Growing oyster mushrooms on cardboard or jeans

Tradd Cotter of Mushroom Mountain wrote an article on growing mushrooms on cardboard, which has since disappeared from Chelsea Green's website. Where I grew up in Maryland I think it'd be easy due to the humid climate but now I'm in a dry climate I think it might be more challenging to maintain suitable humidity levels. He also wrote an article on growing mushrooms on jeans which is still available Grow mushrooms on your jeans. I'd be curious to know if anyone's tried either of these methods. I live in an apartment so am looking for alternatives to the inoculating logs method.

I haven't tried it myself, but oysters are some of the easiest to experiment with and I've gotten them to grow on different types of woody material. If you have them growing in the wild, you can pick them and make a slurry. Mature oyster fruiting bodies often have a "bloom" or whitish cast on the upper surface. This is active mycelium and makes a simple culture...all you need to do is scrape it off and put it on whatever growing medium you have.

I have tried it, and my sample got contaminated.    I think next I need to build a hood to try it again.

Mine are growing in a 5 gallon bucket on aspen shavings.   You will probably need a large clear trash bag to put over the bucket.  I needed it here in Wyoming as otherwise it is too dry for them.  

Dorothy Pohorelow wrote:Mine are growing in a 5 gallon bucket on aspen shavings.   You will probably need a large clear trash bag to put over the bucket.  I needed it here in Wyoming as otherwise it is too dry for them.  

I've thought about doing this as my intro to growing mushrooms!

Seems easy enough!

Due to our low humidity I was not sure how well any mushrooms would grow and how hard it would be to provide the humidity they need.   So I opted to start with a small on the counter grow kit.  I picked lions mane and we got a couple of flushes from the kit.  Which led me to do more research and I discovered the bucket Tek.  A sale on the big bale of aspen shavings at Petco prompted me to try it.  FYI that bale made two full buckets with some left over.  My single biggest expense was buying the spawn to inoculate the aspen.  BUT once it warms up and that bucket is slowing down I will use it to seed an outdoor bed or even another bucket so with care that will be a one time expense.

There are also videos on using unused paper cat litter and of course cardboard and blue jeans that mostly use some form of oyster mushroom as they are the least picky about what they grow on.

Growing oyster mushrooms on cardboard. I have tried it. I failed at it :) I'm reasonably confident I know why the experiment failed and how to make it work.
What I tried to do was, in essence, continually collect all cardboard and junkmail that came to our site into a large wire bin. I had already collected something over a cubic meter when I tried to inoculate the pile with oyster mushroom spawn. This was not Good Planning ;) The material could not be mixed to get the spawn distributed and it also was not possible to actually get that mass of cardboard and paper anywhere near as wet as it needed to be.

On a small scale, like the buckets up thread, you can absolutely soak the cardboard and the volume is small enough to inoculate effectively even if it won't mix in.

If I try it again (when, who am I kidding?) I'll collect a few pounds of material, totally saturate to where it is breaking down, inoculate that and then continually add more wet substrate.