Growing Gourmet Mushrooms For Self-sufficiency

hello everyone and welcome back to mossy bottom on this glorious march day you can probably hear my rooster crowing in the background the birds are singing it really is lovely this video is all about mushroom cultivation and you may remember back in the autumn of 2018 i made a video in which um i wandered the forest hunting for and trying to identify wild varieties of mushroom as well as harvesting a few and eating them as well well my mushroomy know-how has improved quite a bit since then and i do plan on making another foraging video in the near future maybe this autumn because it's fast becoming one of my favorite things to do but as it's spring right now and in the spirit of self-sufficiency which is obviously a huge part of my life i'm going to attempt to grow my own mushrooms now i should say i've never done this before and so this video will be um very much a case of putting the theory into practice for the first time and seeing if it works but i hope that by the end of this video um anyone out there watching who wants to have a go at growing mushrooms themselves um will be armed i suppose with enough knowledge um to give it a go-to so here we have some scarlet elf caps which is one of the few varieties of mushroom or fungi that's actually still growing um at this time of year on my little patch of land later in the year especially in the autumn around september october there's a whole host of different varieties of fungi here and mycology which is the given name to the study of fungi is a fascinating subject with a huge amount to learn but i'm going to attempt to distill it into the need to know facts for the purposes of mushroom cultivation first of all mushrooms are not actually plants in fact they're more closely related to us to people than they are to plants there are three main types of mushroom parasitic symbiotic and saprobic the latter being the type we're most interested in because those are the mushrooms which like the scarlet elf caps grow on dead organic matter like leaf litter manure and tree logs and that's what i'll be using here at mossy bottom to grow my own mushrooms now they break down that organic matter with the aid of moisture and turn it into food so unlike plants they don't photosynthesize which means they aren't dependent on the sun for energy and that's why most commonly you find mushrooms in dark shady places like this and what could be better to grow in ireland than something that doesn't need much sun and likes damp wet places our damp overcast climate might not be well suited to growing you know heat loving crops but as far as fungi are concerned the emerald isle is like a five-star hotel another thing you need to know about mushrooms is that the mushroom itself is the fruiting body of the fungus and that fungus is a network of fibers called mycelium and if i pick this mushroom here um that's the that's the fruit of the mycelium the network of fibers the fungus itself is within the log breaking it down so harvesting a mushroom is kind of like picking an apple from a tree except unlike a tree you can't see all the branches and leaves of the fungus because they're hidden within the organic matter as they break it down what that also means is that if you pick a mushroom in the right way without damaging the rest of the fungus more mushrooms will keep growing back season after season just like apples would on a tree finally unlike plants mushrooms don't produce seeds they actually produce spores instead and unlike seeds spores can't easily be harvested by the amateur mushroom grower like me it is possible but it's quite a complicated scientific process so it's better i think to buy pre-mixed spawn from a professional grower which combines the spores and a basic substrate like sawdust now i know in the u.s there's a burgeoning movement of home mushroom growers and it seems to be quite easy from the research i've done to get hold of mushroom spawn in the uk and ireland it's a bit trickier there are suppliers out there but you might have to get the spawn shipped from another country within europe which is definitely possible if you're struggling to find a supplier just try searching on ebay they're definitely out there and in case you're wondering i'm sure everyone in this part of the world will have seen scarlet elf caps in the wild yes they are actually edible you're supposed to cook them first and i've never tried it but uh maybe one day so today i'll be inoculating logs and i have one here oh very heavy this is a piece of oak with spawn from two different types of mushroom the shiitake mushroom which is native to southeast asia but said to be one of the easiest mushrooms to cultivate and the oyster mushroom which is native to both europe and to north america and as well as logs you can also grow oyster mushrooms on straw bales and bags of sawdust right enough theory let's get started so these are the logs i've harvested each about a meter long from three different species of tree and you may notice these ones on the end look a bit strange well that's because i've already inoculated them that's the process i'm going to show you in this video but i needed to get a bit of practicing first to make sure i knew what i was talking about before filming so that's why they've already been done and the three species of tree that i have here are sycamore on the end which is a member of the maple family european ash in the middle and english oak at the far end now mushrooms in general will only grow on hardwood logs so you can't use conifer trees pine spruce cedar anything evergreen and fast growing just isn't going to work sadly in terms of which species of broad leaf tree to use it depends very much on the mushroom so the shiitake mushrooms they prefer oak and the oyster mushroom seems to favor maple from what i've read there are no maple trees growing on my land sadly so i had to go with sycamore which as i say is is closely related so fingers crossed it will work i've also read that ash works really well and it's quite abundant here so i decided in the spirit of trial and error to give that a go too um other species which i've read um can work well are birch aspen and cherry but i suspect you'd have some success with most hardwood species it probably just affects how long they last in terms of getting the perfect one the most important thing to remember is that you have to use living wood you can't sadly just collect dead branches from the forest floor it would make it easier wouldn't it but the main reason you can't do that is that dead timber will have already been colonized by other species of fungi which are likely to then to out compete and harm anything that you're trying to grow so you need to harvest branches from living trees cut them into lengths about a meter long then clean off any lychen moss or any other microorganisms on the bark using water and then you need to let them rest in a dark moist place mine were lying on the ground here wrapped in a tarp for about two weeks and that rest period it's really important it allows the anti-fungal cells in the wood to die off now the best time to do this is in the winter before the buds start to grow i harvested my logs back in february um it's now late march but if you're really quick it should still work this year you're gonna have to get your skates on though so we need to inoculate the logs um and i have a piece of ash right here with the spawn and this is the spawn for my two different types of mushroom i'll show you this in much more detail a bit later first though we need to drill holes into the log um and for that you will need a drill obviously with a a half inch drill bit which is about 12 or 13 millimeters i think um and you're gonna have to drill holes um at a depth of about two and a half centimeters or about an inch um so i've marked on my drill bit with a piece of white tape at the appropriate depth um just to make it easier to see when i've reached that depth because you don't want to go any deeper for the simple reason that you don't want any air gaps in the holes in terms of spacing you want a gap of about 6 inches or 15 centimeters between the holes and about two inches or five centimeters between each row something like this [Applause] now what i've done and this is very much an experiment is create sawdust from some of the logs here we have some oak sawdust which i'm going to be using for the shiitake mushrooms and it should be really easy for the mushroom spores to colonize this stuff to act as a kind of fertilizer i guess to help get them started so what i'm going to do next is half fill each hole that i've now drilled in the log and you drill all the way around the log with my sawdust packed in as tightly as i can because what you don't want is any air gaps and now for the fun bit we get to add the spawn filling each hole right to the very surface of the bark with as much as we can fit in and i'm going to show you this spawn it comes in different types sometimes it's mixed with sawdust sometimes it's in a dowel and you can see this variety is just very very very tiny little beads and you can actually see that white stuff is the fungi itself beginning to grow which is perfect and you can get special inoculating tools um which are kind of like syringes which make this job a little bit quicker and more efficient if you've got lots of logs to do um i haven't even attempted to look at where you buy one i just read about them in a book for my purposes though i think just using my fingers is probably the best way now at this stage it's really important that you seal those holes to prevent the spawn that you've pushed in from being damaged or indeed from your freshly cut holes being colonized by some other species of microorganism all the books recommend using cheese wax for this purpose but cheese wax is not the easiest thing to get hold of around here i'm not entirely sure where you're supposed to buy it from so i went with option number two which was beeswax and the easiest way to procure beeswax here in ireland is to buy these ulta candles which are actually really cheap and you can find them in supermarkets and i suspect hardware stores i just got these in my local supermarket and i'm going to use an old kettle to melt them down and once melted it's just a case of cutting up a piece of sponge and using it to add the liquid wax onto the outside of the hole do it a couple of times to make sure that it's fully sealed and as you can probably see the wax sets pretty quickly within a few seconds it's solid and you can touch it in fact one of the slight problems with this method is that the beeswax keeps hardening again in the pan so you only have a short amount of time before you have to go and melt it again you also want to seal the top and bottom of the log with the wax and any wounds that were made when you were processing the logs such as by the chainsaw just to prevent other types of fungi from getting in now i'm going to inoculate about 20 logs like this in total and as you can imagine it's quite a time-consuming business um expect each log to take about an hour in total to process um but you can of course buy spawn in much smaller quantities you don't have to buy as much as i did and you don't have to do as many logs as i am just one or two logs uh should still give you a sizable mushroom harvest once complete your log should look something like this you can see each hole has been filled with spawn and sealed up with wax and finally you need to stack your logs somewhere and the best place to do that is under a tree cover in a shady but not pitch black location which is fairly damp just the sort of place you would find mushrooms growing in the wild under conifer trees is actually perfect but in my case i'm going to put them here at the back of my cabin under this vast sycamore tree now i've read it can take between six months to two years for the logs to yield their first harvest of mushrooms but after that they can produce up to six harvests a year for between two and eight years depending on the species of tree which the logs were cut from some decaying much quicker than others if you're growing shiitake mushrooms and you can find oak logs which are of course the best for that species of mushroom then they're going to be yielding for a long time for very very little work of course this is my first time growing mushrooms so i hope i've done everything right and they produce a good harvest there's probably some mushroom growing experts watching this video thinking my god why did you do it like that but i have read a few books on the subject i'm pretty confident i'm going to get a yield quite how much remains to be seen based on the species of timber i think in terms of waiting i'm generally quite a patient person so i think it'll be quite fun checking in on them from time to time every few months to see if there's any progress so i don't mind that too much as you probably know producing as much food as i can from my small plot of land here in the west of ireland is a big part of my life here and like most smallholders i have shady patches everywhere under trees like here and along my boundaries in particular which i'm now hoping are going to be the perfect habitat for mushroom farming not only that but the stacked logs here will provide a great habitat for birds and insects of course as well as other species of wildlife so it's a win-win situation i'm really trying to encourage as much biodiversity here as i can as long as none of them decide to start nibbling on my mushrooms okay folks that's just about it for this video i promise to update you as and when they start to grow uh yes i said when not if i'm trying to be confident here and if you're interested in seeing more mushroom related videos then do let me know in the comments as next year i'm kind of hoping to set up mushroom growing sites with compost and straw bales using some different species of mushroom i have to say it really is very exciting to be growing something so perfectly suited to the damp cool climate here in the west of ireland bye for now you

Channel: Mossy Bottom

Views: 39,216

Keywords: growing mushrooms, how to grow mushrooms, grow shiitake mushrooms, grow oyster mushrooms, grow mushrooms on logs, mushrooms on logs, home grown mushrooms, home growing mushrooms, mushroom growing homestead, how to grow shiitake, how to grow oyster, mossy bottom

Id: _YYGONIptYU

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021