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Showing results for tags 'growing oyster mushrooms'.
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I have successfully grown wine caps and shaggy manes in outdoor sawdust beds. Well when I got my first oyster mushroom kit from 100th Monkey Mushrooms I decided to experiment a little. Rather than just cutting a hole and growing them in the box I divided up the substrate. With the first half I distributed it into containers of straw and coffee grounds. You have to pasteurize your substrate first. Look that up if you're unfamiliar with the process. I was able to harvest several flushes of beautiful oysters from this. I even transferred some into new substrate when I thought they were almost spent and had them take off for multiple additional flushes. With the other half I decided to make an outdoor sawdust bed. Now I'd seen videos of people doing this online, as well as inoculating the logs. What I decided to do was mix the mycelium into the sawdust for step one. For step two I took some firewood chucks, cut some slits in the bottom, and buried them half way horizontally in the sawdust. I had never seen this done, but I thought the mycelium may work its way through the sawdust and into the logs. Well after about a year, and a few very minor oyster fruitings from the sawdust, the logs started producing. I've now gotten probably a dozen good flushes of quality oysters from the logs. In addition I've gotten bonus faun mushrooms, velvet foot and dead man's fingers which found their way in there on their own. These are all edible as well, but you need to know what you're doing. I wish I would have video documented this experiment from the beginning. However if anyone is interested I’ll put a link below to a video overview I did on oysters. In it I show how the project turned out. I’ll also put some pictures of the ones growing from containers.