Show us your shrooms

[JudyB]

I do sometimes. I love pleurotus djamor, pink oyster. Grows on basically everything, from microwaved damp cardboard to sterilized grains or pet store straw. Not the fine grass hay, it's contains too many different fungi. The gold colored straw stuff is great and usually doesn't require pasturisation.

I do recommend getting a couple air filtered containers to start a culture and keep a backup, they're relatively expensive containers (up to 4 dollars a piece) but they can be used twice if they're polypropylene (pp5 plastic). Buy some live mushroom plugs. Microwave some cardboard (like toilet rolls) in water until it boils, strain it in a colander while hot and let it dry a little (or add some dry cardboard). Should be damp, not wet.
Put the cardboard in the containers while leaving about 15% of the container empty, and let them cool, then add the plugs with live culture/spawn. Let them rip (3-5 weeks) until they colonized the container and you can use this colony to inoculate a bag of water-soaked pet store straw by poking 30 holes in the plastic wrapping and inserting the colonized cardboard.
Soak it in the sink if it looks dry. In about 4-6 weeks it'll have colonized the straw and it'll start to fruit. You can get around 5 flushes of mushrooms from a bag. With the right water management you should be able to get about 3 buckets full of mushrooms.

With regular oyster mushrooms you can use store bought mushrooms to inoculate wet straw straight away, same process of poking holes and just jamming the mushrooms in there. But make sure they're fresh. They colonize cardboard as well.

I backup container that's fully colonized can last about 4 months "in rest", so by keeping the system running by inoculating new containers every once in a while, you can basically have a continuous production.

Thank you! Will start with the oysters as that sounds super easy and I LOVE them.

 

[Wires_Guy_wires]

Thank you! Will start with the oysters as that sounds super easy and I LOVE them.

If you plan on using the cardboard backup containers, spent coffeegrounds can work pretty well too. But there's often trichoderma growing on them that eats the oysters for breakfast. If it looks green, dump the container and never use it again. Trichoderma spores are tough as nails (and some species protect plants from pathogenic fungi, by eating them).
So I avoid those grounds, unless I sterilize it in the pressure cooker (pp5 plastic can withstand one or two 20 minute cycles).
Keep in mind that fungi need fresh air and moisture replenishments. Never buy dry spawn or dry plugs because those are dead already.

You can make your own backup containers from glass jars if you want. Those can be washed and re-used. But you'd need two dime-sized holes in the lid and those holes should be covered by a breathing tape. Most pharmacies or sports stores have those kind of tapes, I think they're used to tape up bandages, or boxing knuckles. Looks a lot like that paper-like painters tape. The thicker cotton tapes used for taping muscles and such, have pores of the wrong size and will not work to keep the bad stuff out.

 

[BrightsideB]

Little buddy lives with one of my JM cultivars.

 

[Cruiser]

Lobster mushroom…. And an uninfected host mushroom that can transform into one.. some kind of milk cap, I think.

It may all be in my head, but I could swear they smell like seafood.

 

[Dav4]

These pictures are from my old place in GA, summer of 2021. That Yaupon Holly is still down in the metro ATL, and hopefully still growing more than mushrooms.

 

[Firstflush]

Wood ear- auricularia

 

[KateM]

Oyster mushroom. Gathered, sautéed and pickled, and some eaten yesterday.

 

[RJG2]

Shrooms and snow

 

[CptnGlyn]

This seems like my kind of thread! Here’s Ganoderma australe on common lime, Tilia x vulgaris, and also a sneak peak of what it’s been up-to for the past few years…

 

[Cruiser]

Fuzzy fellas

 

[yashu]

Grill for scale

 

[KateM]

View attachment 471331
Grill for scale

Wood burning I take it?

 

[yashu]

Wood burning I take it?

Yeah, charcoal

 

[Gaea's listener]

I enjoyed this thread and seeing everyone's photos

All of these are from my summer trip to Poland. The creamy flowery ones I'm not sure if it's a mushroom or a different plant? King bollets I ate, oyster mushrooms friends grew at their home, yellow and orange ones I found in the woods, don't know English names but the orange ones grow with birch trees.

 

[Gaea's listener]

View attachment 466958View attachment 466957

View attachment 466959

No way, so cool!

 

[AaronThomas]

Amanita muscaria I believe.

 

[dbonsaiw]

Amanita muscaria I believe.

Indeed

 

[0soyoung]

Amanita muscaria I believe.

View attachment 472494

Anyone here ever eaten one?

 

[Bricker918]

My scrub oak’s little pal

 

[BrightsideB]

Anyone here ever eaten one?

Amanita muscaria has to be cooked in a specific way and the toxic chemicals leached out through boiling rinsing and repeating. I know people who eat them that way. Have you heard it being called the Christmas mushroom and the story behind it?