.) You'll need to pay attention to temperatures when consider seasonal suitability of the different 'shrooms. Sorry, I do not sell mushroom spawn ( the first stage is desireable strain isolation, then fungii's mycelium proliferation & next transfer of culture to a substrate for mass proliferation of the mushroom "roots", called the spawn ) which you need to put among your bulk growing medium in order to harvest the fruiting bodies. I don't think the all included "kits" will give you a profit margin. Be informed that growing a mushroom from it's spores does not guarantee you will replicate it's characteristics. Aloha Medicinals, among others, has a superior mushroom strain bank. Don't expect any commercial enterprise's mycellium snippets to be cheap , they are proprietary.

on gardening australia's latest show they had a fungii bloke, i learnt a lot! there is a mushroom that is "brown" under and white on top that is now dominant where the field (safe) mushroom used to grow but it is a poison mushroom, so maybe the colour i first described might be the go from pink to a dark purplish maroon (never brown). as mention there before there is that yellow one that looks like and edible but you get the yellow stain on your fingers if you rub it also dangerous. so if you are new into fungii eating then do your research first, and i still say the best way is to find a club they are out there. i only know a couple of varieties and there are many more edibles than that. len Here is a link that might be useful: lens garden page

OMG, Doug, you're beating all sorts of records here. When I was researching this for a Hoya talk I was giving in front of my gardening club, here are a few things I found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoya (THE most reliable source :-) ) says: "H. coriacea Blume has been known to have as many as 70 in an inflorescence". http://naturalb3auty.blogspot.com/2010/12/hoya-waxflower.html says: "Number of flowers per umbel varies from one (H. pauciflora Wight.) for 55 or even more." (Even more!, I tell ya, EVEN MORE!!!) So, those are the numbers I used. Next time I'll use your numbers. :-) By the way, I can't find the picture now, but Andrea Agillon in the Philippines once showed H. incrassata umbel on facebook where there were so many flowers that a lot of petals could not recurve - they were bumping into their neighbors. It looked like a mess, but quite an impressive mess. I see some of your petals also could not bend back here because of no elbow room. It did not look like she had 260 flowers on her umbel, although I may be wrong. It's hard to estimate these things.