Check out some of the grow mushrooms in a bucket videos. They just drill holes in the bucket and use oak cooking/heating pellets as the growing medium.
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I will! thank you
Shiitake is probley the second most common mushroom grown in sawdust bags. Right behind oysters.
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I think my favorite are lions mane. They are quite solid & meaty.
These were also grown on hardwood pellets.
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oh yeah! I’m gonna try it
Phoenix oysters in a bucket.
Spawn from mushroom mountain. Regular food safe plastic bucket, ½ inch holes iirc. I used about 60/40 boiled hay and wetted mixed hardwood pellet grill pellets.
Colonized few a few weeks indoors, humidity was between 50-60%. Then in sheltered shade outside. Pretty warm and humid out these days (June, eastern NC). Misted down the whole bucket once or twice a day. First harvest will probably be tomorrow.
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I badly need to do this. We recycle so much cardboard around here when we could be converting it to mushrooms.
I think I want to try the hydrated lime route for sterilizing the cardboard. I want to fill several buckets at a time and pressure cooking all that substrate is going to be a pain.
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I didn’t bother with pressure-cooking. Just boiled for a while. I realize I took a risk doing so, especially since I used plain old hay from a bale that had just been sitting around, but it worked out just fine.
Doable? Yes. Advisable? IDK, once I’ve done it a few more times I’ll have a better idea of the success rate.
Most of the people I’ve seen doing mushrooms at scale use hydrated lime. It’s probably the better method, at least for large amounts of material.
I’ve also got a lot of cardboard laying around, considered using it, but it’s such a pain to get it chopped up…
I’m lucky to own a an automatic cardboard shredder. I have to keep any cardboard I don’t want shredded piled on its side behind a board of wood.
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Given you can do this with a $60 Amazon shredder.
I am thinking about getting one in the $300 range for my Mushroom ambitions.
Maybe next time my wife allocates some fun money or maybe I can convince her this is great father day present.
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mine was free, but he needed some dental work
Looks pretty cool, I bet a $300 one would be pretty fun to use.
Not sure how long it’d take to recoup the cost. I like mushrooms, but $300 dollars buys a lot of mushrooms : D
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the cheapest oysters are over $2/lb and the typical ones with the fleshy cap like yours range between $5=$8/lb
What would you say your conversion rate is from feedstock to mushroom.
Fair point, but if not for growing oysters, I’d be eating el-cheapo button mushrooms, so I’m not sure how best to calculate the cost recuperation.
That’s a good question. I’ll have a better idea once I harvest this flush, and see how many flushes I get. Granted, a round bale of hay is very cheap, given the number of mushrooms it’ll produce, so if I switch to a higher ratio of hay the material input costs will be extremely low. As it is, though, material inputs are already way cheaper than time inputs (even valuing my time at minimum wage, which I don’t, I definitely spent more money on time than on actual money).
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Those are buttons in the bucket pictures? I am pretty sure you’re going to need a manure source along with the straw.
Oysters. Phoenix oyster.