I'm in Australia mate. I was selling mushrooms by the bag at work and to local restaraunts and a i had an Australia wide spawn bag business for colonised grain spawn bags.
4' industrial Flow Bench, cultures and petrie dish cultures for sale as well. I had about twenty five species in the bank and mostly grew on straw in buckets, but i have some shitake logs that were fruiting a couple of weeks ago.
Spawn business was good and profitable, but very time consuming and i had to choose between hobbies once i was finding no time to brew beer. :((
I only did the oak logs that I doweled into them and put wax over them. They were wonderful. I will prob get some more when it gets colder here. Any advice? I have access to wheat straw. You are makin me hungry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111
Sure, join shroomery. Ignore the hippies and drug freaks and stick with the gourmet section, there's less of em, but it's certainly not a hippy free environment.
Take everysingle thing you read there with a grain of salt till you know who's who. There's some good people there but there's some absolute whacko's who live in another universe too.
The guy who did the videos is on there as mod called Roger Rabbit. He's OK, but pretty alternative and prone to elaboration and repetitiveness.
Search for and down load the video series 'Let's Grow Mushrooms' has all the info you need to get started. Really good production.
Move up from a glovebox to a flow bench as soon as possible, glove boxes are for monkeys. :(|)
flow bench is in the picture above. uses a fan to force air past a hepa filter.
Glove box is a still air box that you can get a half sterile enviroment in to do transfers and agar work but it's a pain in the arse.
Sorry for robbing the the other post!!!!!!
I remember the Oak logs. I am gonna do it again toward end of the summer. I have trees in back yard to put them. If I order spawn plugs can I put them in a bag with unspawned plug and make them live with spawn? Shatakee is what I grew before. Any recommendations on what to grow? Oak or straw bales or bags?????
You need to soak and then sterilise the other dowels, but yes that's the way it's done. Must sterilise in a PC at 15psi and handle inside a glove box after that. If you think sanitising is a pain, wait until you start learning to work sterile. You can sterilise hard wood sawdust and colonise that too if you get the moisture level right. All explained in the movie i referenced you too.
You can't put them in live tree's best to cut logs 4 to 6"in dia and a yard or so long. Leave them for 6 weeks or so to dry a little and then innoculate. Too long and something will beat the shitakes in there, too soon and the self defence mechanisisms in the sap will damage the growth of the spawn.
Straw bales or bags are really good for oyster mushrooms. My favourite by a very long shot it the King Oyster. Best mushroom around i reckon. Easy to grow, and if you buy spawn you don't need to work sterile, just paseturise the straw in hot water (all the instructions on the web or in the movie) and away you go.
Wish i could buy Kings, too damn dear and hard to get, that's what got me into it in the first place, gourmet mushies are $50 a kilo in the markets here.
Growing on straw is pretty easy if you buy the spawn ready to go. There is a guy here in Australia who took over supplying the spawn bags when i stopped. One twenty dollar spawn bag is enough to innoculate three or four buckets or a landry basket full of straw.
You don't need a shed for that, just an esky/cooler to hold the straw at 65C (funny how that number crops up through nature) to pasteruise the straw and then spread it out to cool and mix the spawn in on a bench out side. Pack it into bags or buckets with holes drilled in the sides and put somewhere warm and humid out of the sun. You can create the humidity on a small scale by spraying with a water bottle a few times a day.
Oysters only take a few weeks and the yeild really well.
Yep, called Lion's Mane in the common colloquial. It's a US shroom that grows in forests and dead and sick trees. Can get bloody huge.
I like that taste but the texture makes me gag. I have that thing with textures and can't eat broccoli, cauli ect.
They grow mental on straw and sawdust and will push their way out of any crack. I have had them grow through the microfibre tape on spawn jars.
DAMN U PUNKIN. I can tell now you are going to cost me money. OK IM gonna buy the kings and the shatakeees. I know the later but I find kings easy here in the US. IS there a possiblitys that they are not selling the same thing as you are talking about?
That's the stuff. I wouldn't know about the US suppliers mate. There's some site sponsors on shroomery that are pretty good.
Have you downloaded the Let's Grow Mushrooms' videos?
Please do so, it shows all you need to know how to do it on the cheap. Shitakes don't grow well on straw in general and require sawdust. Sawdust needs sterilising because of the nutrient load and so gets much more difficult unless you do dowels in stumps and it''s a long term thing.
Enrgyii are quick, cheap and easy. The tastiest around and good yielders.
I have not down loaded vids yet. I used oak 4in-8in logs that I cut one day and plugged the next. If I wanted mushrooms and I didn't have enough I soaked in water for a day or 2 and mushrooms quick. I did join the site. Roger Rabbit is the hottest rabbit I have ever seen.
Punkin, I paralled your travels in mushroom cultivation. Work at work and work
at home got me down so I gave up the shroom biz. I have yet to move to the
rectification of ETOH and am stuck in the brew beer mode. The powers that be
have made me paranoid about even posessing the hardware here. Looks like
you did some good work on the farm. I even had an ATCC account once upon
a time. Maybe I will get back to it in retirement (a year or so), but not likely.
Cool beans 1V, the shy little bastards are a rewarding pastime and a lot of fun. Growing shrooms for profit has to be done on a fairly large scale to be worth it, but the spawn business is well worth while.
All comes down to getting a cheap flow hood, which i was lucky enough to pick up from a large nursery that were selling a dozen of them.
Without that the spawn business is too tough as well.
Yeah I have a 20 inch laminar flow hood and constructed a small sterile lab in a
closet....it was very functional. Now I do not know how to steralize the hood to
ever reserrect it to serviceable mode. I dont have access to that large of an
autoclave.
Mine was in a dusty shed when i bought it (4' hood) i just sprayed all over with 70% heads from a misting bottle and ran the filter for a couple of hours. I had it in my office opposu=ite my desk and would just start it 20 mins before i wanted to work. It had UV, but i was too scared to use it.
thanks punkin thats interesting that you had good luck with it in that
treatment. I built mine from scratch bought the filter and went to town
with a plywood plenum'
Hi just, wanted to show my first attempt at mushroom growing, portabellos spawned onto, straw & wood burner pellets,
It's was surprisingly easy to get crop this far just followed instructions on that hippy site punkin recommended.
They look very much like King Oysters if i'm not mistaken. My absolute favourite mushroom.
One of the bits i always found fascinating with em was that they are such shy little buggers. If they get a chance to grow round the back or out the bottom where you can't see em they will.
Just like alcometers used to be before the Dragonfire Series.
Looks great 211, do love the fungi,and once ya have them growing it only gets better,fall is here and the fungus is everywhere,good time to be in the north american woods!
@punkin, I just checked the little bag of inoculated grain I bought online and your right the guys shipped me oyster spawn by mistake.
I just harvested some and they tasted great.
@bentstick I am definitely hooked on fungi now but will have to brush up on my identifying species before I go picking in the woods as I obviously can't tell a portabello from a king oyster ..
You can clone these and make a liquid culture using a glove box and a syringe or scalpel.
Lot of people poo-poo the liquid cultures but i had them work right off the bat for ages till i got my flow hood.
Pretty easy to make your own spawn then by going direct to grain jars. Saves the agar and pouring plates step.
Just use a piece of foam earplug in lid hole and a piece of medical tape over the other lid hole. Or medical tape over both. You then inject the liquid culture directly into each jar through the earplug or tape and retape or just let the earplug self heal.
Gotta watch some species though, this ones a Lions Mane that's crawled right out of the jar while i wasn't looking.
I am almost certain as I can be from a photo that you have the parisol mushroom.
Go to Mushroom Observer and look around for your id purposes. There are some real experts hanging there and you can post pics and they will dial you in......
Comments
I'm in Australia mate. I was selling mushrooms by the bag at work and to local restaraunts and a i had an Australia wide spawn bag business for colonised grain spawn bags. 4' industrial Flow Bench, cultures and petrie dish cultures for sale as well. I had about twenty five species in the bank and mostly grew on straw in buckets, but i have some shitake logs that were fruiting a couple of weeks ago.
Spawn business was good and profitable, but very time consuming and i had to choose between hobbies once i was finding no time to brew beer. :((
Can't have it all they say.
At least there's more room in my office now :!!
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
I only did the oak logs that I doweled into them and put wax over them. They were wonderful. I will prob get some more when it gets colder here. Any advice? I have access to wheat straw. You are makin me hungry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111
Sorry, I didn't mean to get side tracked. You did pick the better hobby.
Sure, join shroomery. Ignore the hippies and drug freaks and stick with the gourmet section, there's less of em, but it's certainly not a hippy free environment.
Shroomery - Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms
Take everysingle thing you read there with a grain of salt till you know who's who. There's some good people there but there's some absolute whacko's who live in another universe too. The guy who did the videos is on there as mod called Roger Rabbit. He's OK, but pretty alternative and prone to elaboration and repetitiveness.
Search for and down load the video series 'Let's Grow Mushrooms' has all the info you need to get started. Really good production.
Move up from a glovebox to a flow bench as soon as possible, glove boxes are for monkeys. :(|)
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
HAHAHAHAHH Medicinal Mushrooms. I didn't grow them. what is glovebox and flow bench?
flow bench is in the picture above. uses a fan to force air past a hepa filter. Glove box is a still air box that you can get a half sterile enviroment in to do transfers and agar work but it's a pain in the arse.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
Sorry for robbing the the other post!!!!!! I remember the Oak logs. I am gonna do it again toward end of the summer. I have trees in back yard to put them. If I order spawn plugs can I put them in a bag with unspawned plug and make them live with spawn? Shatakee is what I grew before. Any recommendations on what to grow? Oak or straw bales or bags?????
You need to soak and then sterilise the other dowels, but yes that's the way it's done. Must sterilise in a PC at 15psi and handle inside a glove box after that. If you think sanitising is a pain, wait until you start learning to work sterile. You can sterilise hard wood sawdust and colonise that too if you get the moisture level right. All explained in the movie i referenced you too.
You can't put them in live tree's best to cut logs 4 to 6"in dia and a yard or so long. Leave them for 6 weeks or so to dry a little and then innoculate. Too long and something will beat the shitakes in there, too soon and the self defence mechanisisms in the sap will damage the growth of the spawn.
Straw bales or bags are really good for oyster mushrooms. My favourite by a very long shot it the King Oyster. Best mushroom around i reckon. Easy to grow, and if you buy spawn you don't need to work sterile, just paseturise the straw in hot water (all the instructions on the web or in the movie) and away you go.
Wish i could buy Kings, too damn dear and hard to get, that's what got me into it in the first place, gourmet mushies are $50 a kilo in the markets here.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
is there nothin you cant do gary?? looks like a lot of fun but most hobies you need a bloody decent shed
Growing on straw is pretty easy if you buy the spawn ready to go. There is a guy here in Australia who took over supplying the spawn bags when i stopped. One twenty dollar spawn bag is enough to innoculate three or four buckets or a landry basket full of straw. You don't need a shed for that, just an esky/cooler to hold the straw at 65C (funny how that number crops up through nature) to pasteruise the straw and then spread it out to cool and mix the spawn in on a bench out side. Pack it into bags or buckets with holes drilled in the sides and put somewhere warm and humid out of the sun. You can create the humidity on a small scale by spraying with a water bottle a few times a day.
Oysters only take a few weeks and the yeild really well.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
Very interesting, but what's that white growth 5 posts up that looks like a cauliflower head (and is it edible)?
Yep, called Lion's Mane in the common colloquial. It's a US shroom that grows in forests and dead and sick trees. Can get bloody huge. I like that taste but the texture makes me gag. I have that thing with textures and can't eat broccoli, cauli ect.
They grow mental on straw and sawdust and will push their way out of any crack. I have had them grow through the microfibre tape on spawn jars.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
DAMN U PUNKIN. I can tell now you are going to cost me money. OK IM gonna buy the kings and the shatakeees. I know the later but I find kings easy here in the US. IS there a possiblitys that they are not selling the same thing as you are talking about?
$19 for 2 lbs of inoculated grain
King Oyster Mushroom Grain Spawn, Pleurotus eryngii
Sounds cheap. Is there a place in the US that you recommend over another?
That's the stuff. I wouldn't know about the US suppliers mate. There's some site sponsors on shroomery that are pretty good.
Have you downloaded the Let's Grow Mushrooms' videos?
Please do so, it shows all you need to know how to do it on the cheap. Shitakes don't grow well on straw in general and require sawdust. Sawdust needs sterilising because of the nutrient load and so gets much more difficult unless you do dowels in stumps and it''s a long term thing.
Enrgyii are quick, cheap and easy. The tastiest around and good yielders.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
I have not down loaded vids yet. I used oak 4in-8in logs that I cut one day and plugged the next. If I wanted mushrooms and I didn't have enough I soaked in water for a day or 2 and mushrooms quick. I did join the site. Roger Rabbit is the hottest rabbit I have ever seen.
@punkin, you are truly amazing! So many things going on at your place.
Your Place to be >>> www.StillDragon.org <<< Home of the StillDragon® Community Forum
Punkin, I paralled your travels in mushroom cultivation. Work at work and work at home got me down so I gave up the shroom biz. I have yet to move to the rectification of ETOH and am stuck in the brew beer mode. The powers that be have made me paranoid about even posessing the hardware here. Looks like you did some good work on the farm. I even had an ATCC account once upon a time. Maybe I will get back to it in retirement (a year or so), but not likely.
Cool beans 1V, the shy little bastards are a rewarding pastime and a lot of fun. Growing shrooms for profit has to be done on a fairly large scale to be worth it, but the spawn business is well worth while. All comes down to getting a cheap flow hood, which i was lucky enough to pick up from a large nursery that were selling a dozen of them.
Without that the spawn business is too tough as well.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
Yeah I have a 20 inch laminar flow hood and constructed a small sterile lab in a closet....it was very functional. Now I do not know how to steralize the hood to ever reserrect it to serviceable mode. I dont have access to that large of an autoclave.
Mine was in a dusty shed when i bought it (4' hood) i just sprayed all over with 70% heads from a misting bottle and ran the filter for a couple of hours. I had it in my office opposu=ite my desk and would just start it 20 mins before i wanted to work. It had UV, but i was too scared to use it.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
thanks punkin thats interesting that you had good luck with it in that treatment. I built mine from scratch bought the filter and went to town with a plywood plenum'
Hi just, wanted to show my first attempt at mushroom growing, portabellos spawned onto, straw & wood burner pellets, It's was surprisingly easy to get crop this far just followed instructions on that hippy site punkin recommended.
They look very much like King Oysters if i'm not mistaken. My absolute favourite mushroom.
One of the bits i always found fascinating with em was that they are such shy little buggers. If they get a chance to grow round the back or out the bottom where you can't see em they will.
Just like alcometers used to be before the Dragonfire Series.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
Looks great 211, do love the fungi,and once ya have them growing it only gets better,fall is here and the fungus is everywhere,good time to be in the north american woods!
It is what you make it!
@punkin, I just checked the little bag of inoculated grain I bought online and your right the guys shipped me oyster spawn by mistake.
I just harvested some and they tasted great.
@bentstick I am definitely hooked on fungi now but will have to brush up on my identifying species before I go picking in the woods as I obviously can't tell a portabello from a king oyster ..
Lucky mistake for you.
You can clone these and make a liquid culture using a glove box and a syringe or scalpel.
Lot of people poo-poo the liquid cultures but i had them work right off the bat for ages till i got my flow hood.
Pretty easy to make your own spawn then by going direct to grain jars. Saves the agar and pouring plates step.
Just use a piece of foam earplug in lid hole and a piece of medical tape over the other lid hole. Or medical tape over both. You then inject the liquid culture directly into each jar through the earplug or tape and retape or just let the earplug self heal.
Gotta watch some species though, this ones a Lions Mane that's crawled right out of the jar while i wasn't looking.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
Can anyone identify this shrooms, lots of them popping up in my yard
Mushroom Hunting and Identification
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
I am almost certain as I can be from a photo that you have the parisol mushroom.
Go to Mushroom Observer and look around for your id purposes. There are some real experts hanging there and you can post pics and they will dial you in......
ne1 know wtf i have here in my backyard? I've already tried a few other ways to identify.........
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty6eY9VUIgI