By MICHAEL TORTORELLO

Kendall Morrison is 47 years old and semiretired from the publishing business. A nd on any given weekend, you’re likely to find him in a shady grove of silver maples, in his Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, cultivating eight varieties of mushrooms.

You might not be able to tell right away what Mr. Morrison is doing. He may be wielding a hand drill, for instance, boring holes into a salvaged oak log. Or he may be pounding dowels into the wood with a mallet, each little peg impregnated with shiitake mushroom spawn.

“We started right around November,” Mr. Morrison said, referring to his 15 volunteers, “and we haven’t stopped. As long as we can work back there, we worked. Even when there was snow on the ground.”

There are perhaps 200 stacked billets now. Long strands of mushroom - or mycelium - are infiltrating the grain of the wood and starting to decompose it. Eventually the logs should flush with “fruit” where the spawn went in.

The reward? About 450 grams of edible mushrooms per log.

Mr. Morrison hopes to distribute this harvest to his many helpers. His nonprofit group, EcoStation: NY, will also be selling the mushrooms - at a very reasonable price, he said - to neighbors at the Bushwick Farmers’ Market held at the garden from late May through November.

Yet more mushrooms are growing in burlap sacks stuffed with wood chips. There are 250 of these bags stacked in meter-tall piles that snake around the garden’s pathways.

Mr. Morrison seems to have a growing number of comrades nationwide. “Plug spawn sales are increasing dramatically,” said Paul Stamets, a prominent mycologist and founder of Fungi Perfecti, the Washington-state company from which Mr. Morrison orders many of his supplies.

“The mushroom kit sales are increasing at maybe 25 percent per year, for the last three years,” he said. “The plug spawn sales are easily double that over a three- or four-year period.”

Mr. Stamets, 54, attributes this new popularity to the “magical” flush of the mushroom. “They’re seemingly invisible, and yet they erupt into view within a day or two,” he said. “There are mushrooms that will break through concrete, and there are mushrooms that form fairy rings. People are curious about that.”

Shiitake mushrooms have been grown successfully in Japan for at least a millennium, Mr. Stamets said. But if old photos are to be believed, the “soak and strike” method required a certain comfort level with chilly water, colossal hammers and crippling labor. The tamer and more reliable backyard business began in the United States around the same time as his company - that is, 1980 - with the concept of nurturing all kinds of spawn in grain and then shipping them by mail.

Mushrooms like the shiitake, wine cap, oyster and lion’s mane have taken to home domestication. All are widely available in spawn form and are reasonably easy to grow. But other gourmet varieties, like chanterelles and truffles, continue to defy most human meddling.