Hey everybody!
What mushrooms are you growing currently? What mushrooms do you plan to grow? What techniques are you using? Why are you growing them?
Hey everybody!
What mushrooms are you growing currently? What mushrooms do you plan to grow? What techniques are you using? Why are you growing them?
I have five jars of popcorn kernels and rye berries being used to expand pink and blue oyster mushrooms for my first attempt at growing. When the oysters are ready, I have straw and lime ready to prepare fruiting bags.
I also used another jar of each grain for some creminis that I started on boiled cardboard from grocery store stems. Sadly the popcorn jar started showing mold contamination yesterday however the rye jar appears to be growing great, so I’m trying to source some local composted chicken manure to mix with straw so I can set up a bed for those to grow in.
The technique for the creminis was a crazy experiment… I cut up some clean brown cardboard boxes and boiled the pieces for a few minutes, then set up a small plastic container with the cardboard and mushroom stems… all done in open air on the kitchen counter. And yet somehow I did NOT get contamination at that stage. It wasn’t until I moved some pieces of cardboard with mycelium into the grain jars (done within a cleaned still-air box) that I started getting blue mold. I thought I was doing good by this point, wiping things down with alcohol and such to keep it all clean, but something still managed to get into this one jar. Ah well, it was bound to happen – I guess one jar out of seven isn’t bad.
Love the experimentation! It’s crazy. I crumbled some oyster mushroom mycelium all over used coffee grounds to expand it. Open air kitchen, worked like 75% of the time but then I got too cocky and ended up spoiling the whole batch with cobweb mould 😭
Have you had any success fruiting cremini?
I haven’t gotten that far with any of them yet. Cremini actually want manure, so the fact it started growing at all on the cardboard was just dumb luck I think, but since I have it in a grain jar now it’s growing at a much faster pace. I’m still trying to find some chicken manure to use so I have a bed for it when it’s ready to go to fruiting.
Yeah I was wondering that too since they grow it on manure. Just shows that fungi will grow anywhere haha.
Well it looks like the cremini experiment is over. I just checked my jars, now both of the cremini jars are completely full of blue mold. The stuff sure does pop up quickly, the mycelium was looking really good in that last jar yesterday.
Aw oh well. Growing mushrooms is half art half science. Super hard to get it growing without contamination.
Funny thing was I didn’t have any contam until I transferred it to the sterilized grain jars. Oh well, the next batch can be done directly in grain jars without multiple transfers, but for now I’ll focus on my oysters.