Can you get more than a year out of them? I’m thinking about giving that a try. Logs are easy, but buckets stack nicely.
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buckets/bags/etc. colonize much quicker than logs, if you are asking “will bucket plastic last more than a year?” then most likely, but the oysters will have colonized, fruited, and crapped out in less than a year in a bucket under almost any scenario i can imagine from the grows I’ve done, at least…3-4 flushes over a couple months, the mushroom eventually runs out of food and/or picks up enough contaminating organisms it stops fruiting
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I use so much wood chips and straw in the beds, I think I may try to use the plugs I was given this year in the beds to see if it works. every year my mushroom friend gives me plugs of inoculant of some kind but last year was my first real attempt to get any going with the shiitake.
I’ll ask him for winecap next year though after reading this thread. they seem much easier to establish.
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Can you use that spent material to inoculate something else?
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You can, it is biologically active for some time post-fruiting, but especially w indoor grows you have a highly sterile, highly artificial environment. Sterile sounds good, but when all you have there is oyster mycelium, sawdust, and trich (a green mold) for example, the trich can very quickly overcome the oyster… the longer it is exposed to air, the more handling, etc. the worse the risk.
So in theory you can use to reinoculate something else, and if you were to take the spent spawn for example into a straw garden bed your “take” rate may not be 100% but it may prove fair…. If you keep shuffling from one bag of sterile sawdust to the next you are likely to encounter problems after a passage or two, which is why commercial growers are constantly making more fresh grain spawn to inoculate new substrate instead of going from old substrate to new…
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I’ve been trying to learn how get away from having to keep buying more. Saw an interesting video I intend to try. The guy threw a mushroom and a little water in a blender. Then poured the contents onto sterile straw and grew his own mycelium. Looked pretty easy. That’s what made me think of the spent substrate, but I think you may be right. Might work a time or two, but will eventually go down hill.
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fwiw the plain mushroom cap is likely as dirty or dirtier than your current culture/fruiting block. same issues of growing it out…
…the biggest issue is simply that mushroom spawn grows at a relatively slow rate, so it can be rapidly overcome by bacterial or mold contamination. If there’s never any contamination things are fine, but if there is then you now have a sort of a horse race, and particularly if you have multiple sites of contamination, it becomes harder and harder for the mycelium to outgrow the contaminants.
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I’m always given the little wooden dowels (whatever of those he had left over). should I maybe soak or treat them to get them to take better if they’re not drilled into logs
Wet your substrate if your not using logs.
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will do. thanks all for this thread. I love mushrooms and have been trying a while to get them going, in much disappointment. I’ve no room to fruit them indoors
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you would be better off blending a bunch of shrooms and using that than using spent substrate. its too weak at that point to be able to overcome mold etc… ive taken a dozen wine cap stems chopped in a blender, added to a new spot in the mulch under a tree or bush and have them establish. just keep it all together in a small spot. if you spread it out it will fail. it will spread the next season on its own as long as the mycelium has something to eat.
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I wonder if you could take a bunch of blended oysters and water, then pour it on using the totem method?
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ive had a hard time getting oysters to take using the totem method with even spawn. tried it on aspen and sugar maple. out of 5 totems i got 2 that took. had them sealed each in a large leaf bag. i had better luck using dowel spawn. maybe i did it wrong. seems pretty strait forward though.
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I got a truck load of used oyster white and grey mushroom(mushroom farm giveaway)…broke them up and buried under loads of wood chips. They fry under the sun… once things start greening, there will be more shade but for now, i have had way too much oysters to eat. Anyone try lions mane, tastes like fresh baked bread that just melts when you eat it…my absolute favorite. Waiting for my shitake to produce from last year…paul stamets has a very thorough video on winecaps( he cooks them with caramelized onions and cashews )
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I did one of those oyster mushroom kits a couple years back. When it was done with its flush I chipped my way into a bale of hay and forced it into the bale as best I could.
I got a couple more flushes over the next couple months. Nothing the next year, though. I didn’t really do anything to encourage it though.
Scott
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That’s good to know. I was sketchy on the totem method, but it just looks so easy.
Do you have one of those spawn injectors? Thinking about getting one of those as the grain spawn is cheaper than dowels.
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The totem method is conceptually fine, but it’s subject to drying, sow bugs and things eating it, And contaminants are running your oysters… It’s not that it doesn’t work it clearly does sometimes, it’s just that the more exposed you go the greater your risk. Think of the difference between surgery during the Civil War and now…
The cleaner your shit is the less likely you have issues… The advantage of the totem is that it is very simple, the disadvantage is that it is very exposed. That’s why you only hear about it with things like oysters that are fairly aggressive, and rarely things like shiitake
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Not hard to believe. I’ve had birds practically peck out the dowels on everything they can get to.
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bees of all kinds love fresh mycelium as well.
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We got a little bit of rain last night (in what has so far been a dry season), and this morning I see my winecaps peeking out of the bed again. I’m looking forward to another year of them.
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