Gardening and Growing Mushrooms | How to Grow Mushrooms in your Annual or Permaculture Garden

[Music] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] today we're at the north spore research garden and we're going to show you some techniques for growing mushrooms in your garden [Music] as decomposers fungi play a critical role in nutrient cycling in your soil by intentionally adding edible mushrooms into your garden not only are you accelerating those processes but you're also tapping into a whole other food kingdom today we're going to go over several common mushroom cultivation techniques and show you how you can apply them to your garden specifically we're going to go over growing in beds growing on logs growing on straw bales and growing in containers [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] mulching is really useful in your garden to help with weed suppression by adding mushrooms into that mix you're getting the added benefit of breaking down that carbon rich material into organic matter and returning that back into the soil organic matter is really important for the soil for a couple of reasons it helps with soil structure or the tilth it helps with water holding capacity it improves soil porosity which is important when you have pretty clay heavy soils you need a little bit more air in there and it also feeds the microbes in your soil improving overall soil ecology [Music] so before you mulch your garden pads it's helpful to put something down to kind of keep the weeds from popping up through the wood chips we've got some cardboard and some old grain bags you can use whatever you have on hand i'm going to take the plastic off of this because i don't want plastic in my garden better to use paper without a bunch of dyes so just regular brown paper or cardboard is best uh [Music] it's become a pretty nice day the sun has come out and we're going to be inoculating these wood chips with some wine cap spawn the latin name is stropharia rugoso enolada also called kingstropharia or garden giant because the caps of it can grow to be as big as dinner plates and it also is a perfect companion to your vegetables in your garden mostly because it's very adaptable and pretty resilient so it can tolerate some drier conditions and a bit more sun than other types of mushrooms it's also a mushroom that you're not likely to find in the grocery store and that's because it doesn't really grow well indoors it prefers to be outside interacting with other microbes in the soil now i'm going to break up the spawn so i've got smaller pieces so you're just going to want to kind of massage the bag sprinkle a light layer on the bottom try to get it evenly spread out across the wood chips if there are any big chunks you can just go ahead and break them up with your hand right now so i'm using one whole bag to cover all of this bottom layer one bag of spawn will inoculate a 4x4 square or roughly 16 square feet [Music] so [Music] now that we've mulched our paths we're going to move on to mulching in our garden beds now we're going to want to use straw in the garden bed instead of wood chips because wood chips decompose pretty slowly even though we've inoculated the chips with wine cap spawn which accelerates its decomposition as it degrades it pulls nitrogen out of the soil and plants need nitrogen to grow so they kind of compete with each other for those nutrients straw on the other hand requires much less nitrogen to break down so it's more ideal for within a vegetable bed for mulching in our garden beds with straw we're going to be using oyster grain spawn today now grain spawn has the benefit of adding extra nitrogen to your soil which is a little bit of nutrient boost for your vegetables one of the disadvantages of it is that creatures may also be attracted to the grain spawn because they probably want to eat it but we have a pretty established garden bed here so we're not so worried about a little bit of digging around the plants will be able to hold up to it but if you have a new garden bed you can also use sawdust spawn in this application so we're going to use a pretty similar method to mulch within our bed as we did in our paths just sandwiching a layer of substrate some spawn and then another layer of substrate and today we're going to be using blue oyster but you can use any type of oyster in your beds wine cap also is happy on straw so there are a lot of different possibilities feel free to experiment people ask about using straw versus hay in their garden we recommend using straw because hay has seeds that can sprout and become weeds in your garden and is more prone to contamination straw is definitely the ideal mulch for in a vegetable garden bed [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] we're gonna go ahead and use this whole bag [Music] so [Music] another great way to incorporate mushrooms into your landscape is to inoculate the wood chips around your perennials we're going to be using wine cap sawdust spawn around this weeping cherry today and wine cap is a pretty incredible mushroom because it's so adaptable it can easily grow on hardwood chips as well as soft wood chips and out competes other fungi that may already be established in your bed now that our bed is made we're going to keep an eye on it over the next few months and water it as needed it can take between a few months to half a year for it to be established enough to fruit if you're lucky it will fruit in the same season that you make it but it may take until next year before you get any mushrooms but once it is established and you are getting mushrooms in your garden it will easily reseed itself so you can find the wine cap popping up in other mulch beds on your property we're going to show you a really cool way of incorporating mushrooms into your garden we're going to build a raised garden bed out of fully colonized shiitake logs this is a great way to get more life and utility out of your older shiitake logs and diversify the ecology of your garden these are our shiitake logs they are fully colonized oak logs that we used north spore soda spawn in they've been around about two years and have fruited a few times as well we pulled these out of our shiitake yard which has ideal incubation conditions you don't want to use freshly inoculated shiitake logs in your garden because it doesn't have those ideal conditions the reason that the garden isn't the ideal environment for freshly inoculated logs is all of that direct sunlight that your garden receives can dry out the logs and the logs are going to be put directly into the soil which can expose them to competitor fungi where is that rake [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] this is a super easy technique that's surprisingly successful at growing mushrooms so we originally developed this technique to improve garden soil but have found that it's surprisingly successful at growing mushrooms too all you need to do is take these bags break them up and spread it into your soil work it in there probably the easiest way to grow mushrooms outdoors we're going to be using grain spawn as opposed to sawdust spawn because the grain is high in nitrogen which will enrich the soil increase plant growth and help break down woody material in the soil [Music] [Music] now we're going to plant some veggies in our mushroom bed [Music] so [Music] straw bale gardening is popular with home growers because it's an easy way to grow vegetables without having to do a lot of weeding it's great if you don't have a lot of space and the heat that starts to happen in the bale because of decomposition gives the plants a boost to grow we're going to adapt this traditional technique to grow mushrooms we've got four bales here today and we're going to inoculate each with a different species of oyster mushrooms we've got black king snow italian and golden the first step in strawbell gardening is to condition your bale by adding a nitrogen source to initiate decomposition we're going to be using grain spawn in this application which not only adds nitrogen but introduces a vigorous mushroom mycelium to help speed up the breakdown of the bale [Music] when inoculating make sure to get spawn on all sides of your straw bale one consideration is that grain spawn heats up a veil very quickly which is great in the spring or in the fall or if you live in a colder climate but if you're inoculating in the summer months or you live in a warmer climate you may want to use soda spawn which will slow down the decomposition a little bit and create more ideal conditions for mycelial growth [Music] good now that we've inoculated each of these straw bales with a different species of oyster mushroom we're going to give them another good watering just to make sure that the straw is fully hydrated and we expect them to be fully colonized in two to four months we're going to show you how to grow mushrooms using these containers in a garden setting we're going to be using oyster mushrooms for this technique they're perfect for an outdoor setting because they're extremely aggressive and they don't need a sterile environment in which to grow here we have grain spawn and solder spawn either work for this technique there are a large variety of containers you could use you need to make sure that the container has good airflow and good drainage here we have a hamper that's really good lots of drainage lots of airflow and we have plastic pots that gardeners are likely to have laying around oyster mushrooms grow on a range of agricultural products one of the most common products you'll find is straw an aspect that you really need to keep in mind is particle size you don't want pieces that are so small that the substrate compresses and goes anaerobic and you don't want pieces that are so large that your substrate dries out we're going to be using this finely chopped straw here this has been heat dried which should make it a cleaner starting material don't feel like you have to use this same material you can use whatever you have readily available experiment with different particle sizes or different mixtures of materials we're going to start by taking our straw and hydrating it [Applause] [Music] we've got our straw soaking here and we're going to let it soak for half an hour to an hour enough time for the straw to get fully saturated at this stage some growers will choose to pasteurize their material there's multiple methods for doing this and we're going to be covering that in other videos although pasteurization can lead to greater yields increased overall success and increased diversity this method with oyster mushrooms is perhaps the easiest way to get started with container growing at this point we want to allow some time for a straw to drain straw is looking nicely hydrated i've got a bag of italian oyster sawdust spawn i need to break up i can break that more as i put it in straw just enough to cover the bottom then another layer of the sawdust just enough to cover the straw more straw and sawdust [Music] okay same idea here layer on the bottom and full spawn [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] there you have it [Music] it's a good idea to keep your mushroom installs hydrated but not too wet give them a good watering when you water your vegetables or anytime they seem dry [Music] so we're back at the research garden a couple of months have gone by it's late summer now temperatures are starting to drop and we've gotten some really nice rains which have created ideal conditions for mushrooms to fruit and they're really starting to pop we're going to show you how to harvest and identify your oysters wine caps and shiitakes harvesting mushrooms is a lot like picking apples off of an apple tree you aren't harming the mycelium in your installations when you harvest the fruit feel free to pick or cut whichever you [Music] prefer [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] wow look at that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] one of the big advantages of growing mushrooms in your garden is that you can be pretty confident that what you're harvesting is what you intended to grow that being said you definitely want to be 100 positive of the identification of any mushroom that you're going to eat some of the things that you're going to want to look for when you are identifying oyster mushrooms are decurrent gills so gills that run all the way down the cap through the stem you can see that wine caps have a different sort of gill pattern they either have these sort of concave caps or more shelf-like shapes like these they also often grow in clusters they have a pretty distinct aroma that's a little bit sweet like licorice or anise and some earthy mushroom scent in there and they have a white spore print which is something that you can sometimes see on the substrate that it's growing on or if one cap is higher than another sometimes it'll leave a little spore deposit on another cap in a cluster for the wine caps you can see there's some different colors of the cap depending on their maturity but there's a pretty distinctive burgundy color like a wine cap they have an annulus on them which is this veil which covers the gills when they're young as they mature and the caps start to curl out and get bigger the annulus detaches and will stick to the stem of the mushroom sometimes the annulus is present on the stipe or the stem in age and sometimes it's a little bit more difficult to see the gills have a pretty dark brown or violet brown color because their spores are violet brown and their smell is not so distinctive but pretty earthy for the shiitakes similar to the wine caps they also have a veil which covers their gills when they're young and as they get older the veil will detach and you can sometimes see remnants of that along the margin of the cap it's a little bit more fibrous than the annulus of the wine cap or a little bit webby the caps can have some texture to it a little bit scabbarists as well as on the stem if you look really closely you can see that their gills have some serration to them so finely toothed and these also have a white spore print these mushrooms the shiitakes only grow out of wood so you won't ever find them just popping out of the ground unless there's some buried wood there on all of these mushrooms we like to harvest them when the margin of the cap or the edge of the cap is still a little bit curled under as they grow the cap will start to curl up and become plain to a little bit convex you can still harvest them past when the cap is unfurled but at that point they're not growing any bigger they're just getting a little bit older some of these mushrooms might be new to you just like with any new food you're going to want to eat a little bit of it first just to try it out wait 24 hours or so to see how your body reacts to it and it's definitely recommended that you cook your mushrooms thoroughly before you eat them they're way more digestible that way and they're a lot tastier all of the spawn that we use for this video can be found at northspore.com be sure to subscribe to our youtube channel and follow us on social media thanks for watching

Channel: North Spore

Views: 562,096

Rating: 4.9276271 out of 5

Keywords: mushrooms, edible, fungi, growing, cultivation, homesteading, spawn, foraging, wild foods, oyster, shiitake, grow, cultivate, north, spore, spores, laboratory, garden, gardening, permaculture, permaculture gardening, bale, straw, bed, beds, mulch, mulching, farm, farming, grain, mushroom, winecap, wine, cap, stropharia, giant, pleurotus, ostreatus, container, logs, king

Id: QJuh7-05ilo

Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020