Experiments: bin-o-shrooms

I have one ongoing experiment that I have only mentioned in passing so far: my mushroom culture. At the workshop on urban gardening in October last year, we were told to bring a freshly used coffee filter, which I did, and they gave us a bit of oyster mushroom mycelium along with instructions on how to grow it on coffee grinds. I put mine in a 1 kg yoghurt bin (I have plenty of these), faithfully added used coffee filters with a little more mycelium stuck into the grinds until the bin filled up, kept a lid on, left it near a radiator for warmth, and waited.

Fairly soon, the whole bin was full of mycelium – fluffy white, strangely insubstantial stuff that smelled of mushrooms and forest earth. Then I emptied the bin into a larger metal bowl, put a piece of cardboard on top, and placed it under my bed. I thought the priority was to keep it in the dark, give it some space, and just wait for the mushrooms to sprout. But I soon felt I must be doing something wrong, for the whole thing became very dry, and there was absolutely no sign of a single fruiting body, anywhere. In short, this mycelium was finally taken over by mould and died.

A second chance

There had been, however, some leftover bits and scraps of mycelium in the emptied bin, and so I had put these in another coffee filter and back in the bin and just added fresh filters on top, without spiking them with mycelium, since I had none left. But this one still took off really fast, the scraps soon grew and spread to all the filters, and another bin was filled with mycelium to the brim. By then, I had read Sepp Holzer and learned that oyster mushrooms need high humidity, more so than other mushrooms even. So I emptied that bucket into my metal bowl again, but this time I wrapped it in a plastic bag to keep it from drying out. And that worked out quite nicely!

I still didn’t get any mushrooms though. There was a little coffee fluid at the bottom of the bowl, and the mycelium proceeded to thrive on that. Somehow, it would jellify the fluid first (I’m not entirely sure that was the mycelium’s doing, but it seems so), and then it would spread, in time covering large parts of the metal bowl’s bottom and sides, and even the insides of the plastic bag. Funky!

Pinterest to the rescue

Then I once again found something interesting on Pinterest: growing mushrooms in laundry baskets. That sounded exciting, and I still had some holey plastic containers left over from the vermicompost, so I thought I’d try that. But that article then led me on to another article with a rather brilliant idea: growing mushrooms in buckets! (Check out that article, you’ll immediately get the idea from the pictures.) Well, and of course I could do the same thing with my yoghurt bins on a smaller scale.Perfect.

Without further ado, some pictures:

As you can see, I simply put the former contents of a bin back into a bin with holes, and since it seems to have shrunk a little, I have added one more coffee filter and will leave it to fill the whole bin again, then I’ll take it out of the second bin and maybe put it in the dark corner with the vermicompost. Shady should do it really, out in the wild mushrooms don’t grow in total darkness either.

And of course I’ve used the remaining bits of mycelium in the bowl to spike more coffee filters and start yet another bin! The fun never ends! :-D So far, I’m really pleased with the setup, I’m SO curious to see what comes out of it. Hopefully I’ll be able to write an update in tow weeks or so.