
Low tech oyster grain spawn
Here's the right way to start
oyster mushrooms from scratch:
- Make a "clean room" into which spores of other mushrooms can't
invade.
- Mix up some agar and make sterile petri dishes.
- Add a tiny
section of oyster mushroom to each dish.
- Once the spawn runs across the petri dish, make sure nothing else
is growing on the dish. If you haven't created a clean culture,
throw it away and start again.
- Fill clean canning jars about halfway with roughly equal
quantities of grain and water. (0.45 pounds of wheat or rye and
0.9 cups of water is about right.)
- Put sterilized filters on top of each jar so that air can come
and go but fungi spores can't.
- Let the grain soak overnight, then cook the jars at 15 PSI in a
pressure canner for an hour.
Move the pressure canner to the
clean room before opening.
- Let the grain cool.
- Cut the petri dish (with spawn) into sections and add some to
each jar. You can get away with adding 3% spawn by weight, but if
you've got it, 10% to 20% is much better.
- Shake the jars to mix the spawn into the cooked grain.
- Incubate at 75 degrees Fahrenheit for two or three weeks until
the oyster mushroom spawn has fully colonize the grain.
Maybe it's just me, but that
procedure sounds pretty intense and far beyond the average backyard
mushroom-grower's reach --- and I didn't even mention the part where
you use the grain spawn to inoculate the fruiting
medium!
Extreme measures are needed to keep one strain of mushroom pure for a
big mushroom company, but what if you just want to expand your existing
mushroom log collection slightly?
Last year, I
experimented with growing
oyster mushroom spawn on cardboard. The jury's still out
on whether that worked --- the trouble with mushroom experiments is
that you often have to wait years before you find out if you were
successful. So I decided to experiment with a medium-tech way of
growing oyster mushroom spawn in case the low-tech cardboard method
doesn't pan out.
The vigor of oyster
mushrooms (and the fact that I'm not planning on expanding my spawn
more than once) allows me to ignore some of the sterility
precautions. Rather than jumping through all of the hoops
outlined above, I simply soaked some leftover wheat
overnight in open quart
jars. Next, I cooked the jars in the pressure canner at 15 PSI
for an hour. Once the grain had cooled, I spooned some into a
couple of ziploc bags, leaving the jars halfway full. Then I
mixed in a bunch of oyster mushroom stem butts I'd collected off our
bountifully fruiting mushroom
totems this
week. I left the tops of the bags and jars open, but draped a
damp cloth over them in hopes of keeping the contents moist.
I'm sure plenty of "weed
fungi" got into the grain in my completely unsterile work area, but I
suspect the oysters will outcompete those weeds pretty quickly.
As long as the spawn that appears is white, doesn't look greasy, and
smells right, I'll assume my technique worked. Then I'll be faced
with an even bigger dilemma --- what to do with two gallons of oyster
mushroom spawn when it's too late in the year for outside inoculation!
Our chicken waterer gives your flock something
to peck at during long winter days so they don't peck at each other.
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About us:
Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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