Growing mushrooms on acorns?

Has anyone tried this?  I have tons in the yard and already made lots of flour from them.  I filled a grow bag and pressure cooked it yesterday. I'm planning on putting some oyster spawn in it and see what happens .  

I think the challenge will be whether the mycelium can penetrate the shell of the acorn before the interior either spoils or the mycelium runs out of nutrient.  Perhaps you should try a batch where you smash the acorns with a hammer before sterilizing and see if there's a difference.
    Incidentally, leached and cooked acorns, prepared much as you would for people, are also wonderful food for chickens and probably other animals also.  Sheep, goats, and pigs will eat them off the ground as is, shell and all.

Didn't think about the shell.  I'll give it a try with some smashed ones too.

I think acorns would make a great substrate. Please post your results if you try it. If you smash the kernels they will undoubtedly contaminate. Bacteria will run through the mashed acorn  faster than you could imagine.

Mycelium has no trouble at all colonizing wet cellulose. I can bust open a fresh acorn shell with my thumb and forefinger to remove the nut. Mycelium can reduce the hardest woods to pulp that resembles a sponge disintegrating in your hands almost as quickly as it can through straw.

If a mycelium can colonize a substrate of acorn wood (oak chips) in 10 days, dont you think it could just as easily colonize the acorns?

I would dry them first, using an oven or whatever.

My last thought on this is that it will not work if you just pasteurized the kernals any more than pasteurizing wheat berries would work due to the high nutrition content. They would have to be pressure cooked just like grain spawn.

I did a few bags of acorns and straw mixed and a few of just acorns, all pressure cooked.  The colonization seems to be going slowly. But so is the oyster on coffee grounds. I'll post some photos soon.

I expected it would be slow. probably due to the pH of the acorns. For acorn flower the tannic acids are washed out but no way of doing that while keeping the acorn intact has occured to me so I wondered about colinization time. I think that that is probably a reason we dont usually see acorns on the ground covered in myc', but if you analyze decomposing acorns you can clearly see that bacteria have no trouble with the inner-nut.

Lots of possibilityies of what might come of your experimentation depending on where you go with it. You might be able to isolate a strain that thrives on a selective substrate which could give you an edge. It might be that the most practical application would be to make acorn flour and use that as a nutrient source with wood or straw.

I would also expect slow colonization with the oyster on coffee grounds as well as tomentose growth.

did you know that oyster mycelium does not degrade the caffeine in coffee substrates? The caffeine gets removed from the substrate and deposited in the shroom so the mushrooms are caffeinated. I've heard someone suggest growing oysters on a substrate made of mescaline containing cacti. Mushrooms are the new frontier of possibilities.

I once found a buried acorn that was colonized with mycelium, so I assume this would work.

The bags have going for just over a month.

This might be contaminated.  Looking a little to gray.

Here are a few more.

Lance Svenson wrote:I once found a buried acorn that was colonized with mycelium, so I assume this would work.

Yea, if you dig through the mulch you will find acorns colonized with mycelium but this is after it's been decomposed by the bacteria. Nothing gets buried without going through decomposition before it was even buried.

I agree that that one looks contaminated. Id've added a tyvek patch for better gas exchange. They seem too big for the one patch or maybe its just the pic.

Good work

The bags all have filter patches on them. They are a bit bigger than fist size around and a foot long.  I plan on letting them all go a bit longer before I take out the bad ones.

I waqs thinking they were much longer and was thinking they could use another patch on the bottom.