Dangers of Indoor Mushroom Growing & How to Avoid Them

growing edible and medicinal mushrooms at home is becoming a really popular Trend and for a good reason but is it safe to grow mushrooms at home indoors for example is it safe to grow them inside of your bedroom in today's video we're going to be talking about some of the Lesser known hazards associated with growing mushrooms at home and what you can do to mitigate against them so mushrooms are helping your health and not harming it oh but first my name is Chris I run chrisoutdoors.ca and we do education Consulting and courses helping people learn about the natural world and also build their self-reliance skills and their preparedness in a quickly changing world we also have an in-depth online course on how to grow mushrooms at home both indoors and out as well as how to ID them in the wild and mushroom ecology so you can check that out in the link in the description or just go to themushroomcourse.com now though it's time to talk about mushroom safety now just like getting out of bed in the morning comes with risks and then getting into a vehicle and driving somewhere increases those risks there are a handful of risks associated with growing mushrooms and even more risks associated with wild foraging mushrooms now the first thing I just want to say is a small number of people do actually have allergies to mushrooms and they can even be anaphylactic so if you've never eaten an oyster mushroom before or not really many mushrooms at all I just want to put that on your radar and you can choose what you want to do with that number two is the fact that mushrooms are spore producing so when mushrooms are finished kind of colonizing they're uh their host and they create this fruit this fruit releases these spores out into the air the Spore spread through the air looking for new hosts to colonize them now there's spores all over the place out in the wild if you walk through the forest ever you've probably breathed in spores before you can even get mushroom spores indoors and houses I live in the countryside and we keep our windows open a lot in the summertime so I guarantee you I breathe in the odd sport here or there even inside of my house if you have molds inside of your house or fungi inside your house which is more common than um a lot of people realize then you could be breathing in spores from those as well breathing in quantity of spores and specific types of spores is definitely not good for us particularly there's a wild mushroom called puffball and there's a I forget the name it off the top of my head but there's actually a pretty serious ailment that people can get if they breathe in quantities of puffball spores and they can end up in the hospital even with long-term uh chronic issues from breathing in puffball spores but all mushroom spores are not things we want to breathe breathe in in any kind of quantity and as I say that I don't want to scare you know that you've been breathing them in your whole life it's inevitable you can't go through the world without breathing in some spores unless you're wearing a mask Everywhere You Go 24 7. our bodies have things built in place to deal with the small amounts of toxins and things that we ingest into our body but if you're going to grow mushrooms depending on how you do it there are ways that you might increase the likelihood of you taking in more spores so let's chat a little bit about what you can do to mitigate that risk I'm basically going to just lay out what I know now I'm not an absolute expert on this I'm not a doctor I'm going to tell you what I've known I'm going to share a few links where you can do some of your own research and I'm going to leave it up to you as a responsible adult to make the choice about how you want to mitigate the risks with your growing situation first I'll chat about the easier one so I mostly grow outdoors that's my favorite way to grow and I really don't worry about it at all personally when I'm growing Outdoors now quick little trick when you harvest your mushrooms and you bring them in if you're going to put them into your fridge or bring them into your house put them inside a sealed bag because something that can actually happen if you just bring them in in a big tub and leave them on your counter or in their fridge mushrooms can actually continue to release spores even after they've been harvested what we want to avoid is large concentrations inside of us and especially if you have asthma or any allergies then this becomes extra important so when you harvest your mushrooms put them inside of a paper bag or some sort of bag and put them in the fridge that way they release spores in your fridge you don't open the door and have a big poof of spores spreading through your house so there's one little trick for just on the Harvest now the one that's more important I think for us to talk about or I shouldn't say more important but I think where the risk increases is when we start talking about growing indoors in confined spaces where we don't have the same ventilation that we have Outdoors so let's chat a little bit about where those risks concentrate and what you can maybe do to mitigate against them now with indoor growing I've tried to do as much research as I can around this to try and figure out what the what the real risks are and unfortunately there's no real clear line of where too much is I haven't been able to find it and what I'm realizing is I think it really comes down to the person some people are more susceptible than others to various types of allergies if you ingest spores in your lungs um one just having a lot in your lungs starts to clog things up but two your body creates a response to that and builds antigens and as those antigens be build up over time it can create an allergic reaction and the more you're exposed to it the worse that allergic reaction can actually get and it is possible to turn into long-term chronic health problems if you breathe even a lot of spores now most of the stories that I've heard through my own research are people that are actually working in commercial mushroom operations and they're being exposed to spores day after day week after week here's something that might be interesting to know all kinds of companies sell these grow at home mushroom kits they don't have come with morning labels they're meant to be grown right inside your house they don't tell you anything about the spores with them and I've reached out to a number of these mushroom companies and I've asked them and I've spoken with numerous people that grow mushrooms and the general consensus that people say is that well it's such a small amount coming off here that it's a real low risk that someone's actually going to react and there's ways you can mitigate that risk the main one being that you harvest the mushrooms before the spores get released so when this mushroom here is probably just about to release its spores basically when the cap kind of gets nice and wide and that that end of the the edge of it starts to furl open or wider like when the top of the cap starts to go flat that's usually when they start to release their spores so if you harvest if you want to play on the safe side Harvest your mushrooms when they're a little bit smaller than this Harvest them when the the cap is still kind of curled over a little bit and hopefully you'll be able to get them before the Spore releases and of course you get them before the spores it significantly mitigates the risk there the second way we can mitigate the risk is to just think about the quantity so I would never grow more than a tub or two indoors without doing something to ventilate and you may want to decide that actually you're not even comfortable with that so you're just not going to grow indoors without ventilation you're only going to go Outdoors or you're going to set up ventilation that's your own choice as an adult but what's unclear is exactly where does that risk Point happen and I think it's quantity and it's time another thing that we can do to mitigate risk though if we're going to grow indoors is don't grow inside of the living areas that you spend the most amount of time in so if you're going to grow let's say on coffee grounds or you're going to get a kit you know you could have it in your kitchen beside your sink where you're in there you know maybe for a couple hour an hour in the morning or probably not even you know maybe in their 20 minutes in the morning you're in there an hour at night but you're not sleeping there you're not sitting there for hours at a time you can grow these in your bathroom again you're in and out of that space Maybe maybe don't grow them in your bedroom where you're sleeping there for eight hours every single night breathing in so if there is for a release you're gonna breathe a lot more in so the next mitigation you can do is just not store them in a main living space a few other options I'll just throw out there so one option I have here is I actually grow in this thing called a mono tub here and inside of this I have a controlled humidity environment and I grow two bags at a time so the risk of the spores here is pretty low to begin with but by being inside of this tub even if they release the spores well they're they're inside of the tub they're not floating around my home so when I go to go into my mono tub if they're fruiting one thing is I could put on an n95 mask or a proper respirator and then open this up so that if I am breathing in a little bit of Spore I'm more protected when I do it now I see people growing these all the time and 10 them without masks just saying you know if you go on the internet and do a search for mushroom farm pictures you'll see all kinds of pictures of people walking around these fruiting rooms with a lot more mushrooms many them aren't wearing masks I'm not at all recommending that I would be wearing a mask in one of those when I'm harvesting the motor here and they're fruiting I prefer to wear a mask I go on the safety safety first side if you wanted to take it up even another notch you could have this going indoors and when you want to go check on it actually just take it outside so walk out on your balcony walk outside and open it outside so you're not releasing any spores in your house wear your mask do your Harvest do your work put it back on bring it back in now the third thing I just want to bring up and again I don't worry about this at all in my house because I live in a fairly dry spot but just know that if you live like in a coastal environment or in an area where it's really really moist and you already deal with mold issues maybe if you've even had mushrooms growing in your walls and stuff before just keep in mind that by allowing these spores to go off in the house it's probably unlikely that they're gonna actually be able to colonize anything in your house but I want to say unlikely not impossible I did once have a bucket that I was growing that had holes in the bottom and I had it sit sitting on a concrete floor down in my root cellar and the mycelium actually started growing across the concrete now as soon as I took the bucket away it lost its moisture source which was the straw in the bucket and it just dried up and died but if I had not taken that away and it had connection to the moisture source and that mycelium made it over to the wood so you know just know that you know by introducing my celium to your home if it's very moist already if you already deal with mold problems you are introducing more spores into that environment so these are all factors I think to consider you know the safest way is just to grow outside or to limit the amount and to wear masks when you harvest but again look through the additional resources that I provided here and make your own decisions I'd like to extend you a special offer to join the mushroom course inside this course I'll be taking my 20 years of experience in being a modern day Homesteader and a forager and I'll be sharing how to grow an abundance of mushrooms at home whether you live in the city or in the country and even if you have limited time and space so if this is of interest to you I invite you to check out the course at themushroomcourse.com and enter the code YouTube 30 for 30 off

Channel: Chris Outdoors ON

Views: 48,402

Keywords: Mushroom growing safety, Is growing mushrooms indoors safe?, Indoor mushroom growing, Mushroom cultivation indoors, How to cultivate mushrooms indoors, Dangers of indoor mushroom growing, the last of us mushrooms, the last of us fungus, cordyceps the last of us, Oyster mushroom growing, Mushroom growing kits, Oyster Mushroom growing problems, when to harvest oyster mushrooms, oyster mushroom farming, self-reliance, urban homesteading, homesteading, urban permaculture

Id: yjaZ9fuU5NQ

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023