Growing Mushrooms in a Bucket! (Super Easy Method) | GroCycle

hi there welcome to this video where I'm going to be showing you how to grow oyster mushrooms in a really simple way using a five gallon bucket [Music] so this is a really easy way to grow mushrooms at home without much equipment or prior knowledge and we're going to be showing you how to do it in just one bucket with a focus on home scale cultivation but you can obviously scale this up and do it at a farm scale as well so all you're going to need for this then is a 20 liter or five gallon bucket half a kilogram or roughly one pound of oyster mushroom grain spawn and you're going to want two and a half kilos dry weight that's about five and a half pounds of either chop straw or hardwood chips and in a nutshell all we're going to be doing is just drilling some holes in the bucket pasteurizing our substrate with some hot water and then layering it in the bucket with some spawn and leaving it to grow for around about two weeks at which point it will then be ready to fruit mushrooms which will grow out of the holes of the bucket the first step then is to prepare the bucket we need to drill a series of 12 millimeter holes that's around about half an inch all around the bucket and you want these holes to be approximately 10 to 15 centimeters apart that's about five inches offset in a sort of diamond shaped pattern now these holes enable air exchange to the substrate that's going to be inside the bucket and they also provide a place for the mushrooms to grow out of you can use a standard wood drill bit a grinding stone wheel or even a hole saw bit as we're using in this example all of these different options work fine and you should end up with around 15 to 20 holes in your bucket and you can simply get a bit of sandpaper to clean up any rough edges that may get left behind as you drill through the plastic then you want to add a few smaller drainage holes in the bottom around about three millimeters or 1 8 of an inch and this will make sure any excess moisture in your substrate can drain out the bottom rather than pooling up in the bottom of the bucket next up we're going to pasteurize and hydrate the substrate now this adds water to the substrate and it also ensures that it's nice and clean and ready for our spawn to grow on We're going to be showing you in this example a bucket with straw substrate but you can also use hardwood chips as well although it is possible I wouldn't recommend making buckets with sawdust or wood pellets as the particle size of these is just too small and it tends to create more issues with compacted substrate and poor air Exchange in the middle of the substrate itself so if you're using chopped straw or perhaps hardwood chips you're going to need somewhere in the region of around around about 2.5 kilograms dry weight of substrate if you're using a 20 liter or five gallon bucket once that's hydrated this will become around about eight to eight point five kilograms of substrate now there's a few different ways that you can pasteurize substrate and I do encourage you to watch our video on five low-tech ways to pasteurize mushroom substrate for more info on this our favorite method that we use on our farm here is called the high pH lime bath but many of you watching this video may not have hydrated lime just lying around at home so I'm going to suggest you use the hot water bath method instead now this simply is just pasteurizing the substrate using hot water so you're going to need a bigger container something like a large plastic tote or barrel and you're going to want to fill this up with hot water deep enough that you can submerge your substrate in it you're aiming for a temperature of around about 70 degrees Celsius that's 160 fahrenheit which you can achieve by tip topping up mainly with hot water this is usually around about 50 degrees Celsius or 120 Fahrenheit as it comes out the tap and then you can add a couple kettles of boiling water on top of that just to bring it up to around about 70 degrees you want to make sure it's at least 65 degrees Celsius in that range 65 to 80 degrees Celsius once you have your water prepared now it's time to add your substrate and you can either just add it in loose you know you can Chuck the straw or wood chips in loose and swish it all around so it's well covered or even better is to place it inside a pillowcase or a netted sack like we have here which just makes it easier to keep it all together to weigh it down to make sure it's all submerged and to remove and drain it the following day so make sure your straw is fully submerged in the water you can put something on top to weigh it down if you need to and then you leave it to soak in this water for 12 to 24 hours the first hour or so is going to do the pasteurization of the substrate and the rest of the time will just help it to fully hydrate so the next day you want to drain off all the excess water and then you're ready to inoculate and make your bucket now this part is very simple we're just going to be loading the substrate and the spawn into the bucket in layers so that they're in contact with each other so we start off with a nice big double handful of the substrate and then sprinkling on top of that a smaller handful of your spawn followed by another big double handful of substrate each time just sort of pressing the layers down so that they're in contact with with each other you can either do this just using your hands or if you happen to have another bucket lying around you can use that as it fits nicely inside just to Tamp it all down now we do this until the bucket is filled right up to the top and once the whole bucket is filled right up to the top you want to then place the lid on and make sure it's well secured and now we're going to be incubating this bucket for two to three weeks to give the spawn time to grow across and fully colonize the substrate and to incubate your bucket all you want to do is just simply leave it somewhere at room temperature could be somewhere indoors in your house but you're looking for somewhere where the temperature is going to be in the range of sort of 18 to 24 degrees Celsius and at this temperature Your Spawn is now going to come alive it's going to start growing across all that substrate and fully colonizing the bucket and that's going to take usually around about two to three weeks you'll know it's time to fruit your mushrooms because when you lift the lid on the bucket you'll see nice bright white mycelium all across the surface of the substrate like this and for most oyster strains this will be around about two weeks after you made the bucket but it may need a few more days if perhaps it's been a little bit cooler during incubation or maybe it's a cool weather strain which tend to grow a little bit more slowly than the warm weather strains so to encourage the mushrooms to grow you simply need to place the bucket in an environment with some light lots of fresh air and humidity this could be a shaded spot outside underneath the tree or a bush could be inside in a shed or a garage or perhaps even inside your house you just need to make sure it's somewhere that gets a little bit of light and importantly you need to make sure that you humidify the area around the bucket to provide the right conditions for the mushrooms to grow now if you've got it placed outside and it's already a damp or humid time of year like it often is in the Autumn or early spring then the mushrooms will probably just grow on their own you won't need to do too much to it but most other situations you're probably going to need to add some humidity either by spraying it with a water sprayer or a hose and you want to do this on a regular basis at least two or three times a day just to make sure the environment around the bucket is well humidified and for the mushrooms as they start to appear so around about five to seven days after you've placed your bucket in these fruiting conditions you should start to see little baby mushrooms starting to form in some of the holes on the bucket now they won't necessarily grow out of every hole that you've created but they should start to grow out of quite a few and they should come roughly at the same sort of time when this happens it's a magical moment it's a wonderful thing to observe watching the mushrooms start to grow from these tiny little mushroom pins into full-size mushrooms and you just want to keep spraying and humidifying the mushrooms every single day during this time period whilst they mature now that's going to take anywhere from sort of four or five days if it's quite warm conditions the mushrooms will grow really quick it could take up to 1 two weeks if it's outside and the conditions are a little bit cooler so your mushrooms are ready to harvest at the point where the Clusters really begin to swell and the Caps widen and flatten out and at that point all you need to do to harvest them is just reach your hand in behind and give them a little twist and Pull and if they're ready to harvest they'll simply come away from the bucket and you've got a lovely crop of mushrooms to enjoy and then your bucket is going to fruit again with a second maybe even a third crop around about two weeks apart if you just leave it in the same fruit and conditions as you did for the first crop and when it's finished growing completely all you need to do is just tap out that spent substrate put it on your compost pile wash the bucket out and you can do it all over again so there you have it a really simple way of growing mushrooms at home that pretty much anyone can do and if you want to learn more about growing mushrooms in buckets like this we have a more in-depth set of lessons alongside a whole bunch of other lessons inside our low-tech mushroom farming online course and meanwhile if you just want to learn a bit more about getting started grow mushrooms check out the workshop that we have and I'll link that up at the end of this video thanks a lot for watching and we'll see foreign [Music]

Channel: GroCycle

Views: 140,322

Keywords: mushroom farm, grocycle, commercial mushroom farm, grow mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, mushroom business, gourmet mushrooms, mushroom cultivation, growing mushrooms in a bottle, growing mushrooms in, growing mushrooms in bags, mushroom bales, mushroom production costs, cost of mushroom farming, mushroom yields, biological efficiency, mushroom production method, substrate, mushroom substrate, ready to fruit, ready to fruit substrate, mushroom fruiting, shiitake mushrooms, buckets

Id: vyAn2QEeMsM

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2022