Mushroom Cultivation

sikadelic

sikadelic

Chumono
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Southwest VA
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6B
Hey folks. I searched and saw another mushroom thread, but it was mainly for sharing pictures and I didn't want to be a hijacker. I know it has been a while, but I am trying to get back in the game. I plan to be more active here once again, but more importantly, outside with my trees and other projects!! I have always loved mushrooms for some reason. I have a random collection of mushroom related items that I have been gathering since I was a kid. I love how different they are, the amazing shapes, colors, how they appear to just grow overnight...something so unique and mysterious about them to me. On that note, I wanted to try and cultivate some mushrooms in my garden this year...some oysters, portabellas, and maybe a few other special varieties.

Has anyone attempted mushroom cultivation in their garden or at home? This will certainly not overtake my tree projects, but something I definitely plan to try at some point this year. Thanks in advance!!
 
I've been culturing pink oyster mushrooms for 6 years, for a local restaurant.
And I'm going to restart my old reishi projects. They would make great accents for bonsai! As long as I can keep the woodworms out of their fruiting bodies.
Ganoderma applanatum has some appealing qualities as well, but I quit growing those because I want my trees to live.
 
Wires_Guy_wires said:
They would make great accents for bonsai!
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This is one of the things that got me interested in adding them to my garden. I can't even imagine all the beautiful combinations one could throw together for a display. I hadn't thought about the potential of selling them to local restaurants but it may be something I could entertain later on. Right now, I am just planning on trying out a few varieties for fun, flavor, and positive thinking.

Do you use agar and make your own spore prints or do you order new spores each time? I will admit that I haven't researched the fungus among us anywhere as closely as I have bonsai. Just something new I want to try. SQUIRREL!
 
I quit using agar since chinese sellers started to cut it with salt and sugar to increase weight. I found sand in it too, while the label says 99% pure.. I have no clue why they did that, but everything dies on it. It's even killing my plants in tissue culture, so I lost quite a few very unique and special projects thanks to that. To be honest, I quit in vitro culturing of plants at home all together after that fiasco.
All other consumer available agar is mixed with flavor agents and fungi don't seem to like vanilla flavor for some reason. Plants don't either.
So I devised a substitute! Cheap, easy, and even hard to contaminate: cardboard.
A friend of mine copied the idea for his magic mushrooms and wrote down a single sheet instruction manual. To be found here: https://mycotopia.net/topic/98081-cleaning-up-spore-prints-in-7-steps/
He got it to work with Reishi, I could not. So I'm just going to order a pre-made culture bag and let it fruit, maybe transfer some parts of it to new bags I have lying around catching dust. I still need to order it, thanks for the reminder! It has been on my to do list for over a year.

The oysters have been in mycelial culture for 6 years, but new cultures from spores are added every year before inoculation. I believe it lets them fruit a bit more aggressive, but there's no telling that without isolating mono/dikaryons and doing a control study. I wanted to keep it easy and less scientific, and cardboard transfers (and isolations) of live culture work very well for me. With the oysters, I can even work in the kitchen, no flames, no flow cabinet, just a tweezers and some boiling water with some cardboard in it. A child could do it, really.
Cheap cling film for foodstuffs instead of the expensive parafilm (use that for grafting plants instead) works wonders.
It also lowers the production costs a whole lot. I produce for a single restaurant and only when they ask me to.
Back in the agar+petrifilm era, a single batch would cost me 10 bucks to produce. Right now I'm at 3 bucks a batch. Same end product, less work, and more important: fewer contaminations.
I get a good meal out of it in return, and that's all I ask for. There's a company making big money by recycling used coffee grounds from restaurants, by growing oyster mushrooms on them and selling those mushies back to those exact restaurants. I don't know if that's happening in the US too, but I've heard that these guys are making millions over here. I'm just leaving that out here for someone to pick up.
 
If you are raising pines, you are cultivating mushrooms, the symbiotic mycorrhiza fungi of Pines, is a mushroom. When your mycorrhiza is healthy, you will occasionally see fruiting mushrooms on the surface of your pines. They usually are rather small mushrooms, quite delicate.

@wireme is a member of BNut who raises mushrooms as a part time business. Perhaps he will weigh in, or post a link to the thread about his projects that he posted a couple years ago.
 
sikadelic said:
Hey folks. I searched and saw another mushroom thread, but it was mainly for sharing pictures and I didn't want to be a hijacker. I know it has been a while, but I am trying to get back in the game. I plan to be more active here once again, but more importantly, outside with my trees and other projects!! I have always loved mushrooms for some reason. I have a random collection of mushroom related items that I have been gathering since I was a kid. I love how different they are, the amazing shapes, colors, how they appear to just grow overnight...something so unique and mysterious about them to me. On that note, I wanted to try and cultivate some mushrooms in my garden this year...some oysters, portabellas, and maybe a few other special varieties.

Has anyone attempted mushroom cultivation in their garden or at home? This will certainly not overtake my tree projects, but something I definitely plan to try at some point this year. Thanks in advance!!
Click to expand...

The easiest thing that I can think of is to buy online a bag or two of sawdust spawn and mix it into wood chips (hardwood, Not coniferous) The wood chips are then used as mulch wherever you want mulch and want to create soil. I’d recommend trying Garden giants (Stropharia rugosoannulta), they are very aggressive and quick to colonize. I mixed some GG spawn into they woodchips that I use for winter mulch with my trees. In the summer I just raise the trees up on wood rounds or whatever and leave the mulch on the ground below the trees. With the watering of the trees above I get mushrooms all summer long. In the fall I add more fresh chips and that just keeps feeding the mushroom. It’s been producing for 5 years now from a single inoculation. If I was using pesticides and fungicides on my trees above I’d think twice about eating the mushrooms. Mushrooms are bioaccumulators of things like heavy metals and radiation but are pretty good at breaking other toxins down into harmless elements. Also garden giants have been known to cause serious gastrointestinal distress if eaten too many times in a short time span. Apparently something we have in our digestive system kind of gets used up after one or two meals or something so dont eat them more than once or twice a week I guess.

We started another garden giant bed on top of cardboard over a grassed area, wood chip 12” deep. The second season planted potatoes into it, they did great with the mushrooms, by the third year the wood chips had become soil and it was a great garden area, no digging required.

Plugging logs with inoculated dowels is another easy on that can produce for a long time with only the one initial effort to get it done. You can order dowel spawn online easily too. You could definitely combine that with trees. Inoculated logs under benches or as part of the actual bench structure itself...tall standing single rounds (monkey pole kinda thing but larger diameter). If you have wood water and shade you can have mushrooms really. Just have to choose the species to match the wood type and environment. I sit a lot of my trees up on wood rounds but have never gotten around to noccing them up. It would be cool, my rounds are coniferous, that limits the options, most cultivated mushrooms prefer hardwoods. I’d probably suggest trying shittake and reishi in the logs. You just collect freshly cut logs, drill holes and hammer the dowels in. @JudyB, you’ve mentioned that you have had shittake logs before haven’t you? How did the do for you?

There’s lots of species to try, lions mane, chicken of the woods.. etc..

Anyway the suggestions above are the easier options. Growing, maintaining, expanding and inoculating your own spawn into substrates that produce more predictably and quickly is a whole nother matter. It’s not that hard as @Wires_Guy_wires says but it takes quite a bit of learning and experimenting.
 
wireme said:
@JudyB, you’ve mentioned that you have had shittake logs before haven’t you? How did the do for you?
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Limited success. They like fruit tree wood best from what I've experienced. I can't get much mileage out of them, usually can get a crop but that's all.
 
JudyB said:
Limited success. They like fruit tree wood best from what I've experienced. I can't get much mileage out of them, usually can get a crop but that's all.
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That is 110% 'FALSE'! Shittake mushrooms 'HATE', cannot stand fruitwoods! Never has liked fruitwood, never will! Try 'hardwoods', instead, and your yields will soon astound you! ;)
 
I tried on both, and only fruit tree wood sprouted for me. I will try again on hardwood, thanks!
 
There was an article in today's Philadelphia Inquirer about how the mushroom business is changing because of Chinese imports. Shitake specifically.
Article
CW
 
CWTurner said:
There was an article in today's Philadelphia Inquirer about how the mushroom business is changing because of Chinese imports. Shitake specifically.
Article
CW
Click to expand...
That's the pinnacle of capitalism. Here in Europe we have the same loop holes, our (and yours!) Gouda Cheese is not from Gouda, but from Poland and then sold on the Gouda Market. Our Dutch chicken fillet is produced in Ukraine and repackaged in our country so that it's of Dutch Origin. And yes, if one of those US-trade agreements would have passed, the market would be flooded with chlorine-water-injected poultry from the US (one of the main reasons the EU voted more or less against it).
The Germans have found a way to counter this, by setting strict rules about labeling. A Schwarzwalder Schinken (Black forest meat) is protected by law and can only be named as such, if it's actually from the Schwarzwald area. The same goes for beer, that has to adhere to the Reinheitsgebot to be called beer. It's been that way since 500 years ago. Champagne too, by the way, has to be from the Champagne area, otherwise it's just 'sparkling wine'. But that's only when regulators can reach it, which is inside the EU. I bet there's a couple of hundred brands selling sparkling wine from other areas, labelled as champagne.
I'm all for these kind of protective measures, not because I care a whole lot about money, but I have this thing for transparency and honesty. And yes, I'd still buy the cheapest version no matter where it's from as long as it's the same product.

@wireme I never said it was hard to cultivate mushrooms!
Was it you by the way, who I advised to stop wearing gloves? Any positive/negative experiences to share?
 
Wires_Guy_wires said:
That's the pinnacle of capitalism. Here in Europe we have the same loop holes, our (and yours!) Gouda Cheese is not from Gouda, but from Poland and then sold on the Gouda Market. Our Dutch chicken fillet is produced in Ukraine and repackaged in our country so that it's of Dutch Origin. And yes, if one of those US-trade agreements would have passed, the market would be flooded with chlorine-water-injected poultry from the US (one of the main reasons the EU voted more or less against it).
The Germans have found a way to counter this, by setting strict rules about labeling. A Schwarzwalder Schinken (Black forest meat) is protected by law and can only be named as such, if it's actually from the Schwarzwald area. The same goes for beer, that has to adhere to the Reinheitsgebot to be called beer. It's been that way since 500 years ago. Champagne too, by the way, has to be from the Champagne area, otherwise it's just 'sparkling wine'. But that's only when regulators can reach it, which is inside the EU. I bet there's a couple of hundred brands selling sparkling wine from other areas, labelled as champagne.
I'm all for these kind of protective measures, not because I care a whole lot about money, but I have this thing for transparency and honesty. And yes, I'd still buy the cheapest version no matter where it's from as long as it's the same product.

@wireme I never said it was hard to cultivate mushrooms!
Was it you by the way, who I advised to stop wearing gloves? Any positive/negative experiences to share?
Click to expand...

Sorry, I didn’t mean to say you said it was hard. Meant to say that as you say it is not all that hard. As with everything though it’s only easy once you know how. Starting from zero there is a lot to learn. I have given cultivation workshops before, it is not easy to pass along all the knowledge needed in a short space of time!

Yes I did decide to try going gloveless after one of our previous interactions here. It’s been great for me, contam rates staying negligible, don’t have to fiddle with gloves, buy them or worst of all delay the work because I forgot to restock them and ran out.

I’m still mostly working with agar dishes but I do have cultures cardboard too. I inoculated small squares of pc sterilized cardboard in filter patch jars and let them dry out so It’s basically a dehydrated storage method. I can just pull out a square with sterilized tweezers and drop it into a new dish or grain or sawdust. It seems to work well so far but for some reason I don’t yet trust it as much as going back to a backup slant in the fridge. If I’m only after a growbag or two I’ll use the cardboard but if I’m doing something that will be expanded larger then it’ll be back to agar.
 
When you come to Asheville for the pumice there is a store in West Asheville that sells spawn and other related products for starting mushrooms. We grew shitake’s for a few years until the logs petered out. A failry easy process but the logs have to be fresh cut when innoculated. My wife tried growing oysters in coffee grounds but that didn’t work out. We finally stopped as it actually costs less in the long run to buy them at the local farmers market than go to all the trouble of keeping a small operation going, plus I found I didn’t really lkke the taste of shitakes.
 
Cofga said:
When you come to Asheville for the pumice there is a store in West Asheville that sells spawn and other related products for starting mushrooms. We grew shitake’s for a few years until the logs petered out. A failry easy process but the logs have to be fresh cut when innoculated. My wife tried growing oysters in coffee grounds but that didn’t work out. We finally stopped as it actually costs less in the long run to buy them at the local farmers market than go to all the trouble of keeping a small operation going, plus I found I didn’t really lkke the taste of shitakes.
Click to expand...

I didn’t like shittake much the first times I ate them but they have somehow become nearly a favourite now.
 
We grew them on oak and cherry logs and they tasted a little different as a result. Between the two I prefer the oak logs which I think were red oak. Our logs were about 6” diameter and petered out after abiut 3 years. I had to soak each log for 24 hours to get them to produce and I just got tired of having to put each one in a plastic rain barrel full of water and then drag them out the next day. A 3’ long log saturated with water gets pretty heavy!
 
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