Growing mushrooms

[Patchouli]

Let’s start a thread on growing mushrooms, mostly for food or medicinal. I bought a kit from Walmart.
Some of us might be situated by a wooded area to harvest wild growth mushrooms.
Or situated to purchase everything needed to get some started.
If you grow mushrooms please share your information.
@MoBookworm1957 you mentioned mushrooms in garden 2024 thread.

 

[elkhound]

I have grown some mushrooms from my own logs i cut and inoculated with spore from this place https://www.fieldforest.net/ and some from e-bay too.

I have grown shiitake,blue dolphins and one lions mane...it was least productive.

edit...i tried chicken of the woods but it was 100% failure.

 

[jazzy]

years back i tried growing some mushrooms from a kit--pretty sure they were just button mushrooms. grew them in a bucket in closet---terrific yields. , i was really surprised. i think i dehydrated most of them, . totally forgot aobut doing that---thanks for this thread and reminder. i think i will try that again, it was simple enough i can still do that.

 

[Amish Heart]

I have a kit I haven't started yet. They're pink. Our son in NM is working with a mushroom growing place to get their discard substrate and he's doing fertilizer experiments with it, thinking about selling his end product.

 

[Hooch]

interesting...

 

[Hooch]

Ooh! Lol..

 

[jazzy]

this is sort of what i tried years ago--found this on amazonm. the one i got before was from some mushroom company but it was this easy.

https://www.amazon.com/White-Button...ix=button+mushroom+growing+kit,aps,198&sr=8-1

 

[MoBookworm1957]

Well I tried growing mushrooms last year.
50% failure.
But the 50% that failed was a 100% win.
It kept the neighborhood terrors out of my garden.
And they learned a bit of math, science, at the same time.

 

[Patchouli]

Do tell, @MoBookworm1957 how did the terrors learn math and science?
This is awesome to read y’all’s comments.
I think my LH had grown Reishi, it grew well but I wasn’t in the right place in my mind to do anything with it. And @elkhound and @Amish Heart my my memory is so bad, I forgot the words you’re using, substrate, inoculation.
Is this an okay time of year to get something started? For my area, probably yes.
And @Hooch I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ll be discussing growing those kinds of mushrooms openly.

 

[elkhound]

Do tell, @MoBookworm1957 how did the terrors learn math and science?
This is awesome to read y’all’s comments.
I think my LH had grown Reishi, it grew well but I wasn’t in the right place in my mind to do anything with it. And @elkhound and @Amish Heart my my memory is so bad, I forgot the words you’re using, substrate, inoculation.
Is this an okay time of year to get something started? For my area, probably yes.
And @Hooch I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ll be discussing growing those kinds of mushrooms openly.

Inoculation is putting spores into your logs or whatever medium you are growing the mushrooms on/in.You drill holes and fill with spore paste or drive wooden dowels containing spore into holes,then cover all holes and end of logs with wax. This helps keep other stuff from getting in and growing.

For logs you need to cut in winter and do everything well before spring time.

 

[Hooch]

Do tell, @MoBookworm1957 how did the terrors learn math and science?
This is awesome to read y’all’s comments.
I think my LH had grown Reishi, it grew well but I wasn’t in the right place in my mind to do anything with it. And @elkhound and @Amish Heart my my memory is so bad, I forgot the words you’re using, substrate, inoculation.
Is this an okay time of year to get something started? For my area, probably yes.
And @Hooch I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ll be discussing growing those kinds of mushrooms openly.

Understood lol....those are for research purposes only.. anyway

I would like to grow some medicinal kind and mini bells to dehydrate but growing conditions are not great here in winter..gets too cold n hard to maintain good temps.

 

[Hooch]

Do tell, @MoBookworm1957 how did the terrors learn math and science?
This is awesome to read y’all’s comments.
I think my LH had grown Reishi, it grew well but I wasn’t in the right place in my mind to do anything with it. And @elkhound and @Amish Heart my my memory is so bad, I forgot the words you’re using, substrate, inoculation.
Is this an okay time of year to get something started? For my area, probably yes.
And @Hooch I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ll be discussing growing those kinds of mushrooms

 

[Shawn Burkett]

I bought a kit for hubby that he never used. How long do spores last?

 

[Hooch]

I would think like most other spores but I've never done a kit so I'm not sure how those spores are packaged.

Most of the time you can store your spores in the fridge for generally around a year or so. The spores will go dormant in the fridge.

So you can easily grow small batches of your favorite mushroom for fresh salads or spaghetti sauce , and not have to use the whole syringe all at once.

It's best to follow what the kit instructions say. Some variety of mushroom spores are more hardy than others.

 

[joel]

https://mailchi.mp/fieldforest.net/september-2024-newsletter-091924?e=c3db596f41

Holy Shiitake! A Mushroom Log Story.​

In April 2024 we received a customer email customer that simply said, “Pretty cool Shiitake log in Southeast Ohio. This is its 2nd year.” We opened the attached image expecting to see a nice Shiitake log, but we were totally unprepared for its magnitude.

After seeing the photo, we reached out to the senders, Bryan and Tracie in Southeast Ohio, in order to find out the story of their logs. Here it is:

“I had cut the white oak tree because it had been hit by lightning in a cow pasture. Half of the tree was still alive and I dropped it in March 2022 and used the limbs to make mushroom logs. The trunk of the tree was over 3 feet in diameter, but wasn’t suitable for sale so I decided to inoculate it. I used a chainsaw and cut 3” deep grooves in a X-pattern around the log, stuffed the X's with Shiitake sawdust spawn an