Oyster Mushrooms and growing them

[Mt Toaker]

Another thought. We had a separate facility for the oysters. When you walked in during fruiting the air was thick with a fog of spores. Oyster spores are dangerous. Wear a respirator or at least a dust mask to protect your lugs while you work.

GREAT! I'm so happy to hear you did this commercially, I'm sure i will be contacting you for information at some point because there are some things where questions are to be had.

Sounds like you've collected your spores before to make your own spawn, right now we buy ours but have talked about making our own so I'm sure I'll have some questions on that at some point.

As far as the market, the area I live in has dozens of farmers markets we can hit up and are hoping to be doing 100lbs a week by this summer. There are a lot of high end restaurants around me too so thats always an option, although they won't give us the $14 a lb we are looking for.

 

[Mt Toaker]

As far as temp its at 65F in there right now, about as cool as you want it. They grow slow at that temp, want it closer to 75F really. Its just expensive to heat and we are just building up stock for the summer anyhow right now. Humidity I think is like 75-80%.

Like I said in an above post, EVERY ONE should grow some of these for their grow room. They are a natural producer of CO2.

 

[Mt Toaker]

Here is the new bag to blow straw into.

 

[IE2KS_KUSH]

Re: Oyster Mushrooms and growing them

Amazing...subscribed...I bet there is next to nobody doing this where I live...

 

[IE2KS_KUSH]

Re: Oyster Mushrooms and growing them

Man this is pretty Rad...thanks for posting and please more info! A little research tells me there isn't really anyone with 500 miles any direction that is doing this. I am gonna read and start a small hobby mushroom cultivation and get it out in the garden too. But this looks pretty simple. And I fucking love mushrooms yummy! Thanks for the rabbit hole here I am off!

 

[Mt Toaker]

Yeah man, do it. You can make a good living off from it. Hardest part is shredding and pasteurizing straw. Big commercial ops shred their straw 2-6cm in length, we don't shred nearly that fine but I would like to. I'm sure finely shredded straw will colonize faster. I know of a guy up north who will just throw it out in his yard and run over it with a lawn mower for hours. . .

 

[guest8905]

badass

id like to do a small outdoor patch of gourmets this year

 

[Mt Toaker]

Stickky, if you are going to use the plugs I doubt you will see mushrooms until next year, maybe late in fall if they pop up.

 

[B.C.]

Im gonna have to try this on a smaller scale. This thread is really inspirational, makes it look easy! lol

Hey I wonder how hard is it to grow morels? anybody?

Thanks fer sharing, take care.... BC

 

[high life 45]

There is one place that grows morels successfully and their method is patented. Check out St amets book if you are serious about a commercial op. There is also classes on reproducing spawn.

 

[Mt Toaker]

Update!

Update!

Here are some shots from this week.

Here is our new splitter so we can fill 2 barrels at once, we put a full bail in each barrel, all that stuff is to keep it down.

A nice cluster forming

This weeks haul!

Some pretty ones, picked perfect timing imo, best looking cluster this week too.

5.3g baby!

Enjoy!

 

[fungzyme]

Awesome thread! Do you guys buy your spawn or culture your own? I grew the pink oysters a loooong time ago and was wanting to grow some this year just for personal eating.

 

[Mt Toaker]

We don't culture our own spawn yet, I honestly don't have any idea of how to do it. Can you do like a liquid culture of it? If any one could give me some info on making spawn I'd love it. We buy it right now and its 30 bucks fro 5-5.5lbs but the company will short you and do nothing to make things right. . . fungiperfecti I believe is where my buddy said he buys it from.

 

[MummyCat]

My last 3 orders from Fungi Perfecti showed up dead

Anyone know anywhere else to get spawn?

 

[monoss]

Looks great! Makes me wanna start something similar.

You say the spawn comes in rye jars? I would speculate most mushroom spawn cultures to propogate similarly; do a search on the Shroomery forums for "g2g" or grain to grain innoculation.

Hope it helps!

 

[ronbo51]

Wow, I am starting to get pissed. This is the third time I have written this and I keep getting booted, and I'm not getting timed out. Anyway, you can make spawn easy enough. You have to do two things: buy a pressure cooker and make a flow hood. The pressure cooker comes from Mushroompeople. I had 10 of those bad boys as well as an autoclave and a straw steamer. I think the largest one they have was 315$ the last time I bought one, ten years ago. The flow hood you need to build and it's pretty simple but will cost you 1K about. You need to go to a clean room supply place online and buy a "drop in" filter unit, all prewired and ready to go. They put them in drop ceiling grids in clean room factories. You get one and stand it up horizontially so that clean air blows across your work area. Build a box around the whole thing that can be cleaned well and use Fiberglass Reinforced plastic for countertops.( Lowes/HD has it). You are building a small area that you can work in that is sterile and can be kept sterile for all eternity. So you have a stovetop to cook your medium, which is rye grain. Get clean rye from the feed store. You also need to have canning jars, or better yet a specialised mushroom growing bag that has a hepa filter sewn into the side of the bag. You can get them from Fungi Perfecti, or if you get big enough you can buy them in 10K lots from the manufacturor like I did. The bag and the filter allow the grain to breathe and not spoil while its being colonized. I bought my spawn as cultures on petri dishes. Cook the rye grain and some water in the cookers @250 degrees for 2 hours. Blow the steam off and put the jars or bags in the hood to be cooled in the clean air. I used liberal amounts of 70% alcohol in spray bottles, latex gloves, clean clothes, a general "clean room" mentality. Anytime the hands come out of the hood they get sprayed. Anything going in the hood gets sprayed. Basic shit. After the grain has cooled you can innoculate. If you have culture dishes you sterilise the scalpel and slice off wedges and drop them into the rye. Close the lids. If you use canning jars you need special filters made to fit the jars to allow breathing. FP and Mushroompeople sell the filters for canning lids. Once innoculated and closed up you just let the spawn "run". When its white and colonised you can use it. You can use spawn to make more spawn. Eventually you will be just opening bags and pouring a small amount of spawn into another bag. Before you know it you will have a lot of fucking spawn.

 

[ronbo51]

A word of caution. I knew almost everyone in the mushroom game. I visited the big operations in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. I went out west and met a lot of folks in the biz. I was having problems and my prices were getting slashed and my business plan originally had me getting way more money per pound than I eventually got. I also got infected with several viruses that were over my ability to deal with. Like anything, if you get bigger, your problems get bigger. All my customers (white table cloth restaraunts) , except for farmers markets, could make a phone call and get high quality mushrooms of any variety and amount delivered to the back door anytime. My "niche" proved a fantasy. Mushrooms are mass produced by highly capitalised producers with PHD guys on the payroll. And the bottom line was I could not compete. It was fun and I loved it. I am sure you love it too, it's pretty fucking cool, but my advice is don't build a business plan on those high prices. Oyster mushrooms right now can be had for 5$ a pound at the grocery store. The producer made couple dollars. I sold oyster for 2.50 wholesale and was glad to get it. Shiitake was 3$. I sold shiitake at farmers markets for 6$. That was the best I could get. Kinda sad. But maybe you will do well. Good luck and let me know if I can help.

 

[ronbo51]

For what it's worth Paul Stamets' "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms" is the starting point for developing your own mushroom juju. Most people in the biz hate him for whatever reason, but the book is top shelf, loaded with good procedure and broad understanding as well as the little shit that can be elusive.

 

[monoss]

My "niche" proved a fantasy. Mushrooms are mass produced by highly capitalised producers with PHD guys on the payroll. And the bottom line was I could not compete. It was fun and I loved it. I am sure you love it too, it's pretty fucking cool, but my advice is don't build a business plan on those high prices.

Thank you for your words. Sucks that it didn't quite pan out the way you hoped, but your anecdotal advice is certainly insightful on things of this matter.

 

[MummyCat]

For what it's worth Paul Stamets' "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms" is the starting point for developing your own mushroom juju. Most people in the biz hate him for whatever reason, but the book is top shelf, loaded with good procedure and broad understanding as well as the little shit that can be elusive.

Paul Stamets is a fungal badass and I have a lot of respect for him as a scientist.

He needs to stop selling dead spawn in a $40 cardboard box though