Growing Mushrooms

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Zack

Growing Mushrooms

Post by Zack » Wed Feb 19, 2020 5:04 pm

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You can grow a whole lot of oyster mushrooms in a five gallon bucket. All you need is the bucket, mushroom spores, wood chips, and a drill bit 1/4" wide. You can often get food-safe buckets for free at a local bakery.

First you need to pasteurize the wood chips. To do this you can put them in a storage bin. Then, you fill it up with hot water from the tap. Don't drown the wood chips in water-- just get them wet enough. Then, you're going to add a few gallons of boiling water. Cover up the container and leave overnight.

For the bucket, you take the drill bit and drill holes around the sides and bottoms. As an estimate, five holes going down each column should be good. The holes on the bottom are for drainage. The holes around the sides are for the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms. It's amazing how many big mushrooms you can get out of those tiny holes.

Once your wood chips are done, you can add them to the bucket. When adding them, however, you alternate in a layer cake fashion between the spores and wood chips. If your wood chips are leaking water, just squeeze them out. Also, make sure you pack down the material in your bucket. Make sure the last layer is wood chips.

Cover up your bucket and wait for it to colonize. When it's colonized you should see mycelium growing. Mycelium, for those who don't know, are like the "roots" of the mushrooms. It looks like fibrous, moldy roots and everything should be like a big block at it's peak. It may take a few weeks to fully colonize, but once that happens you can bring it outside (if you want to keep it outside) to fruit.

Make sure the fruiting bodies stay moist. They don't like too much sun or wind. They need humidity to make sure they don't dry out. You can mist them with water to keep moist. Once you cut off a group to harvest, eventually, more mushrooms will grow in its place.
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This setup allows a large amount of mushrooms to be continuously harvested at basically no maintenance cost.

The last thing you need is to enjoy the taste! :lol:

GandalfTheWhite
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Re: Growing Mushrooms

Post by GandalfTheWhite » Thu Oct 01, 2020 9:48 pm

where do you suggest buying spores?

once its going there is no need to rebuy spores, it just grows perpetually?

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Grimork
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Re: Growing Mushrooms

Post by Grimork » Fri Oct 02, 2020 10:45 am

Gandalf,
Zack doesn't appear to be active at the moment so I took the liberty to search up a page about bucket growing mushrooms that may answer your questions https://blog.freshcapmushrooms.com/learn/bucket-grow/

Enjoy!

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White Man 1
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Re: Growing Mushrooms

Post by White Man 1 » Sun Oct 04, 2020 11:11 am

It appears that in order to get mushrooms growing in a bucket you need to have grain that will host the spores, and in order to get those grains made you need to get a liquid that contains spores in the first place. I found this source:
https://www.themyceliumemporium.com/

It makes me wonder if a man could collect those spores from harvested mushrooms in the wild and make his own liquid in the first place. That would be a much more reliable method than ordering them off the internet in a survival or self sufficient situation.

This thread could be richer with more how-to's on mushroom growing methods and step by step instructions, which can be found here:

https://blog.freshcapmushrooms.com/lear ... wn-method/

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JohnUbele
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Re: Growing Mushrooms

Post by JohnUbele » Fri Jun 03, 2022 9:50 am

This is a really good book on the subject. I read it about five years ago, it has a lot of good information in it:

Mycelium Running
https://fungi.com/products/mycelium-running

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