Growing oyster mushrooms for the first time

Hi

I'm a first time grower and a newcomer to the forums. Recently i colonized oyster mushrooms with straw. The straw was pre soaked for 3 or 4 hours and then steam treated using a home made pressure cooker . My profession is a welder so made a home made boiler to steam treat the straw. Pasteurized it for 2 hours and let it do a spawn run in the bag. After like 15 days, the bag was pretty much white. So I have my questions here.

1. How do I start inducing pinning in them? And how do I know if they are ready to start pinning?
2. When touched from outside, the straw hasn't become hard after colonization, it's squishy , is that normal or the substrate is too wet even after colonizing?
3. I have made around 10 bags and in some bags the bottom half of the bag isn't being colonized, what can I do to solve that?
4. If the bags are ready to fruit, do I do a X slice on the bag and spray mist it once a day? Do I spray mist on the opening or just around the bag? What to do there?
5. If mycelium run has fully colonized from viewing the bag side, how can I know if it has colonized in the middle of the bag?

I hope I can keep contributing to the forum and keep learning from here.

Hello!
I'm no expert, but I have a little experience with mushrooms, so I'll share some thoughts.

I believe that once the mycelium has fully colonized the bag, you're pretty much ready to induce fruiting. Oysters are pretty aggressive, so probably just giving them some access to the atmosphere will get them started. Some other mushrooms do well with things like ice baths and other methods, so you might google around to see if you need to do that.

It looks like your straw isn't really hard-packed, so it might just be that you don't have a dense enough substrate for them to be very hard. Oysters are a wood-eating mushroom, so sending mycelium through something as dense as a log obviously isn't a challenge for them. You might end up not getting a lot of mushrooms if there's not a ton of substrate in the bags. (no worries, just keep experimenting!)

For the bottom half not being colonized, that reminds me of jar spawn problems I've had where the bottom of the jar ended up with too much water, and the rice I was using was too wet for the mycelium to colonize it. It wasn't totally submerged in water, it was just too wet and the mushrooms didn't like it. I'm sure there's some science on that somewhere. You might be able to poke some holes in the bottom, let any excess drain off, and maybe that straw will dry out some, allowing the mycelium to colonize it.

Cutting an X and misting the hole once or twice a day should do fine. If you have them in like a humidity tent, misting around them would be fine, but if they're in the open atmosphere, you'll want to mist the hole in the bag itself. It keeps the mycelium/fruit damp as it grows, otherwise you get cracked mushrooms that struggle to push a full fruit out.

My guess is that it has fully colonized it - again, the mycelium isn't really slowed down by a substrate with a low density like straw, so I doubt it would just go around the outside of the bag. If you're still curious, you could pull one out of the bag and tear/cut it in half to see. At this point the oysters have really taken over, so you're not really at risk of having a mold overtake them by exposing them that way. Some people might argue with that, but again I'm not an expert.  Then you can stick it back in the bag and continue on.

Good luck with them, I hope they fruit really well!
Also if you have them, I'd love to see pictures of your homemade pressure cooker!

Hey,

Thanks for replying. I have sliced the bags and misting it once or twice depending on the humidity of the room.

As for the homemade pressure cooker, it's more of a pressurized boiler to generate steam and that steam will go to a oil drum where my substrate goes in. Did the fabrication in my shop.

You could use one of your bags to colonize some logs to greatly increase the "food" for the mycelium with out much work.  

Some are familiar with the method of drilling holes in logs and hammering in inoculated wood pegs but my favorite method is the totem style.

With the totem style you just cut a 8" diameter or larger log into discs 6-12" thick.  Then you stack them with some of your inoculated straw in between each disc.  If you spray paint a line lengthwise down the log before you cut it makes it easier to stack the discs in their original orientation so you reduce the air gaps as much as possible.  I put a paper bag over the stack to keep the environment more humid during the first year.  If your totem stack is inoculated successfully you will get mushrooms for 3-5 years depending on the size and species of the wood.

The wood should be from a living tree that has not been contaminated with other fungus in the fall or winter when the tree is dormant.  This is because the sugar from the leaves is brought back into the wood and provides more food for the mushrooms.  I wait 1 week before I add my straw or saw dust because living wood as a natural fungicide that takes time to fade.

Some of the species that work best for Oyster are:

Aspen
Box Elder
Cottonwood
Willow
Hackberry
Mulberry
Sweet Gum