Collected works and current thoughts
Background
In a past life, I grew mushrooms at home as a hobby. I started with PK Tek, then went to grain spawn and a substrate. After an initial success, I had an abysmal failure. So I went back to the start, repeated my first success, then over a 2-year period, I replaced every step in the process, until I found an easy at home process that worked in a house with 5 cats and 2 dogs.
For this go-around, I’ll be growing Cyclocybe Aegerita, it’s great for stir-fry.
Turns out, the approach is identical to cultivating magic mushrooms, so do not use these steps to grow magic mushrooms, as that is illegal.
Step 1 : Get Yourself Spores or Live Culture
Spores last longer (3 years give or take); live cultures grow a few weeks quicker but don’t last much longer than a year. If you follow this appraoch, the slightly faster start doesn’t get you much since once you have your first innoculated grain spawn, subsquente generates happe quicker.
I’ve used Premium Spores in the past and found them to be quite reliable.
Create Grain
I use wheat berrie, they are easy to get in bulk:
- Rinse with water
- Soak about 20 hours
- Spread out and allow them to air dry so they are dry to touch, but still well soaked
- Fill a 32-oz mason jar 3/4 full, put a lid on (with filters), cover the jar with aluminum foil
- Pressure-cook for 90 minutes (15 psi), or 120 if using an instapot (11 psi)
- IMPORTANT: Allow to cool several hours before taking out, this allows released mosisture to get back into grains without leaving the jar wet, which encourages mold
Inoculation: Sterilized grain is injected with the syringe assets.
Put about 3 ML of liquid from your syringe into the mason jar. There are several ways to do this, here’s what I do:
- Fill a small saki cup with rubbing alcohol (I use 90%, but 70% is fine)
- Use a crembrulet torch to get tip of the needle red-hot
- Douse in rubbing alcohol
- Pierce the filter in the top of the mason jar and inject 3 ml
- As I pull out the needle, I’ve prepared another filter to immeditaly cover the injection hole
Wait until Approximately 75% Coverage in the Jar
The Break/Shake: At ~5 weeks, you shake the hell out of the ~75% inoculated wheat berries. This breaks the single mycelial block into hundreds of individual mycelian strands, transforming a slow linear growth front into a highly distributed parallel processing array. It accelerates total colonization and rapidly denies remaining space to latent contamination.
Grain to Grain (G2G) and Spawn to Bulk (S2B)
At ~7 weeks, time to put the grain spawn either into more grain spawn, for a next generation, or into a substrate, to actaully grow mushrooms. Mix part of the grain into a new jar of sterilized grain (Grain-to-Grain transfer, second generation) and the rest into a bulk substrate bag (Spawn-to-Bulk).
If this is your first time, 50/50 is safe. I typically go 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, but it’s a tradeoff between speed and diversity. While I will not decide for at least 8 weeks from the publishing date of this blog post, since it’s been yers, I’ll probably go for 50/50. Also, I don’t want too many mushrooms gowing at the same time. At my peak, I had about 16 blocks of mushrooms in 8 containers.
Substrate Choice
The “easy button” for pasture-loving variants (magic mushrooms) is vermiculite and coco coir. This requires only basic pasteurization, and so is less error-prone for the same yeild. But for the wood-loving Cyclocybe aegerita, I’ll use Master’s Mix, which requires full serialization. A bit harder, but my home-built Still Air Box keeps the transfer clean.
Fruiting
Two to four weeks later, the fully colonized block goes into a high-humidity chamber with wet vermiculite to trigger pinning.
My personal production record: 8 generations, 33 jars, and a total of just over a pound of dry mushrooms generated from a single starting jar of wheat berries and a mere 3 ml of spore solution.
Closing Thoughts
This is a fresh run of an old and familiar process. When I get to the next major steps, I’ll write more detail about each of those steps.
