My Experiences so far Growing Mushrooms

This is a synopsis of my mushroom growing experience.  I’m hoping others can benefit from both what I’ve learned and from my mistakes.

My first experiment with mushroom growing was oyster mushrooms in quart canning jars filled with birdseed, followed by wheat, and a couple with coffee grounds. I also experimented with several strains of oyster mushrooms.

Coffee grounds were a complete failure with me.  I suspect they needed drained more, and I simply had them too wet.  Coffee grounds are extremely rich in nutrients and prone to infection.

The grain, both birdseed and wheat, were soaked overnight, changing the water several times after stirring, so that you get rid of the things that float to the top. The grain and water mix was brought to a boil for several minutes to increase the water content of the grain.  Then the grain was drained and spread out to allow the extra water to evaporate. I put beach towels down on the kitchen table then landscaping fabric over it to do this.

The canning jars were then filled with grain, and sealed with a modified lid and ring.  The modified lid had a hole drilled in it and synthetic pillow stuffing pulled partway through.   I then placed foil over each jar and rubber bands around it to hold the foil in place.

I cooked the jars to sterilize the substrate for 45 minutes in the pressure cooker at 15 pounds PSI.  After the jars had cooled completely, I removed the foil.  I only had plug spawn on hand, so one at a time I opened each jar, dropped in five plugs and closed the lid back up.  I then shook the jars to distribute the plugs.

I realize I breached the sterilized environment this way.  I properly should have used sterilized needles to inject a liquid spore solution, or added the plugs under a laminar flow hood.  And used either sawdust spawn or grain spawn.

But oysters are aggressive and I had infection in about one in ten jars.  Infection rate seemed higher on wheat, which makes sense as it is a richer in nutrients.

I feel that from a substrate to yield ratio that jars are one of the most efficient ways to grow mushrooms.

I was very happy with the yields I got, although some varieties performed better then others.   Although they are beautiful, I will not grow golden oysters again for two reasons.   The caps were very thin resulting in a reduced yield over all the other varieties.  And they are escaping into the wild and becoming an invasive fungus, as they are not native.  I’ve since settled on the blue oyster variety for all my oyster growing.  It’s a good all weather strain, yields well and tastes great.

I had several problems develop.   I grew these in the basement in winter to start, as it warmed up, I moved them outside, then to the garage.   In the basement, I started having a problem with fungal gnats.   The didn’t impact production but were a bother.  Once I moved them outside, the red squirrels discovered that the jars contained grain, and started digging it out of the jars to eat.   So I moved them into the garage.  The problem continued until I observed how the red squirrels were entering and exiting the garage and plugged those holes.

Then I tried using oat straw in buckets.  Take a five gallon bucket, drill several drain holes in the bottom. Using a quarter inch bit, drill holes all over the bucket, keeping them about 4 inches apart.  Don’t drill in the top and bottom 2 inches.  

I soaked straw overnight, then spread it out on a tarp to let excess water drain.  I then put about two inches of straw  in the bucket and compressed it.  I sprinkled a handful of spawn on it, then repeated the layers of straw and spawn, ending with a layer of straw at the top. Then I put the lid on the buckets and stacked them three high. A half bale of straw and a bag of spawn fills from 6 to 8 buckets.

Once the oysters started to pin, I sprayed them directly at least twice a day with tap water(I think spraying them more often promotes quicker growth). Results were amazing, with a heavy first flush, often within six weeks. A slightly weaker second flush followed, and some provided a weak third flush.  

Note that I didn’t sterilize the straw at all, nor did I chop it up.  If I was using wheat straw, it would have to be chopped into smaller pieces.  The oat straw is shorter.  

The bucket method has become my favorite method for growing oyster mushrooms.  It is easy and quick to do, provides high yields and does it in a much shorter time than any of the other methods I’ve use to grow oysters.  I can grow more oysters in a much shorter time than other methods. For instance, I did eight buckets the day after Thanksgiving.  So far I’ve harvested 8.8 pounds of oyster mushrooms and the buckets are still producing.

I have since tried growing oysters in straw bales and straw beds, as I’ve seen videos of.   I had absolutely no luck with the three beds or six bales I tried.   On the straw bales, Monotropa uniflora, (the ghost plant, ghost pipe, Indian pipe) fed upon any mycelium that grew and animals devoured most of the grain spawn (I should have used sawdust spawn).  The straw beds just set there, doing nothing, despite regular watering.  

My most recent attempt at growing mushrooms was using grow bags and masters mix (50 percent hardwood sawdust and 50 percent ground soy hulls, hydrated to approximately 60 percent).  That works out to one pound each hardwood sawdust and soy hulls, and three pounds of water in each bag.  

The bags were then folded closed, rubber banded so they would stay that way. I was then able to put two at a time in a pressure cooker, where I cooked them for 2 hours at 15 psi.  After they cooled, I inoculated them with spawn, and sealed them.  Again, this would be better to do in a laminar flow hood.

So far, I have tried this method with oyster, lions mane, chestnut and hen of the woods.  The hen of the woods colonized the bags well, but I could never get it to fruit.  The oysters did well, but took several months to produce.   Both the chestnut and lions mane did great.

But while the chestnuts could be sprayed directly, like the oysters, the lions mane discolors off sprayed directly.  So it needed a shotgun fruiting chamber. Take a large clear plastic tote.  Drill small holes all over it and a couple drain holes in the bottom.  Pour two inches of perlite in the bottom. Now spray the sides and the perlite, put in the grow bags, and spray the sides several times a day.  Remove the lid and wave it over the tote, to give the mushrooms fresh air.  But the totes only hold 3 or 4 grow bags.  And I start 8 at a time normally.

Note that lions mane gets deformed if it doesn’t get enough fresh air.  Instead of the teeth growing straight and downward, it grows upwards and branches. It still tastes the same.

This year I have an automated system that controls humidity and fresh air.  And it holds 12 bags at a time.   It worked well on chestnut mushrooms and I recently started lions mane bags, which should do well also.

I tried wine caps on a bed of straw and got nothing.  Then I dumped several buckets of sawdust and another layer of straw and inoculated it again.  Now I definitely have wine caps established there, and have harvested one nice flush.

I have started both oyster and shiitake logs.  The shiitakes fruited nicely last fall, but the oysters have not fruited yet.

Kevin,

I wish I had enough time right now to thoroughly respond to your post, but your mushroom harvest looks amazing!  Good job on getting a wide variety of mushrooms in one harvest “season”.

Eric

Kevin,

Ok, I finally got a chance to read your entire post thoroughly.  Wow!  You really went out of your way to try a bunch of different mushroom species.

I have grown plenty of Wine Caps outside, mostly as a decomposing agent, but also for mushrooms.  I find Wine Caps pretty bulletproof.  I would like to try Oyster Mushrooms but have heard that they are a bit more temperamental.  Up till this point I have ONLY grown mushrooms in my garden but I might try some in my woods just to be different.

Kevin, you have given some great information about your project that might be helpful for others trying their own projects.  Please keep this updated so that we can see how things work, and don’t work as they happen.  This is a great tool for learning.  I know I can learn a lot from it and I am sure others can learn much as well.

Eric

Thanks Eric, that what I intended this post to do.

My desire to grow mushrooms grew out of my hobby of hunting wild mushrooms.  So much to learn, but joining a mushroom club helps.  This last summer helped too because it was very wet, and as a result I saw many mushrooms that I had not encountered before. Great opportunity for learning.

As I said the automated system with humidity and fresh air control is great for lions mane.  I’m going to start harvesting from the first flush today, and expect three flushes.

Here you can see the difference between the deformed lions mane in the initial post, and what they look like if given enough fresh air. First four clusters I harvested today.

First flush (three expected) totaled 8.7 pounds or just over a pound per bag.  I gave away 6 large and two small clusters and this was what I harvested this afternoon.

I’m getting a nice second flush on the lions mane.

A note on the 8 buckets of oysters I started the day after Thanksgiving.  They started fruiting in early January and are still producing mushrooms. I harvested a nice cluster today and have five small clusters developing.  I have picked over 15 pounds of oysters from these buckets so far.

I started 8 bags of chestnut mushrooms and eight more bags of lions mane two weeks ago.

I had similar experience with coffee. A complete failure

The oyster buckets that I inoculated the day after Thanksgiving continue to amaze me.  I harvested three clusters of oysters last week. And right now four of the buckets have mushrooms developing on them right now.  Yield for the eight buckets total over 20 pounds so far!

Kevin, I have been thinking about branching out into oyster mushrooms for a while now and you may have given me the impetus to finally do it.

Eric

Hi Eric, so do you buy plugs from some lab, then inoculate it in birdseed or grain canning jars, then grow it out in straw or sawdust outside? Why can't you just directly grow it in logs? Also, is there a way to avoid having the dependence on the lab? Can you continue to propagate the mushroom, either as spawn, or take a clonal sample below the cap of the fruit, or a spore print and inoculate/expand those in grain before inoculating logs or straw or sawdust?

Eric, where did you source your automated system? Or did you design and build it yourself? How temperamental are the mushrooms on temperature? And where are you sourcing your spore?

I think that plug question was probably a result of what I said.  The only reason I used plugs at all is that I was just starting out, experimenting and it was the only type of spawn I had.

I buy bagged spawn, either grain or sawdust.

What results after I grow mushrooms is a bag or bucket full of colonized substrate.  What’s the definition of spawn?  Colonized substrate.

I do use it as spawn for my next generation.  I’ll do it for three generations, then start with fresh bought spawn.  Why?  My experience is the yields diminished.

The automated system, and most of my spawn is sourced from NorthSpore.

Temperatures for fruiting depend on the type of mushroom you grow and even varies greatly among oyster varieties.  I grow blue oysters because they are more forgiving on temperatures.
Most of the mushrooms I grow fruit readily at 65-70 degrees in my basement

Kevin Hoover wrote:

This is a synopsis of my mushroom growing experience.  I’m hoping others can benefit from both what I’ve learned and from my mistakes.

My first experiment with mushroom growing was oyster mushrooms in quart canning jars filled with birdseed, followed by wheat, and a couple with coffee grounds. I also experimented with several strains of oyster mushrooms.

Coffee grounds were a complete failure with me.  I suspect they needed drained more, and I simply had them too wet.  Coffee grounds are extremely rich in nutrients and prone to infection.

The grain, both birdseed and wheat, were soaked overnight, changing the water several times after stirring, so that you get rid of the things that float to the top. The grain and water mix was brought to a boil for several minutes to increase the water content of the grain.  Then the grain was drained and spread out to allow the extra water to evaporate. I put beach towels down on the kitchen table then landscaping fabric over it to do this.

The canning jars were then filled with grain, and sealed with a modified lid and ring.  The modified lid had a hole drilled in it and synthetic pillow stuffing pulled partway through.   I then placed foil over each jar and rubber bands around it to hold the foil in place.

I cooked the jars to sterilize the substrate for 45 minutes in the pressure cooker at 15 pounds PSI.  After the jars had cooled completely, I removed the foil.  I only had plug spawn on hand, so one at a time I opened each jar, dropped in five plugs and closed the lid back up.  I then shook the jars to distribute the plugs.

I realize I breached the sterilized environment this way.  I properly should have used sterilized needles to inject a liquid spore solution, or added the plugs under a laminar flow hood.  And used either sawdust spawn or grain spawn.

But oysters are aggressive and I had infection in about one in ten jars.  Infection rate seemed higher on wheat, which makes sense as it is a richer in nutrients.

I feel that from a substrate to yield ratio that jars are one of the most efficient ways to grow mushrooms.

I was very happy with the yields I got, although some varieties performed better then others.   Although they are beautiful, I will not grow golden oysters again for two reasons.   The caps were very thin resulting in a reduced yield over all the other varieties.  And they are escaping into the wild and becoming an invasive fungus, as they are not native.  I’ve since settled on the blue oyster variety for all my oyster growing.  It’s a good all weather strain, yields well and tastes great.

I had several problems develop.   I grew these in the basement in winter to start, as it warmed up, I moved them outside, then to the garage.   In the basement, I started having a problem with fungal gnats.   The didn’t impact production but were a bother.  Once I moved them outside, the red squirrels discovered that the jars contained grain, and started digging it out of the jars to eat.   So I moved them into the garage.  The problem continued until I observed how the red squirrels were entering and exiting the garage and plugged those holes.

Then I tried using oat straw in buckets.  Take a five gallon bucket, drill several drain holes in the bottom. Using a quarter inch bit, drill holes all over the bucket, keeping them about 4 inches apart.  Don’t drill in the top and bottom 2 inches.  

I soaked straw overnight, then spread it out on a tarp to let excess water drain.  I then put about two inches of straw  in the bucket and compressed it.  I sprinkled a handful of spawn on it, then repeated the layers of straw and spawn, ending with a layer of straw at the top. Then I put the lid on the buckets and stacked them three high. A half bale of straw and a bag of spawn fills from 6 to 8 buckets.

Once the oysters started to pin, I sprayed them directly at least twice a day with tap water(I think spraying them more often promotes quicker growth). Results were amazing, with a heavy first flush, often within six weeks. A slightly weaker second flush followed, and some provided a weak third flush.  

Note that I didn’t sterilize the straw at all, nor did I chop it up.  If I was using wheat straw, it would have to be chopped into smaller pieces.  The oat straw is shorter.  

The bucket method has become my favorite method for growing oyster mushrooms.  It is easy and quick to do, provides high yields and does it in a much shorter time than any of the other methods I’ve use to grow oysters.  I can grow more oysters in a much shorter time than other methods. For instance, I did eight buckets the day after Thanksgiving.  So far I’ve harvested 8.8 pounds of oyster mushrooms and the buckets are still producing.

I have since tried growing oysters in straw bales and straw beds, as I’ve seen videos of.   I had absolutely no luck with the three beds or six bales I tried.   On the straw bales, Monotropa uniflora, (the ghost plant, ghost pipe, Indian pipe) fed upon any mycelium that grew and animals devoured most of the grain spawn (I should have used sawdust spawn).  The straw beds just set there, doing nothing, despite regular watering.  

My most recent attempt at growing mushrooms was using grow bags and masters mix (50 percent hardwood sawdust and 50 percent ground soy hulls, hydrated to approximately 60 percent).  That works out to one pound each hardwood sawdust and soy hulls, and three pounds of water in each bag.  

The bags were then folded closed, rubber banded so they would stay that way. I was then able to put two at a time in a pressure cooker, where I cooked them for 2 hours at 15 psi.  After they cooled, I inoculated them with spawn, and sealed them.  Again, this would be better to do in a laminar flow hood.

So far, I have tried this method with oyster, lions mane, chestnut and hen of the woods.  The hen of the woods colonized the bags well, but I could never get it to fruit.  The oysters did well, but took several months to produce.   Both the chestnut and lions mane did great.

But while the chestnuts could be sprayed directly, like the oysters, the lions mane discolors off sprayed directly.  So it needed a shotgun fruiting chamber. Take a large clear plastic tote.  Drill small holes all over it and a couple drain holes in the bottom.  Pour two inches of perlite in the bottom. Now spray the sides and the perlite, put in the grow bags, and spray the sides several times a day.  Remove the lid and wave it over the tote, to give the mushrooms fresh air.  But the totes only hold 3 or 4 grow bags.  And I start 8 at a time normally.

Note that lions mane gets deformed if it doesn’t get enough fresh air.  Instead of the teeth growing straight and downward, it grows upwards and branches. It still tastes the same.

This year I have an automated system that controls humidity and fresh air.  And it holds 12 bags at a time.   It worked well on chestnut mushrooms and I recently started lions mane bags, which should do well also.

I tried wine caps on a bed of straw and got nothing.  Then I dumped several buckets of sawdust and another layer of straw and inoculated it again.  Now I definitely have wine caps established there, and have harvested one nice flush.

I have started both oyster and shiitake logs.  The shiitakes fruited nicely last fall, but the oysters have not fruited yet.

Kevin; many thanks for explaining your experience in detail, which is helpful and fascinating. I’ve never tried growing mushrooms, but now I’m inspired to start. Your yield looks fantastic!

Hi Iuval, good questions you have there!  I will try to get to these in the order you asked them.

Firstly though, I really don’t have a supply of logs that I can use.  What I have is an endless supply of brush alongside a fence line that needs trimming every 2-3 years.  This brush is not really conducive to plugging, but I can run it through a chipper and make small mountains of wood chips.

I then spread these wood chips into garden beds and I inoculate with mushroom spawn, in my case, frequently using Wine Caps, but feel free to use others if you like.

As far avoiding lab dependence, yes, it is possible and it can be done using the spores as you mentioned.  You could also harvest the mushroom but sever the “root mass”, pull it and replant its another spot.

But the easiest way is to either dig up some chips that have an active network of mycelium growing or simply add chips on top of those chips.

I will give one word of warning though.  This can be a bit tricky to time.  The fungi won’t push up a mushroom until it is starving, deprived of wood to consume.  Adding new chips AFTER a mushroom flush may not give you the desired results.

I mostly grow mushrooms for the effects they have on my soil.  I have a long-running thread HERE:

https://permies.com/t/82798/composting/composting-wood-chips-chicken-litter

This details my fungal journey and I keep it updated.  I have also included a link in the first entry to a page of other pages about growing mushrooms.  If you are really interested, I suggest starting there.

I hope this helps.  If I failed to address any point, please feel free to ask.

Eric

I should have added, I use the company Field and Forest.net.   They are reasonably priced and great to work with.

Eric

As I stated earlier, I have not chopped my straw I use in the oyster mushroom buckets.

But I recently read a study that indicates chopped straw produces higher yields than unchopped straw, so I’ll try chopping it in future buckets.

Easy way to chop it is putting about an eighth of a bale into a clean barrel or trash can and then sticking a weed waker into it.

I’m also going to experiment with hydrated lime pasteurization. And with cotton seed hulls.

Great share Kevin!

I hope you turned the ghost pipe into tinctures. I'm under the impression that ghost pipe is difficult to cultivate on purpose and is usually foraged. But it makes a strong medicine.

Are you selling your mushrooms by chance? I'm considering growing for farmers markets and I have no clue how economically viable mushrooms are right now. I'm sure it's highly dependent on location. But you've been at it, you've got an idea of the labor and input costs. How much would you have to sell them for to not only break even, but make it worth the time and effort?

Ok, If you have made it this far on Kevin's excellent thread about growing mushrooms, I want to let everyone know about my Wine Cap thread.  I am not trying to hijack this thread by any means.  Quite the contrary, it is so good that I have decided to add it to my central mushroom (especially Wine Cap) growing page.

Like I said, this is not a hijack.  I actually just added a link to this thread from another centralized thread, so since everyone here is interested in growing mushrooms, I am including a link back to that site.

https://permies.com/t/wine-cap-mushrooms#1372440

Kevin has given some awesome advice and shared some amazing mushroom growing experiences.  He even mentioned that he is documenting his experiences for others!  Great!  I hope that everyone can learn from all of our collective experiences.

Happy mushrooming!

Eric

Okay Kevin, you have all these mushrooms that you have grown. Now can they be preserved to save them for later use? How would one go about preserving them?

Eric,
No problem at all.  You’re much more experienced with wine caps than I am and I enjoy reading what you’ve wrote.

Preserving mushrooms?   I eat them, give them to friends, fry and freeze them or dehydrate and store in sealed canning jars.  Same with the wild mushrooms I gather, except I rarely give those to friends for safety, even though I am extremely careful.

No I do not grow for profit.  I’ve watched enough videos to know doing so is extremely labor intensive.

You can also pickle them.  I’ve only done that with button mushrooms I buy.  

And yes, I occasionally buy button mushrooms.  Once in a while I travel through the SE corner of PA where they are grown all over.  One place sells me 5 lbs of medium button mushrooms, organic and freshly picked for $10.  That’s had to pass up

I couldn't find it just now; but a while back I watched an intriguing vid on Youtube: growing oyster mushrooms from actual fresh mushrooms I think the poster was in Italy. It is DEAD EASY and I've done it twice because I didn't make a large enough batch the first time, and then we travelled and it dried out. (although I brought it back!!)

Here it is: buy some oyster mushrooms, put them in the blender with enough water to make them into a "smoothie".  Get some very clean hay or straw and use your sink spray or shower to get it wet w HOT water. (You do NOT need to sterliize: the original vid said to boil it but I noticed it made a brown tea that took away a lot of the nutrients.  It works fine without sterilization; think about Mother Nature, and relax).  Then, pour your warm, drained hay/straw into a big food-safe plastic bag (5-gal ones on a roll from Amazon; use some for lining 5 gal buckets when fermenting or pickling nig batches!!) and massage all of the mushroom smoothie into it.  PACK TIGHTLY into a container: a box, bucket, etc. and squeeze out the extra air; tie off.

Then, you either set it on a warm floor vent (I did this the first time, it was February) for about 2 weeks, or set it on a germination mat or just in a warm place: it needs 2 weeks at about 70 degrees F to form its lovely solid micorrhizae.  After this, decide whether you want to open up the whole top, or make holes around the sides (you don't need many, these will "mushroom" out of a single nickel-sized hole and cover the whole side of your box/bucket.

You may add some chunks of fresh clean hardwood to the straw/hay; this I find gives longevity, much like adding rabbit poo to your "perpetual" wicking bed; the longer there is food, the longer you will get flushes of mushes. If you add the wood, soak those a good day or so, or just make sure the whole thing is extra-wet before you close the bag.

Oyster mushrooms come in many colors; I have planted the pink ones outdoors here (grr, things plowed up and ate every single shred so nothing ever came back!!! so now they are all in the greenhouse, hanging in holey buckets, since something loves them exceedingly).  I mention this because if you want them year round, you may wish to do some pink, which fruit from 80-90 degrees F; and some grey/white which fruit at about 60-70 degrees F and some varieties even cooler.

You do need to keep the substrate moist; the mushrooms will draw up the original mositure.  I am going to experiment with wicking made from some of that super-fat yarn they made in the 60's and 70's (yep, I'm that old) burying it the length of the bucket in several places, with the ends in a refillable jar on the top.  Haven't done it yet but it sounds brilliant, doesn't it?

I would like to make the point in all this, that while we NEED the Stammets method in mass-production of medicinal mushrooms and production of reliable spawn, there is a lot of room for the DIY method: look at nature, and see how the little buggers pop up everywhere, without special strerilization and all of those lab instruments and things. As long as you bear in mind that you need to use clean straw/hay/wood (but I have had about 20% mildew in mine and it's worked) and get it warm and keep it warm, to allow the spores to activate and quickly outnumber/overpower anything else that might be there, you are good and it will work so well, you'll have to figure out how to put up the extras XD

Kevin, you mentioned that you spray your oyster mushrooms in buckets directly. I have been trying to grow oyster in buckets on sugar cane mulch and haven't had much luck with the size of my flushes, despite using a fairly high grain spawn to substrate ratio. I also pasteurise the substrate by soaking in hot water with lime for a few hours. I have them in a plastic greenhouse as a fruiting chamber under the stairs outside, so they get natural light but very little direct sunlight. I have been spraying the chamber several times a day when they fruit, but not the mushrooms directly. I am wondering if spraying them directly works better with oysters than just spraying the area around them? If you have experimented with that at all.
My buckets pin well, but then they get to a certain size and seem to start smelling funky, or dry out. I've had a few bigger flushes when the weather is really humid. I'm guessing it must be a humidity issue as I keep the door of the chamber open for airflow.

Love the idea of using your buckets of inoculated substrate to re-inculate fresh substrate! Will have to try that one.

That sounds like a humidity problem to me.  My oyster pins tend to dry up more in the winter when the humidity is low, versus the more humid summer.

To address an earlier question on raising mushrooms as a business.  Grocycle has a good video explaining costs and approaches.  A semi occupational setup (about 160 lbs of mushrooms/week) is estimated at about $20000 cost to establish, and I don’t think that addresses production costs.  Marketing, to my thinking, would be my greatest hurdle.  That might be easier if you were near a bigger city with more market.

Betsy,
Thanks so much for the detailed instructions on low tech mushroom cultivation, I will give it a try!

About your hydration wick, if your plan doesn’t work, here’s another idea.

Use a strip of towel, cotton or linen, no polyester etc.  To test its ability to transport water, here’s an idea to “pre-test” it.

Fill a reservoir of water half full.  A quart jar would do.  Put the end of a strip of cotton material down into the water.  The strip comes up and over the rim of the jar, then down to a level lower than the reservoir.  It’s been a very long time since I did this, and I can’t remember if you have to pre-wet the whole strip.  

It should work as a siphon, with the capillarity of the fabric functioning as the tube.  I discovered this by accident, the water gone out of the reservoir, and a lake on the floor.  I was trying to humidify a cheese curing and aging space.  I thought with the bath towel in the water, it would stay moist for continuous evaporation, but something else happened!😊