How to grow mushrooms at home - Full process day 1 to 60

last year I grew mushrooms for the first time and it was one of the most fascinating things I've ever done and it was surprisingly easy to do because mushrooms can grow incredibly quickly it made for a very interesting project to watch now this year I wanted to do some more mushroom growing so the other day I went online and bought a few pieces of equipment including this box to use as a mixing container some of these special mushroom grow bags these are not just any old bag they actually have filter patches where air can pass through to allow air exchange but not other particles which might interfere with the mushroom growth I bought this big bag of straw pellets now this is probably the most important thing because this is the food for the fungus mushrooms are not like plants and not really like animals in fact they are closer to animals because they actually eat other living or dying matter so those straw pellets are basically a straw which have been processed and compacted into these little pellets I believe like that's what they feed animals with it's like an animal feed but you can also feed mushrooms with it which is really cool and then the most exciting thing I have are two bags of specially prepared mushroom grain spawn it's basically a substrate in this case they've used grain I'm not sure what type of grain and the company that I bought it from inoculated that substrate with a fungus in this case I have one bag of blue gray oyster mushroom spawn and then also a bag of gold oyster mushroom spawn over time that fungus colonizes the whole bag and then I can use the grain inside this bag to inoculate a bigger bag full of my straw pellets to grow a whole bag of mushrooms I'm really excited for this process not only because watching mushrooms grow it's a really interesting thing to see but also because it's going to mean we have a load of food from this project by the end hopefully I will be pretty much self-sufficient in mushrooms because I've got a fair amount of mushroom grain spawn to use up over the past few weeks I've done a little bit of research about mushroom growing and I have learned that one of the most important things and what people always say you need to remember to do is work in a clean environment with clean equipment because if the fungus is competing with other bacteria or other molds or funguses which are in the air they can out compete your mushroom fungus that you're trying to grow and things can go terribly wrong so I'm not sure if this is the correct way to do it really but I figured I'd get some anti-back spray and clean all the surfaces down and of course the box that I'm using I've washed my hands to try and make myself clean as well people suggest oyster mushrooms are the best mushrooms to grow if you're getting started because you don't need to have a proper lab with everything sterilized with alcohol and all perfectly clean so yesterday I received this oyster mushroom grains ball and the first thing I did after opening the packet was put them in the fridge because the fridge slows down the growth and makes it last longer now much like cooking today I am following a recipe for a mushroom mix basically what I need to do is I need to combine straw pellets mushroom grain spawn and water mix it up and then I can fill these bags up with the mixture so this first step is called inoculation and we're going to weigh out 720 grams of straw pellets and coming back to the point of cleaning often you have to sterilize or pasteurize your substrate you're using because you don't want there to be other funguses or bacteria present in the substrate but with these pellets I've heard that the process of turning them from straw into a pellet they are actually compacted under a lot of pressure and it actually pasteurizes them which basically means it kills off lots of the the stuff in them I don't know what happened there I just picked up the bowl and it just snapped foreign in fact why don't I double this recipe because the container is really big we need to hydrate these pellets because the fungus isn't going to be able to colonize these dry pellets they need to have some water we need 1080 grams of water this is a 60 hydration mix so there's 60 percent of water and 40 of straw Peppers that's half of what I need current looks like it's very wet but these straw pellets should soak up the water and it should turn into a nice fluffy substrate we're going to leave this now for a bit to soak up all the water whilst that is soaking up the water I can weigh out my mushroom grain spawn and the mushroom growing process actually starts way further back I've kind of cheated a little bit and that I've I've just bought in this mushroom spawn I can just add this to the substrate and grow mushrooms someone had to collect a a wild oyster mushroom collect the spores cultivate it and then grow it in a lab under very special conditions to make it grow strong and do well it's something I'd like to try in the future but it seems quite Technical and and it seems like you need specialist equipment and you need to be very careful with keeping your space very clean I can just break up the grain score we're gonna make this batch blue gray oyster mushrooms and we'll do another batch with mushrooms I've heard you can vary the amount of grain spawn that you use if you use more of it it'll colonize the substrate faster and if you use less of it you're more likely to be out competed by other organisms and it will take longer of course I want to use as little as possible that I need to make more mushrooms out of this bag but I've heard that a good starting point is about 10 percent of the weight of all this mixture which in my case is 180 grams times two because I'm doubling the recipe 180 times two 36 360. it looks like it's actually Mixed Grain and then it's got a load of this white stuff which is the fungus mycelium let's see how this is looking still got some time to go interestingly lots of people are afraid of mushrooms when I tell people that I collect mushrooms from the woods they think I'm crazy and I read somewhere that the fear of mushrooms is likely to come from the fact that they only appear for a few days each year right a fungus lives under the ground most of its life and then pops out with its fruiting body the mushroom and then only stays there for a few days before it then releases its spores and rots back down into the ground so the fact that they appear and disappear so quick maybe is one of the reasons why people are a little bit scared of them and why they they seem very mysterious but I don't think we should be scared of mushrooms mushrooms are so cool in fact growing mushrooms is probably the safest way to eat mushrooms because you can see exactly the type of mushroom you're growing picking them in the wild yes is more of a risk hey everyone welcome back the oh look at that it really is soaking up now it still needs a little more time I think I've been a mushroom forager for the last like three or four years and when I discovered and started learning more about mushrooms they they were fascinating there are thousands of species of mushroom and they all look different and some of them have some very odd and crazy shapes and textures oh it's like jelly and and they they always just keep fascinating me and growing mushrooms I guess is the next logical step because you can really learn more about how they grow because you're doing it all yourself in nature it seems like magic you know they just appear out of the ground but in fact there's a whole process going on which you don't see which is happening under the ground where all the leaves are decomposing or the mycorrhizal fungi which work with the trees have this connection going on and you don't really get to see that physically but by growing mushrooms myself I'm hoping to to see the whole process and it'll help me understand them a bit better and how they work and and learn a bit more about the life cycle of a mushroom some people say that I'm going to turn into a mushroom if I'm not careful I don't believe in reincarnation but if I do turn into something after this life then I wouldn't mind being a mushroom one of those big red and white ones anyway I think the straw palettes have now soaked up the water so I'm going to now mix in the mushroom grain spawn with the substrate that's half of it I need to weigh out the other half now I can mix it up now this is only the second ever time growing mushrooms so if you have any suggestions or tips for mushroom growing I would be happy to hear your advice in the comments I don't really know what I'm doing but it's fun it's fun giving it a go right that is that must be mixed up enough now and we can load up some of these which are special I bought these they're a special mushroom grow bags they've got these white filter patches on them fresh air is good for mushrooms and without these filters they don't get that hey we filled a bag of mushroom stuff all right we made a bag which is ready to grow mushrooms in I need to remember the date and everything else 15th of January nice and now we're basically going to do the same again with this leftover mix and then I'm going to mix up some more but with the gold oyster mushroom spawn and then do the same again let's do some more inoculating foreign [Music] growing mushrooms in the kitchen two bags of gold oyster mushrooms and two bags of blue gray oyster mushrooms the next step is incubation much like an egg you need to keep it warm enough so that it grows well that's correct isn't it but it gets cold biological processes everything biological slows down Grass Grows slower your mustard so I'm going to try and find a warm spot in the house I figured that in here there's the boiler so it's a little bit warmer it feels a few degrees warmer than outside apparently between 20 and 25 degrees is the ideal temperature for these particular mushrooms so I'm just going to place place them in here and we should now wait and see what happens [Music] while the mushrooms are doing their thing in the cupboard there colonizing the bags I've got to prepare the fruiting chamber and it sounds all very exciting but it's really just an indoor Greenhouse the fruiting conditions for a mushroom need to be humid if you think about how mushrooms grow naturally in the outdoors they they often fruit in the Autumn time when it rains a lot and it's very humid in the air and the temperatures drop a little bit so we're basically trying to recreate that and you can do that with the little Greenhouse setup I went online to buy a greenhouse and I was like well that's cheap it was like 10 quid so I bought it and what arrived in the post was uh just a cover for a greenhouse not not actually the frame um so there's a top tip for you make sure you read the description of what you're buying because I thought I was getting a whole Greenhouse for 10 quid I wasn't I was just getting this cover so I went online again and bought an actual Greenhouse now I'm hoping in here is what I ordered this is a Swiss Army knife I got a green house four tier Greenhouse which means it's got these levels and on these levels I'm going to put the mushrooms let's get this set up [Music] we've got to turn all of this into a greenhouse you might be wondering why there's so many books behind me it's my mum and Dad's bookshelf apparently they like books quite a lot we're nearly there we're nearly finished it's pretty simple just putting these metal poles into the holes Greenhouse it's not green yet oh no it is green actually it's hasn't got a cover so now I've got two covers I've got the one that I bought on its own and now this one and there is my my Mushroom House what I'm trying to create here is what the mushroom Community call a master tent it's called a master tent because um someone called Martha Stewart invented it back in the day Martha converted a portable closet into a mushroom grow chamber and now many mushroom Growers use these stings it's just a greenhouse but we're gonna just add a few additions to it and convert it a little bit into a ideal mushroom fruiting chamber where shall I put it I could put it in my bedroom the way I'm going to turn this portable Greenhouse into a Martha tent is with this which is a fan it basically I'm gonna pop it on the back side of the tent and it's going to suck fresh air in through the bottom and out through the back basically you don't want high CO2 levels building up so you want fresh air exchange and this thing here will do just that the postman arrived the other day and you drop this off this is a washing machine drip tray my mum and dad were really confused why is Alex buying a drip tray well it's not for the washing machine it's for my greenhouse because this is going to be a very humid environment it's going to be damp in there I don't want the carpet or the floor getting all wet so I need to place this thing on a tray now I'm hoping Trey is the right size it's pretty much ready to go I've got a couple of other things I'm going to use this shows the temperature and the humidity a humidity measure is called a hydrometer I've now just got to wait for the mushroom bags to become ready to put in the fruiting chamber we're basically just waiting for those bags to be completely white and covered in mushroom mycelium and then we can fruit them in my mouth attempt [Music] one week update on the mushroom grow bags quite a lot has happened they it was just a bag of brown stuff and now it's a bag of mostly brown stuff with some white stuff added on I'll try and be a bit more scientific the the white stuff is mushroom mycelium at the roots of the mushrooms spreading out and eating away at all of the straw inside this bag the whole bag is pretty much got that white Roots layer so this is how it looks after one week of apparently mushroom grows say it takes about three to four weeks for the whole bag to be fully colonized you want all the the food in this bag to be eaten by the mushroom and once it's eaten all the food the only thing it can then do and the only thing it really wants to do is then reproduce so it's gonna fruit with the mushrooms and try and release all its spores it's looking good though looking good two week update on the mushroom bags oh whoa the mycelium is spread all over the top of the bag this bag is becoming really covered and if you can see in there in the top of the bag is just completely White this is the blue gray oyster I want to compare it to the other one the gold oyster doesn't seem to have done as much looks like it just isn't growing as quickly it's still growing it just looks a little bit less vigorous welcome to my bedroom this is where I sleep and it's also where I'm going to be growing the mushrooms I've got some filter patches now these are they're called milk filters all I could find was a pack of 500 of them I don't know what Farms is to filter the milk after it's come out of the cow anyway these are going to be important because the fan that sucks out all the air that's inside will possibly contain spores from the mushrooms and I don't want the spores to clog up my lungs because I'm going to be sleeping in here and also this is why I work most of the time so I'm going to attach one of these filters to the back of the air exchange machine this thing is called a jubilee clip I'm going to place it onto the outside the hair will be sucked out from the tent and it'll have to pass through this filter before getting out which means I should trap any of the spores that come from the mushrooms some people have ducting which comes from the end of this out of a window which would be ideal but I don't want to cut a hole in the side of my bedroom I've got this interesting little device which is a um it's a humidity humidity humid meter thermometer and hydrometer it's broken I'm gonna have to buy another one that's so stupid it was working when I unboxed it the other day and that doesn't work at all anyhow let's get the mushrooms it seemed that the blue gray oysters have colonized a lot quicker than the golden ones the golden ones are still in the Airing cupboard I'm going to leave them a bit longer but you can see that they're starting to pin that's the technical term mushroom people use they say they're starting to pin and that means that the mushrooms are starting to grow and that's a sign that they're ready to fruit we've got mushrooms in the tent one thing I'm gonna do I've seen mushroom Growers do this because they fold the bag down to stop the mushrooms growing at the top and focusing their energy to come out of the holes that they can these were inoculated on the 15th of January so three weeks it took to get like this the mushrooms trying to escape there there there there so I've folded the top of the bag over so they don't grow at the top and I've cut a couple of holes one on either side that the mushrooms will hopefully grow out of okay ready to go in I'll do the same for this one I'm gonna put this bag of gold oyster mushrooms in there as well although it hasn't colonized the substrate as much it doesn't look like Anyway there are mushrooms forming at the top of the bag so that's a sign that they're ready to fruit I guess so I'm just going to give it a go and we'll experiment and we'll find out if it works last thing I need to do before I leave them to grow is spray them with some water they need to be humid they need to be damp I'm trying to replicate Autumn weather you know where it starts raining and it's really damp and slightly cooler as well foreign [Music] I was really excited to wake up this morning to see the first mushrooms pushing out of the bag on the holes that I cut and one of my bags there are an awful lot of mushrooms like pinning and trying to escape but not where the hole is so obviously they're pressed up against the plastic bag and they can't escape but I'm hoping they find their way to the the whole at some point but yeah this one on the right there's actually a cluster a tiny little cluster of mushrooms which are pushing out and hopefully they're going to expand every day and get bigger and bigger and bigger and then we'll be able to eat them just giving them another spray mushrooms now we're in the fruiting phase and these mushrooms are actually growing so quick every time I look back at them it feels like they've grown even more most of the bags are fruiting so they have mushrooms coming out of the holes but this one on the right has grown the most there are there's probably hundreds of little oyster mushrooms the golden oysters haven't seemed to be growing as much but it must be a matter of days before these mushrooms uh become big enough to eat I'm sat in my bedroom on this quiet Monday night looking at my mushrooms and I think there's a slight problem when I was doing my research about growing mushrooms Apparently one of the key things you need to check are the CO2 levels mushrooms need oxygen to grow and they give off CO2 a lot like humans and if they have too much CO2 the fruits I've heard can grow kind of deformed and I'm noticing on the cluster that has been forming the last couple of days that the stems are growing really long and I believe that as a clear sign that these mushrooms are in too high of a CO2 environment the setup I had in place to hopefully have a fresh flow of oxygen for the mushrooms was to have this air pump it sucks air so fresh air comes in at the bottom and goes through in and out the other side I had to think about it and it might not actually be working how I wanted to because the air fan is sucking the air here out in the room into the tent but the air out here might not even have low enough CO2 levels because I'm in this room almost all the time because I work here I sleep here I'm giving off CO2 the mushrooms are also giving off CO2 and so if the air in the room has too high of a CO2 level then it's not going to help sucking into the tent earlier on today I ordered myself a CO2 monitor so we can look at the CO2 levels apparently you need to keep them under 1000 parts per million so we'll be able to put that next to the mushrooms in this room and see if I am correct on my assumptions that we have two high of a CO2 level what I have currently done is open up the front to the tent so now I'm no longer keeping it in enclosed space and it does mean I have to spray the mushrooms more to keep the humidity up but hopefully the air in my room will be slightly lower CO2 than in the tent which might help them a little bit but we'll see how these mushrooms develop over the next few days my new air quality measuring device just arrived it tells me the CO2 levels the temperature and also the humidity so it does what this one does but it also does co2 which I think is better anyway the parts per million of CO2 is meant to be below a thousand ideally and just now it was reading about uh three thousand it's gone down to 1200 which is still kind of too high really so that'll explain why my mushrooms are getting incredibly long stems I've just come into my bedroom after being out and I've realized that the CO2 meter has dropped to about 800 and or about 900 parts per million which suggests that the reason the CO2 is so high is because of me I think keeping mushrooms in my bedroom isn't a good idea it's not helping the mushrooms at all in fact as I'm speaking the C 02 meter is going up rapidly just by standing next to it so I give off a lot of CO2 which in turn makes the mushroom struggle to grow properly I seriously think I need to find a different place in the house for this mushroom tent I'll see what I can do I figured out a way to keep the CO2 down and um currently it's at 796 parts per million but I've had to open the front of the greenhouse which defeats the object of keeping it humid in this which means I have to spray it more and I've also opened the door to my bedroom because when I had it closed with me being in here the CO2 was Rising too much but I think that's all I can really do so we're gonna have to settle for this the mushrooms are really developing fast you can actually see the gills of the mushrooms now the girl was aware the the spores eventually come out from the golden mushrooms are looking super super cool they're actually really yellow and the top bag up here they have grown really quite large and most bags have a fruiting cluster out of both holes bigger one here slightly smaller one there was looking looking really cool they're so much fun to watch because they grow so quick hmm it's been just over one month since I started these mushrooms off growing and wow the last few days it's blown my mind how quickly these things grow I've been away for the last two days so I haven't seen them and I came home this evening and I was just shocked by how much they've all grown they doubled in size every day when they start fruiting it's Madness and I think I believe these mushrooms are ready to harvest apparently you don't want them to get to the stage where their caps are curling background and they start releasing loads of spores you want to get them before that so we're going to do our first harvest I've got a piece of paper where I'm going to document the weight that we get from each bag and I've got a couple of shoe boxes to put our harvest in that is ridiculous look at them they're growing out both of the holes two really decent sized clusters of oyster mushrooms look at that that's amazing can I get it with my hand oh we've done it we've disconnected the cluster from the bag there we have our first harvested waste of mushrooms they smell really nice oh 320 grams I see mushroom Growers put their harvest in cardboard boxes so I figured this would this would do okay let's get the next cluster oh yeah this is off the same bag a little bit smaller this one mushrooms are crazy like alien objects 180 grams my box is already full 280. 345. I'm not gonna lie I feel quite proud of my cardboard box full of mushrooms and we're not done yet we've got quite a few more [Music] gold one [Music] these ones grew really funky look at the shape of that here's my Harvest of 1.77 kilograms of oyster mushrooms there's still a couple of bags which haven't fruited yet so we're gonna get some more I'll see you tomorrow I'm gonna do some cooking with them because I guess that's why we grew them in the first place was to eat them [Music] they taste amazing rule in fact it is very similar to normal button mushrooms you'd buy at the supermarket the texture is definitely a little bit different the stems are maybe a little more tough and fibrous I'm gonna try one of the golden oysters which have an odd smell they taste more Woody they're definitely not as nice in my opinion that might change once they're cooked this is what I'm left with after I've cut all the mushrooms off I can put this in the compost and recycle it [Music] [Applause] just tipped out the mushroom scraps into the compost tea and under the mushrooms all the the whole the whole bottom of this cardboard box is covered in spores whole white layer it's like a layer of snow it looks all spores from the mushroom I've just been away on holiday for five days and I've returned to loads more mushrooms that have been growing unfortunately I think I've left these a little too late I think you're meant to harvest them before all the spores drop for the best results anyway starting at the top here this this bag I actually harvested from only like a week ago there's another few mushrooms coming out of the bag these ones because I haven't been in the room the CO2 levels have been lower the Caps are larger in comparison like to the stems so I'm going to take those little ones off these four that I cropped off recently haven't grown anymore then at the bottom we've got some blue gray oysters which have grown pretty big and I can actually see they have dropped a load of spores onto the onto the rack here I have heard that spores can be very bad for your lungs because there's like millions of tiny particles in the air and I'm blaming my cough on the fact that I have had mushrooms growing in my bedroom and then I've got a couple of bags of golden oysters which are fruiting here as well so we're gonna cut these off make notes of how much we Harvest and then um I guess eat them these oyster mushrooms are so beautiful I've just done a terrible sketch of them and that's ready to be harvested you can see the Caps are curled over still they would have started releasing spores so we want to harvest them and we're gonna eat it tomorrow they feel so nice and on the other side of the bag we have a load more which are starting to fruit another day another mushroom Harvest is about to take place I've now got a uh a terrible cold and cough whether it is anything to do with these mushrooms releasing spores I don't know I think once these mushrooms have finished fruiting I will definitely move them out of my bedroom because I have heard that spores and in your lungs is not a good thing they're proving to be rather fruitful it's funny my bed is just here and this is where I'm growing the mushrooms I figured the best way is to sort of get your fingers around where it meets the bag and then just give it a little twist and it breaks off just like that see the fruiting sizes are getting really small these look kind of like they're not going to develop any further 103 grams these ones are looking good they're quite big I have noticed that the bags are getting a lot lighter and that's because the nutrients and the water is being used up that was in the bag I think soon the fungus will run out of food and stop producing mushrooms we might get another Harvest out of this I think we just got to keep it moist to keep it damp and there might be another chance of more mushrooms coming and the gold ones look at that whoa last one and then we have a whole bowl of mushrooms ready to eat oyster mushroom soup chives from the garden and crispy onions it's edible it doesn't taste bad and the texture is not so nice I'm not a fan of soup textures but it was all right good enough to eat and to take pleasure in the really small things you know I I you know I love my dogs I love my friends I love going to try new pastry and I really that's the thing that's important to me now is just connections small pleasures and I think we've all kind of learned over the last few years not to take any of that for granted [Music] yum mushrooms for breakfast Tomatoes gosh do I eat too many eggs gonna make mushroom ramen noodles I've got some dried noodles oyster mushrooms chicken stock oyster mushroom noodles they seem to have taken on the flavor of the chicken stock that I use really well all I did was add them to the stock once I added the noodles so they're just kind of boiled but they're really good um [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] I spend way too much time making and eating food we got some egg fried rice and some mushroom and Chinese chive dumplings foreign let's do a little conclusion of the mushroom growing project we're not completely done yet because these mushroom bags are still producing some more fruits this must be the fourth Flash from this bag which basically means they've had four lots of mushroom push out but the flashes are getting smaller and smaller so I can't imagine these will actually develop into anything that large but we should have a few more mushrooms to eat soon so was mushroom growing worth it was it fun was it cost effective and would I recommend that you do it yourself let's look at the total Harvest weights because that's always exciting how much how many mushrooms did we manage to grow we grew a total of 3.2 kilograms of mushrooms from eight mushroom grow bags if I was to go to my local food shop and buy oyster mushrooms they would cost me 12 pound per kilo so 3.2 kilograms is about 40 pounds worth of mushrooms but I think I spent a lot more than that on growing them to make one mushroom grow bag it cost me a six pound 23. the grain spawn was very expensive and then the mushroom grow bags were 60p each you see a one bag cost me six pound twenty three my highest yielding bag was bag number one and I harvested 603 grams of mushrooms from that bag which is about eight pound forty a worth of mushrooms if I were to go then buy them from the shop that bag was worth doing uh if I sold that for eight pound forty that'd be a profit of two pound or something but it wouldn't because not all my bags performed as well as that one my lowest yielding bag was 201 grams which was one of the gold oyster mushroom bags the gold oysters just didn't perform as well as the blue gray oysters for some reason I don't know why and much like all the growing projects that I've done um it doesn't save me money it doesn't it's not really that cost effective I think if you're smart with sourcing your materials you could definitely make this work and and save money doing so however you then have to realize that you will be spending time each day watering them and looking after them and of course when you're making the bags that is quite time consuming but the biggest thing I've gained from this project was just the joy and fun of watching mushrooms grow so if you look at the fun and enjoyment I got out of this project it was 100 worth it and I would definitely suggest that if you have time and and you want to give something new a go try growing some mushrooms if you want to grow mushrooms yourself I think the easiest way is to just buy a mushroom grow bag there's a number of suppliers who sell them they're basically a bag like this which is already prepared you don't have to do any of the mixing all you have to do is open up the box and spread of water and you can watch mushrooms grow anyway the last thing I want to do is give away some stuff I have this box well one box which has a mushroom grow bags I've got loads of these left over from this project and I've also got a big bag of straw pellets and I want to give this away to one of the people watching this video so someone else can can grow mushrooms like I did whoever does get this will have to buy some grain spawn but that's about it I live in England so unfortunately um the offer is only open for people who are in the UK but if you want the chance of having this head over to my Instagram uh send me a direct message on there and one lucky person will have some mushroom growing stuff to grow your own mushrooms cheers for watching everyone hope you enjoy watching me grow mushrooms in my bedroom I'm going to move these out of my bedroom so I don't clog up my lungs with mushroom spores just watching I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Just Alex

Views: 1,870,470

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Id: ibkXqKe4ebE

Length: 43min 47sec (2627 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2023