Grow Mushrooms at Home In A 5 Gallon Bucket (Easy - No Sterilization!)

hey guys this is Tony from Fresh Cap mushrooms calm and although the leaves aren't on the trees yet and there's still a bit of snow on the ground it's really starting to feel like spring which is making me want to grow some mushrooms outside so I thought I'd show you a super simple method today for growing mushrooms in a bucket on woodchips and you don't really need any special equipment like a pasteurizer or anything like that you just need a five-gallon bucket some oyster mushroom grain spawn and some wood chips so I have this grain spawn here that's been sitting probably way too long so it's definitely ready to go I'm also going to be using some Aspen wood chips that I'm gonna pasteurize in a tote just using hot water from the tap and a little bit of hot water from the stove and then I'm going to be using a five-gallon bucket then I'm going to drill a bunch of holes into you and the mushrooms can colonize inside that bucket and eventually fruit out of those holes okay so here's the bucket that I'm going to be using to grow the mushrooms in you can get these buckets or wherever obviously Home Depot but it's just a regular five-gallon bucket and I've already got some drain holes on the bottom which allow any kind of excess moisture to drain out but I'm also gonna go ahead and drill a bunch of holes all around the bucket quarter inch holes probably every couple inches or so that will allow it one to breathe and also will allow the mushrooms to eventually fruit from so I'm gonna ruin the bucket but it'll be great for growing mushrooms [Music] okay so there's my bucket now full of holes these holes are going to allow the mycelium to breathe as it's working its way through the woodchips but it's also going to be spot where the mushrooms can root through and they're obviously not going to fruit through every single hole and that quarter-inch doesn't look like a lot of room for the mushrooms the growth room but I've seen some of the biggest oyster clusters come out of holes no bigger than that so it'll be just fine okay so now we're gonna go ahead and pasteurize our woodchips and honestly with just straight aspen wood chips if you're not adding any supplementation or anything like that you probably don't even need to pasteurize them you can probably just soak them and add your spawn and things will likely go just fine without any kind of contamination but I do like to pasteurize them just because it does give a better chance for the mushrooms to fully grow and eventually fruit and it also seems to kind of soften the wood chips a little bit and make it easier for the mycelium to work its way through the substrate and eventually fruit that way so with pasteurizing you're gonna have a really really good chance of success so that's what we're gonna do but we don't need a big 55-gallon drum or a propane burner or anything like that I just have a large tote that I'm gonna fill with chips and then fill with hot tap water just straight from the hot water tank and then I'm gonna add a few gallons of boiling water from the stove and that should be enough to get the temperature up to close to around 80 degrees Celsius where the chips are going to sit and we're gonna leave them overnight and then the next day we're gonna take them out and add them to the bucket once they've cooled and then we can add our spawn as well okay so I've had the woodchips pasteurizing overnight and now they are pre soaked and pasteurized and ready to go so I have this spawn here that I'm gonna add to this the woodchips and we put it down in layers gonna put down like a thin layer of which and then a little bit of a later spawn then a layer of wood chips on the layer spawn and put it down kind of like a layer cake throughout the whole bucket till we get right to the top so typically you want to make sure that you're being kind of clean when you're doing this but this is a old spawns been sitting around for a while and we're going to grow on these outside so I'm not too worried about contamination or anything like that let's go ahead and sprinkle in some layers a spawn try to make sure that you break it up as much as you can so you don't have big clumps of a spawn oh yeah you'll put in a layer spawn that and then just throw in a layer of woodchips every time you put down a layer of woodchips you want to press it down just so it gets nice and compact and that'll help them mycelium to jump up and fully colonize all those woodchips and if your wood chips are really wet make sure you just squeeze them out really good before you fill up your bucket but that's why we have drain holes in the bucket so that even if they are a little bit too wet it'll drain out and you'll have the right amount of moisture content in your woodchips you can see that this spawn has been kind of left too long in the bag and it's just a solid chunk of mycelium really super consolidated and there's even some fruiting bodies have started to grow on the green spot inside the bag that's no big deal we'll just break this up and you can use it especially when you're growing outside like this that you're not you're worried about you know chunks of fruiting body going in there or if the mycelium there's been kind of overgrown it'll still work out pretty well as long as it still smells good it smells like nice healthy oyster mycelium then you're good to go okay so that's it once you get to the top of the bucket you want to make sure that your last layer is a layer of woodchips and then just put a lid on top it's time to let it call and ice so for this bucket I ended up using about five pounds of grain spawn and I'm not entirely sure how many woodchips but I guess enough to fill a five-gallon bucket now I'm just gonna put this bucket somewhere where it can colonize a perfect spot would be the garage or somewhere out of the way where it can colonize for ten to fourteen days and still drain a little bit if it has to so we're gonna put it away and come back and check it in a couple weeks and it should be ready to put outside and fruit so normally you wouldn't want to do this but because I want to show you guys I took the lid off this bucket and it's been over a week now since I inoculated it the mycelium has started to really work its way through the woodchips and it's starting to get really nice and firm and bind to it and you can feel it it's just solid and it's working its way across so another week or so probably until this thing's fully colonized and like I said you you normally wouldn't want to do this you just want to leave it but kind of want to take a look for the video and see what it's like so I'm gonna let this continue to colonise for another week or so and then should probably be ready to fruit okay so the oyster button has been colonizing for a few weeks now and I hadn't really paid much attention to it but I looked at it the other day I just had it in a garage and it's starting to fruit quite nicely so I brought it outside and we're gonna continue to let it fruit through those holes so blue oyster mushrooms in particular are really sensitive to co2 concentrations so I brought them outside to fruit them which is one of the easiest and best places to fruit oyster mushrooms because they'll you know there's lots of fresh air and they'll be able to grow into these big clusters with nice large caps the challenge is to be able to maintain high humidity so usually when you put these buckets outside you want to put them in a location where they can out of the wind maybe in some tall grass or in some trees where they can you know stay relatively humid without getting too dried out because if the pins do dry out it will eventually abort and just kind of stop growing or not grow very well so luckily right now it's pretty humid it's been very rainy and cloudy but still I put in the corner here so it's gonna stay out of the way of a lot of the really heavy winds or any wind really that would kind of dry it out and cause it to grow slowly or abort fruiting altogether now it's also always good to have a spray bottle on hand especially if you can check your bucket every once in a while just to make sure that the caps or the pins aren't drying out too much alternatively you can also drape a bag over the bucket to try and maintain that humidity just you know opening up a few times a day to make sure that it's getting some from some fresh air in there but that'll really help to maintain the humidity and it'll ensure that your fruits don't dry out now once it's past the initial pinning stage the high humidity is a lot less important but especially when the mushrooms are just starting to show up through the bucket then you're gonna want to make sure that it stays relatively humid while those much room to grow so I'm gonna continue to let these mushrooms grow for the next few days and now they'll start to grow really really quickly and won't be long before we're gonna be able to harvest some of these mushrooms [Music] okay so I think these oyster mushrooms are now ready to harvest could probably let them grow a little bit longer but I don't wanna let them go too long but you want to get them just before the mushrooms start to curl up so just before they're ready to drop their spores it's a really good time to harvest them so I'm gonna go ahead and harvest these two big clusters behind me and there's another cluster on the back side of the bucket that I'm going to continue to let grow now for this bucket once it's all harvested you could just leave it and get a second flush or another option with me to empty out the inside of the bucket and lay it down in a straw bed or in a bed in the garden and get another flush that way and harvest them all I'm gonna do is just take a knife and cut off the whole cluster in one piece right at the back right at the hole where they grew from and it's pretty amazing to imagine that this entire cluster there's two clusters there but it's pretty amazing to imagine that this entire cluster of oyster mushrooms is growing out of one tiny little quarter-inch hole I don't know what this weighs but it's probably close to a pound or so of fresh oyster mushrooms growing out of one tiny little quarter-inch hole a five-gallon bucket that was nothing but pasteurized asking wood chips so yeah this process is super easy to do pretty much anybody can do it at home if you have a bucket some asking wood chips and some grain spawn so I highly recommend you give it a try but anyways I'm gonna go and enjoy these mushrooms so thanks so much for watching I'm Tony from fresh cat mushrooms calm and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: FreshCap Mushrooms

Views: 1,843,690

Rating: 4.9427476 out of 5

Keywords: grow mushrooms, mushroom cultivation, easy way to grow mushrooms, grow mushrooms at home, easiest way to grow mushrooms, mycology, oyster mushroom, growing oyster mushrooms, mushroom farming, mushroom farm, how to grow mushrooms, bucket tek, easy mushroom growing tek, blue oyster mushrooms, home mushroom growing, how to grow mushrooms at home

Id: 45b2t7fqhjA

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019