Grow your own mushrooms

One rainy day back in April, Ben, Squeegee (the ball python) and I took a walk thru our neighborhood and observed a fresh crop of some wild mushrooms growing in the neighbor's garden. Hundreds of them....some kind of agaricus I suspect, but not knowing anything more than that, I was giving them a wide berth. Ben was fascinated, however...where did so many come from, practically overnight? Luckily, I had recently gotten a copy of Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti. 

We spent an hour or so reading up on mushrooms (actually fruiting bodies), mycelium, and the amazing job they do decomposing/ cleaning up our environment. Did you know the worlds largest organism is a fungus?  This lead us to order online the espresso oyster mushroom kit.

Ben could not wait for it to arrive so we could grow our own mycelium. Nevermind he will no longer eat the fruiting bodies (he used to love things like broccoli, anchovies, goat cheese but won't touch them now). We followed the easy directions. One food grade, 5 gallon bucket...check, got one in the garage. About 10 pounds of spent coffee grounds...check, stop by a coffee shop for those. Drill holes in the bottom of the bucket. Check, Steve helped with the power tools. Dump in the grounds and wet thouroughly. Check. Break up the bag of sawdust inoculated with mycelium. (It looks like a big block of tempeh.) Mix that with the moist coffee and cover with a humidity tent (aka a plastic bag with holes). Mist twice daily with water and in 2-3 weeks you will see mycelium devolop and oyster mushrooms should grow a week or so after that. Check, check, and check.

It all went well up till mushroom development. We literally had hundreds of baby shrooms, but they never got very big. Finally they began to grow mold. So we threw in the towel on that batch.

But then my neighbor Denise, an amazing gardener who even grows coffee beans in her greenhouse, invited me to the SOMA meeting.  Denise is an amateur mycologist and has been growing mushrooms since 1999 on oak logs in her yard.

Here are some shitakkes she grew and brought to the meeting. She bought some shitakke plugs from Fungi Perfecti back in 1999 and put them in a few oak logs and she has harvested a large batch of mushrooms every spring since. This really got my attention. I love shitakke mushrooms, I do not love the $13 a pound price tag, even if they are grown locally here in Sonoma County. Fortunately, they had bags of oyster mushroom spawn on hay....ready to fruit and only $5 a bag. I bought two bags and vowed to try again.

In order to be scientific, we are trying two methods this time. Coffee grounds (after I receive a reply from Fungi Perfecti in regards to troubleshooting my first effort) and the second is the newspaper/cardboard sandwich in filtered light approach. Like so:

Steve and I have a Christmas Eve tradition of walking up into the oak woodlands near our house to look for chanterelles. My good friend in college had parents from Poland who once served me a wonderful mushroom soup with imported, wildcrafted delicacies from their homeland.  And another college friend who spent summers on a ranch in Wyoming had a father well versed in mushroom indentification.  No ranch visit was complete without a mushroom-butter saute.  But that is the extent of my mushroom forays outside of the grocery store varieties.  Now I am looking foward to some oyster mushroom stir-fires, or sauteed mushrooms with garlic and white wine made with my own home grown mushrooms!  And I am looking for space for my own shitakke logs. 

There just might be a mycological society/club in your area too!  Disclaimer: NEVER eat any mushroom you have picked in the wild, without having it positively indentified by an expert first.
ALSO: Children, never try this at home with a snake. The above photo depicts trained professionals, and absolutely no animals were harmed in the writing of this post.

Mimulus lives in Northern California, hangs her laundry to dry and rambles on at greenjewls.

Comments

[Justin H.]

Just this past weekend, we visited Shiloh Farm as part of a local farm tour and saw their small-scale shiitake-growing operation. They are working with a local college to analyze the successes of different inoculation mixtures.

They use the plug-in-the-log method - they cut down trees, drill holes in them, and create and insert plugs using a special drill bit. The logs are configured into multiple stacks using lincoln-log style formations in a shady area. They produce for several years depending on the size of the log, both in the Spring and Fall as the weather allows. The shrooms just use up the log's nutrients from the inside out and require zero maintenance (they didn't mention any supplemental moisture requirements).

[Birdson]

Mimulus, this is such a delightful and encouraging post! I have grown mushrooms from a kit at home before myself, and you need absolutely no more space than people normally have to live in an apartment, making the process very accessible. I am considering the plug-in-log method after reading your entry, and wondering if my hot summers would inhibit growth, although this spring the Sierras have been plenty moist.

[George louis]

I need to know how to grow eating mushrooms and its step how it is done .Please ineed to know it all help me please

[stacey]

Hi interesting post! I am doing a school project regarding the cultivation of mushrooms and i was wondering if you had any information on cultivating it with hay. If you have anything at all please email me, it would be greatly appreciated:) - Stacey (stacey.lee.henderson@gmail.com)