Siemen Cox

In my experience it's best to buy spawn and experiment with that. But indeed the big professional spawn suppliers do not deliver to homegrowers.

Tip: Contact a local mushroom farmer and see if you can buy one bag of spawn of him/her.

As a mushroom professional I see a lot of comments where terminology is mixed.

Different substrates need to be treated differently. Some need to be pasteurised [straw] some need to be sterilised [Wood dust] some may never be sterilised [straw]. So make sure your answer is related to the correct substrate.
And boiling straw is never a good idea. Because boiling means above 100 C and you should never boil your straw.

I would be reserved in using pine needles as a substrate. Especially when you are a beginner. Straw is by far the easiest to learn to grow mushrooms. My advice: Use chopped straw. Easier to handle. :-)

Dry mushrooms are in most of the cases related to the environment [To dry] or waiting to long with harvesting.
On our YouTube channel [rotterzwam] we offer several videos on how to handle mushrooms.
This one is on dry mushrooms.  

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Siemen

Thanks for sharing!

Hello there,

Since my PDC in Portugal [Terra Alta] I have been fascinated with permaculture. It was a matter of time before I joined this forum, and some more time before I found the time to do my first post. Although my name was flagged as inappropriate [which I can understand] but it is my given Dutch birth name. My parents sucked at English as you can understand. ;-)

I do not know if this is the correct place for introducing myself, but let's just go ahead. I'll use the bumperstickers that I checked as a guide for the activities that have my most attention.

Tiny house
I lover living simple and after seeing 'we the tiny house people' I wanted one myself. As the Dutch weather is not ideal for tiny house living, we opted to build a tiny house for Cabo Verde. Under the name Horta Boa Vista we have succesfully build a 20 container house from The Netherlands to Cabo Verde. I will post pictures here in the Tiny House forums of the build of the house. Attached two pictures of how it stands now.
The plan is to create a permaculture inspiration centre and train the locals [and others] in adopting permaculture. In the future we plan to accept WOOFERS who can stay on site in a tent.

Urban farming
When I did my PDC I was introduced in a concept called 'The Blue Economy'. A book about more then 100 business cases you can do from waste. Specificly the business case to grow mushroom on coffee grounds resonated with me. I decided to build a business like that. Under the name RotterZwam, I created [together with my business partner] a mushroom farm in a former subtropical swimming paradise in the city centre of Rotterdam.

We believe in a society that closes loops, uses raw materials to the maximum of their potential and that consumes more green then animal based proteins. We produce mushrooms, give webinars and share a lot of information though our YouTube channel. I will post stuf here as well on the mushroom topic.

Composting
I love to compost. Worm composting has my specific attention. I am working on a project to compost al the organic material of the building we are residing in, with worms. Also on this topic, I will be posting stuff. I attach a picture of my wormbin in full activity.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask