Shoestring mushrooms on a shoestring budget

by Brad Butterfield

I set out on my grand mushroom grow with the premise that if Miss Mother Nature can grow mushrooms on a soggy log in the forest, then surely I (harnessing the power of google) can fruit some shrooms while living in the back of a van on a top-ramen budget, right?

I bought both Lions Mane and King Blue Oyster liquid cultures for $40 from Lost Coast Fungi.

The next step was painful for me as a person because it required shopping –an activity I hate from multiple angles. To begin the grow I needed: pressure cooker

• tin foil

• mason jars rye berries cotton balls

I got the rye berries from Wildberries for a couple bucks. So, I ended up buying everything at Walmart and will soon find out their return policy on ‘unopened’ pressure cookers.

The following day I used a sharp knife to create holes in the mason jar lids to allow for gas exchange while mycelium feeds on the rye berries. I made the holes different sizes for fun and also for science.

Next, I soaked the rye grain in water for a full day. After filling the mason jars with the soggy rye berries, I covered the lids with tin foil. Ideally, inoculation would be done using a laminar flow hood to create a sterilized flow of clean air but I didn’t want to fork out any extra money. So, I’m going to just stick the damn syringe through the tin foil and hope the tip finds a hole. Anyway, theoretically, the air between the foil and the top of the lid will be sterilized in the pressure cooker. Obviously the foil is not air tight and microorganisms still may contaminate during any stage of the process. But, I’m often lucky, so I’m going to rely on that as my secondary anti-contamination method. My total cost for this first stage of the process was about sixty dollars. I’m not including the pressure cooker in that as I plan on returning it at Walmart (hopefully).

Having prepared the grain spawn and sterilized it, I could finally get going on the fun stuff. Unfortunately, I got so busy with classes that my mushroom project kept getting pushed back. Late one night I just said -hell with itand inoculated in my van. I wiped the syringe needle tip down with rubbing alcohol and torched it with my crack lighter before injecting into the jars.

It occurred to me after I inoculated that the van gets far too cold at night for the mycelium to populate the grain spawn. Of course, mushrooms are badass, and most likely would still grow in the thirty-five degree nighttime temperature of my van-home. Eventually, I found that the kinesiology building rents out lockers for ten dollars a semester. The locker room stays about seventy degrees, which was more or less perfect for the young mushrooms to begin feeding on the rye berries.

Remarkably, within one week, a couple of the grain spawn jars had been completely populated by mycelium. I had to get moving on gathering materials for the next step.

I ordered the plastic bags that the bulk substrate will go into from Amazon for about ten bucks. The only things left to gather were:

• hardwood sawdust

• wheat bran

I have been annoyingly short on time as the spring semester wears on here at Cal Poly. I had an hour between classes on Monday morning though and went foraging. From a previous -mushroom unrelated- adventure with Big D, I knew that there was a massive pile of hardwood sawdust at an abandoned sawmill out on the marsh. I stuffed as much sawdust into my backpack as I could fit and then went to Wildberries to buy the wheat bran.

I didn’t measure out the wheat bran, nor the sawdust before putting it into the grow bags. I’m winging it! I also added some water, then shook the bag up a little bit.

The most annoying aspect of mushroom growing is -without doubt- the sterilization process. I got into a bit of trouble while sterilizing the substrate jars. I had picked a poor location and got found out…(I think I shouldn’t tell that story publicly for now)… I needed a different spot for sterilizing the substrate bags which would take about two hours. For the first bag (I could only do one bag at a time) I went to the Bret Harte house. I explained to Professor Kirby what I planned to do and he gave me the green light. Well, about a half an hour into pressure cooking in the small building, the cooker began purging out a soggy wood smell. Perhaps I should have foreseen that coming, but I didn’t. Personally, the smell didn’t bother me. But I can’t say the same for my comrades in the building.

After telling a friend my tribulations pressure cooking on campus, she offered to sneak me into her dorm building -the dorms are key card access only. We found an empty conference room and let the cooker do its thing without being bothered. I sterilized a third in the athletic building early one morning.

Currently, four out of the six substrate bags are sitting in my locker with mycelium slowly populating the sterilized sawdust. Unfortunately I’ve already had to throw away two of the substrate bags due to obvious contamination. From here, it will be a few more weeks until the bags are completely populated by mycelium. Then, it will be time for fruiting!