With the ever expanding interest in growing mushrooms at home, finding the mycology supplies you need is as easy as jumping online. With a few simple grains, a tote, and some substrate, you can be having successful flushes of your favorite mushroom right in your own home.
How to grow mushrooms at home
To begin growing mushrooms at home you will need a spore syringe, liquid culture, a spore print, or something of the like. Multi-spore solution syringes are typically what you will buy when you order medicinal spore syringes. They are made from a spore print that is then mixed with sterile water. They are very easy to transport, including to ship, and they can be stored in the fridge for a long time.
For growing gourmet mushrooms you will most likely order a liquid culture syringe. A liquid culture syringe is different from a standard mulit-spore syringe. Liquid culture consists of germinated spores forming mycelium which can be suspended in a variety of different solutions. A liquid culture will colonize faster than a multi-spore syringe, as well as be an isolated strain instead of multi-strains like spore syringes. One of the main benefits of a liquid culture is that it will colonize your grain faster than a standard spore syringe. This can shave many days off of the time it takes to get to final harvest.
Another way to acquire spores is via a spore print. It is done to a lesser degree, but is a viable option. A spore print is made by laying a mushroom cap gills down on a piece of foil in front of a laminar flow hood. Being in a sterile environment allows for the transfer of nothing but spores to the print. A print actually looks like a printed black outline of the mushroom gills. The print is then wrapped up, and can be stored for years until ready to use. With the right know how you can then use these spores to create a spore syringe.
I have my mushroom spores, now what do I do?
Once you have your spores you are going to want to inoculate your spores into a sterilized grain of some sort. So many grains will work for this, but there are some that are more popular than others. Rye berry, millet, milo, and bird seed are all very common to be used for grain spawn.
You will need to sterilize your grains in a pressure cooker or autoclave before you inoculate them. Depending on the grain that is being used there will be some prep work needed before you can load up your jars or bags with the grain. After the sterilization process is done, you need to allow the jars or bags to cool down to below 80 degrees before you inoculate them.
Once you are ready to inoculate your jars or bags you will create as sterile of an environment as possible to use as a laboratory. The goal is to not have any contaminates enter into the injection port of the jar. You want to just inject spores or some sort of spore solution. Alternatively, if you made agar you can use a laminar flow hood to create a sterile environment and drop in a wedge of agar into each jar or bag.
Now you need to wait, and let the mycelium develop. Once the mycelium has had time to colonize the grain completely you will then be ready to spawn the grain to bulk. This will consist of either buying or creating a substrate that will be mixed with your colonized grains and then put into fruiting conditions to grow out mushrooms.
Buying all of the supplies needed to create your own substrate isn't to difficult. A base of coco coir and vermiculite is a great place to start. Additives like oyster shell flour & gypsum are pretty standard in the industry. For medicinal mushrooms the addition of straw or sterilized horse poop may help with yields.
Spawning to plastic totes seems to be the easiest way to grow your own mushrooms at home. You can get totes at pretty much any big box store, and they come in an unlimited amount of sizes and shapes. Once you have spawned your totes, you will wait for the substrate to colonize, and fruit to begin to appear. This can take anywhere from 7 to 21 days on average depending on strain, environment, etc...
After each flush of mushrooms you can harvest your shrooms, and dunk each cake to begin another flush. As long as contaminates are not present, this can be done multiple times. Getting 5 or more flushes from a single tote is possible, even it is outside of the norm.
What do I need to grow mushrooms at home?
We went over the basics of how the process works, but lets delve into the supplies needed to grow mushrooms at home.
With so many different techs out there, there isn't a one size fits all for growing mushrooms. There are teks like; broke boi tek, slurry tek, Spider-Man Tek AKA Uncle Bens Tek, and so many more we couldn't fit them here if we tried. Other than spider-Man tek, you will need some sort of grain to inoculate. We carry things like millet & rye because of their ease of use and popularity in the community. Millet can be sued with zero prep work right out of the bag, and added with water to your jars or bags and sterilized with zero advanced prep work. This makes it great for larger commercial sized production.
If you are using jars for your grains you will need a gas exchange port, as well as an injection port. The gas exchange port can consist of poly-fill, or even a stick on port. The injection port can be self made from RTV silicone, or you can use a pre-made self-healing injection port. Although the pre-made injection ports will still need to be sealed with RTV silicone.
Keeping your work area sterile can be done by using alcohol as a hand sanitizer between operations. Things like In-cide can be used to spray your work area to cut down contaminants & surface bacteria & molds. Sterilizing your needle between injections is usually done with an alcohol lamp, although for the small home grower a lighter works well. Gloves & a face mask can help to keep your critters to yourself & not contaminate your work space.
After harvest it is important to dry the mushrooms as quickly as possible, but without applying to much heat. Using a dehydrator is the best tool to achieve this. They come in a range of sizes, and even for larger grows there is a dehydrator that will work for your larger flushes.
The popularity of microdosing mushrooms has begun to catch on rapidly in the past few years. All you really need to make your own micro-dose capsules at home is a coffee grinder, a pill making machine, and some empty capsules. We carry vegan capsules in varying sizes to help you pick the right dose for your needs, as well as different size pill press machines for encapsulating your ground powder
Growing mushrooms at home can be very rewarding. Getting an all in one mushroom grow kit may be the easiest way to get started down your mushroom growing adventure. The all in one mushroom grow bags may not give huge yields, but they are one of the easiest ways to grow enough mushrooms for personal use. Having the ability to inoculate and fruit in the same bag cuts down the amount of time you need to spend on the actual growing of the mushrooms.
There are so many ways to cultivate mushrooms, with many different tech's to choose to pursue. No matter the tech, or style you choose to grow in, Redbud Soil Company carries the latest mushroom cultivation products for all of the top techs to get you growing mushrooms & enjoying your harvests sooner.
