Through the early days of the pandemic, it appeared like rising your personal meals was all the trend. I noticed these mushroom rising kits talked about by folks and I used to be fairly curious to strive them however by no means obtained round to it till now. My S.O. loves mushrooms and it appeared like a cool thought to develop your personal. I made a decision to see if mushroom kits are value it by way of the associated fee and time concerned. So come together with me whereas I strive it out!
What’s a Mushroom Equipment?
Initially, I made a decision to begin with the best technique to develop mushrooms – from a package. There are different strategies for rising your personal mushrooms, like drilling holes right into a log and inserting “spawn plugs” into them. Or you possibly can get much more hands-on and create your personal substrate and inoculate it with mycelium, and so on. However since I do know nothing about rising mushrooms and I wish to strive probably the most foolproof technique first, I went with shopping for a pair kits.
I truly discovered a vendor who’s in the identical state as me (Ohio), so I made a decision to present him my enterprise. He calls himself Mushroom Man and has loads of useful movies on his web site. Sure forms of mushrooms can’t be shipped this time of yr as a result of chilly, however I used to be in a position to get a shiitake package and a white oyster mushroom package.
The fee for many mushroom kits appear to run about $25. With delivery, these kits price me a complete of $62.80. Oyster and shiitake mushrooms price about $10-$12 per pound, so to make this endeavor price efficient, I’d must get about 5-6 kilos of mushrooms from the 2 kits mixed. It’s purported to be doable to get a second harvest after the primary one, so we’ll see the way it goes. Regardless, I believe this shall be enjoyable to strive.
The kits arrived very promptly inside a couple of days and appear like this:
The white oyster package is on the left and the shiitake is on the proper. As you possibly can see, there are some directions on every, together with a QR code that you could scan for tutorial movies particular to your number of mushroom. (I used to be unable to get the QR code to work, however I nonetheless discovered the movies on the web site.)
From what I perceive, these kits are principally made up of sawdust inoculated with the mycelium of every particular mushroom selection. For now, there’s nothing I must do with these kits however enable them to take a seat at room temperature for some time and out of direct daylight. After a sure time frame (14-21 days for the oysters, 40 days for the shiitake), I’ll take additional steps to hydrate the kits and get the mushrooms to begin rising.
So for now I’ve set them on a shelf in my workplace the place they’ll get some mild from the room, however no direct rays. They have to be out of the field to get some air. There’s a vent within the plastic bag to permit some oxygen in:
That’s it for now. Test again in a pair weeks for an replace on my mushroom rising experiment!
