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Growing mushrooms

thebat

thebat

No, these are not magic mushrooms! Now that that is out of the way....

I'm gonna try my hand at cultivating mushrooms. I really do enjoy them with dishes, they add a nice flavor to certain meals :) So far my favorite I've had were some morels that my grandfather found growing in a leaf pile at his house. Sliced em up, sauteed them in butter and garlic and had them with steak. Oh my god were they good! Now morels are VERY difficult to grow. As far as I'm aware there is no good indoor growing kit for them. They like hard wood and grass seed as their substrate and that's for inoculation. Even with an outdoor kit it can take 6 months to 2 years to see some morels from it! :eek: That is WAY too long. So I ordered myself a brown sonoma oyster mushroom log that is pre-inoculated so all I have to do is cut the bag, keep it moist, and reap the benefits! :) I plan on gathering spores from some caps when they've grown, seeing as $25 shipped for a kit that can yield 8-16oz of mushrooms cannot be justified in my book. That and I'm a DIY guy, if they can do it and sell it why can't I do it and keep it for myself? So I purchased some inoculation loops, 10cc syringes, 1.5" needles, fine vermiculite, 4 lbs of brown rice, and some pleutorus eryngii or otherwise known as, trumpet royale, mycelium to innoculate some grows with. I'll be getting into detail on that process when I start it. For now I'll stay with my purchased kit. Oyster mushrooms like hard wood (trees) but they can grow on paper, cardboard, and even coffee grounds! They're supposed to be quite easy to grow and I can understand why. My ramble is done for now... after I type everything out of order so it will probably be confusing. :whistle:

Anyway......
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That is the mushroom "log" (not a real mushroom log since it isn't a physical log cut from a tree that has been inoculated)
Just got it today and followed the instructions that came with it to get it started. I should be seeing some pins come up in 2-14 days :D\
I'll get some pics up as soon as something interesting happens to it :)
 
Awesome. Morel or dry land fish as we call them are my absolute favorite. They should be popping with all this warm weather we have had. Mabye I'll go fishin this weekend.
 
From what I've read you can take that log and cut pieces of it off and drill holes in another piece of a suitable log and stick the pieces you cut off in the holes you drilled to innoculate the new log.
Some mushroom vendors sell wood plugs that are pre innoculated for making more mushroom growing logs.
Some people cut up a log that is almost done putting out mushrooms to make more logs.

When you are done with your original log try putting it in a mix of different things they grow mushrooms on and see if the mycilia will spread.

I gave my sister a mushroom kit once and she thaught it was dead so she tossed it in her garden.
After a while she had mushrooms all over the place...
 
I so want to try growing mushrooms eventually, but yeah, like smokemaster said, you can potentially extend the life of your shrooms through any of the means mentioned. I know my friends were growing some at one point and when it looks like the "log" was spent they tossed it in the compost pile only to have a big pile of shrooms come up later...
 
I am working on morels this year as well, though I probably wont be doing any kind of grow log or anything until I have the process nailed down. I finally feel like I am getting pretty good at substrate colonization and fruiting. Commercial morel growing is like the holy grail here in the Mississippi valley. The first person to really figure it out is going to be rich very quickly. The last time I was in London, I found them in a street market where they were being sold for nearly $200/kg dried.
 
Morels are very difficult to grow, almost impossible indoors. Those who can grow them are often rich. If you're new to growing mushroom, I recommend trying regular oyster mushrrooms since they are aggressive growers and don't require nearly as much sterile enviroments and tecniques. Its also quite easy to use old oyster mushroom mycelium to inoculate new medium and you can get away with a simple pasteurization of the medium vs. pressure sterilization
 
smokemaster said:
From what I've read you can take that log and cut pieces of it off and drill holes in another piece of a suitable log and stick the pieces you cut off in the holes you drilled to innoculate the new log.
Some mushroom vendors sell wood plugs that are pre innoculated for making more mushroom growing logs.
Some people cut up a log that is almost done putting out mushrooms to make more logs.

When you are done with your original log try putting it in a mix of different things they grow mushrooms on and see if the mycilia will spread.

I gave my sister a mushroom kit once and she thaught it was dead so she tossed it in her garden.
After a while she had mushrooms all over the place...
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I had planned on trying to get it to grow a bit more on some sterilized cardboard. Some people get incredibly large flushes from it. I've been doing my reading on it, I have at least 20 pages bookmarked on how to keep everything sterile and best growing conditions and I have a dvd and book on it too! :D




synclinorium said:
I so want to try growing mushrooms eventually, but yeah, like smokemaster said, you can potentially extend the life of your shrooms through any of the means mentioned. I know my friends were growing some at one point and when it looks like the "log" was spent they tossed it in the compost pile only to have a big pile of shrooms come up later...
Click to expand...
Yep, toss it in your garden and very likely you'll have some more sprout up next year. I don't want to make logs, although they last for 2-4 YEARS!!! Not just 2-4 flushes like a brf cake!!!!



theghostpepperstore said:
I am working on morels this year as well, though I probably wont be doing any kind of grow log or anything until I have the process nailed down. I finally feel like I am getting pretty good at substrate colonization and fruiting. Commercial morel growing is like the holy grail here in the Mississippi valley. The first person to really figure it out is going to be rich very quickly. The last time I was in London, I found them in a street market where they were being sold for nearly $200/kg dried.
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Its like morels are worth their weight in gold. Best tasting mushroom by far I'd say.
 
I've started my prep and sterilization and will post up my current glog when I'm done and inoculating is done.
 
I may also try to get some morels growing on my north facing composty dirt hill on the side of my house. I think they'd love it there.


Anyway I got started on inoculating jars last night. Here is my process.

Gathered up all my materials (I'm at my friends house when I did this last night)
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Got my brown rice and made some flour with the coffee grinder. 1 cup brown rice
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I don't have an after pic.

Mix it in with 2 cups vermiculite. I had fine vermiculite. Add water to field capacity as seen here.
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Now fill your jars up to about .5" from the top
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Clean the rims
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Before After

Cleaned all the jars
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Top it off with dry vermiculite
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Get the pressure cooker ready. I used the tray and rings to keep the jars out of the water.
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Got the jars in
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Now I have to wait to post more images... I think?
 
Image limit...

Bring the water to a boil. Once its boiling let it boil for 90 minutes to sterilize everything.
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Now let it cool enough to touch it with your hands and not burn yourself. I left it overnight since it was 3 am and still not cool!

Get your sterilization materials and syringe
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Sterilize your gloves and work space with rubbing alcohol. (You should use a glove box but I didn't have one) Now heat the needle RED HOT and let it cool for a few seconds. Remove the top layer of foil (I have 3 layers) Insert it into the jar and inject ~.25mL down the inside of the glass so you can see the liquid run down it. Rotate the container 90 degrees and inject another ~.25mL. Do this 2 more times and place foil back over top. Re-sterilize the needle as to not spread possible contaminants. I only got 4 jars out of this syringe seeing as it was my first attempt to do this. (I wasn't too happy with the syringe. Mycelium clumped at the bottom of the syringe so my last jar got at least half of all the mycelium in there.)

Here are my finished jars
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Now I let them incubate and once fully colonized I can birth the cakes and let them fruit or mix it in with another substrate as to increase my total yield. :D

POTAWIE said:
What species of oyster mushroom are you growing again?
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Pleurotus eryngii also know as "King Oyster". :)
 
King oysters are some of my favorite mushroom. I grew some from a kit and then expanded into pasteurized straw fairly well without much sterile practice. Other oyster types are even more aggressive and can be quite easy to grow but the kings really are a royal treat.

King oyster mushroom-Potawie
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I'm really excited for mine to grow. They say you can slice the stem into medallions and sautee them and it tastes like scallops.
Cheapest kit I found for them was 20 plus shipping so I figured why pay 20 when for 35 i can have as many as I want?
 
theghostpepperstore said:
+1 This is how I have been doing it. Tried and true method.
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Yep. Brown rice flour cakes. Work like a charm every time. Easiest and most fruitful thing you can go with for the effort it takes to make them. It only took me around 1 hour to make the jars and that included grinding the rice and going and checking my instructions multiple times. Only thing I'd do differently is use micro pore tape and make inoculation/gas exchange holes in the lids.
 
I have had no trouble using regular clear packing tape, I just unscrew the lids slightly to allow air exchange. I was lucky enough to find organic BRF that was already ground.
 
theghostpepperstore said:
I have had no trouble using regular clear packing tape, I just unscrew the lids slightly to allow air exchange. I was lucky enough to find organic BRF that was already ground.
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Maybe I'll give that a try. I also want to make liquid culture jars and try my hand at that since spores die in hydrogen peroxide but mycelium doesn't. That way I can make a sterile substrate with h2o2 and put some mycelium in it and don't need to worry about contams as much.
As for the brf I've heard fresh ground is better than packaged ground for some reason...
 
I have heard grinding your own is the way to go. Unfortunately I already have 3 grinders in the house that all have their own designated purposes. My wife would lose it if I add another one for brown rice :banghead:
 
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