- If you choose this action, you will use edges and value the marginal by learning to forage local wild mushrooms or grow some mushrooms yourself at home. Fungi are everywhere. They're a little bit scary and a little bit mysterious because many of us don't understand how they grow, and there are a few dangerous or even deadly species. They seem to emerge from the ground without warning, and they grow in the dark, damp marginal areas where plants have trouble surviving. But a little knowledge goes a long way to overcome fear. With a little knowledge, you can learn to embrace the world of fungi and enjoy a whole range of new tasty treats and health giving foods. (acoustic ukulele music) Fungi make up a whole kingdom of life, similar to plants and animals. In fact, it's now thought that there are more than three million species of fungi, outnumbering plants ten to one. Fungi can't photosynthesize like plants do, so they have to get their energy by consuming the bodies or by-products of other living things just like animals do. Mushrooms are the fruiting body of certain types of fungi. They are some of the tastiest, most highly valued foods on the planet. As you probably heard, mushrooms are really good for you too, so good, in fact, that people often use them as medicine. Mushrooms are packed with nutritional value. They're low in calories and are a great source of fibre and protein too. They also provide many important nutrients, including the B vitamins, selenium, potassium, copper, and particularly when exposed to the Sun, vitamin D. And they're packed with as many antioxidants as fruits and vegetables are. Studies have also found that eating mushrooms can improve digestion, fight cancer, reduce obesity, and give you impressive immune boosting benefits as well. There's some links below if you want to check that out. So how can you bring mushrooms into your life without having to buy them? You can grow your own, or you can forage for them, or you can do both. Let's start with foraging. Firstly, there are no simple rules that you can use to differentiate between a harmless and tasty mushroom that will be great to eat and an inedible species that could make you sick. A mushroom with brown gills is not necessarily safe to eat. A red mushroom is not necessarily poisonous, and a mushroom that bruises blue is not necessarily hallucinogenic. On top of that, different species grow in different parts of the world, in different environments, at different times of year. You need to know what species you are looking for, learn the identifying characteristics of that species, and then be able to confidently identify it in the wild. This might sound overwhelming, but you will be amazed at how easy it is once you get the knack of it. Your mind is a pattern recognition engine, and in no time, you'll have learnt to identify a few choice edible species in your area. And then you'll be no more likely to mistake a saffron milk cap from a slippery jack as you are an apple from a tomato. The easiest way to learn what mushrooms are good to forage in your area is to find people who are already foraging nearby. Ask around in your local community if anyone forages mushrooms, or look for a guided mushroom foraging expedition to get you started. The internet is also a fantastic resource for identifying mushrooms. There are some great online groups where you can post photos of your finds to help you ID them. We've included some links below. Make sure you take good close-up photos of all the parts of the mushroom, including the top of the cap, the gills, or paws on the underside, the Stipe or the stem, and also include a description of the location, landscape, and any nearby trees. Many species of fungi that you can forage mushrooms from are mycorrhizal. Mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with particular species of plants. Sometimes, identifying the tree species can help a lot in identifying the fungi. If you're looking for a particular species, try typing the scientific name of that species into a Google image search. It's a great way to quickly compare dozens of photos of that species to the mushroom that you've found. Finally, you can never go past a good book. There are local field guides to mushrooms for just about everywhere. We've included links to some of the best ones below. Many of them have identification keys that allow you to answer simple multiple-choice questions that help you quickly work out what species you have. One thing is for sure, though, you should never eat a mushroom unless you are absolutely positive which species it is. (peaceful ukulele music) The other way you can bring mushrooms into your life without having to buy them is by growing them yourself. Some mushrooms are actually really easy to grow, and when you grow them yourself, you can be absolutely positive which species you have. Probably, the easiest species to grow are those from the genus pleurotus, the oyster mushrooms. Today, I'm going to show you how to grow oyster mushrooms on straw in a holey bucket. So you'll need to get a few things ready before you get started. You'll need some buckets. I get these 5 litre or about 1 gallon plastic polypropylene food-grade buckets from a local café. They're throwing them out. So I can divert something from a waste stream with this. You'll need some straw. This is wheat straw, but you could use barley straw or sugarcane bagasse, oat straw, any of those kinds of things. You'll need some surgical tape. This is just standard surgical tape that you can get from a chemist or drugstore or whatever. And the most important thing that you'll need is some grain spawn. This is the mycelium or the body of the fungi that we want to grow. In this case, it's an oyster mushroom, mycelium. It's called grain spawn because it's been grown in sterile conditions on grain. Wheat grain, barley grain, millet, something like that. This is one that I've made myself, but you can purchase it online from a bunch of different suppliers. It's incredibly beautiful. We're going to use this to inoculate our straw, but before we do that, we need to prepare the straw a little bit by pasteurizing it. We need to get rid of any competition for our mycelium that might already be living in the straw. Remember, nature's everywhere, so right now, there's a bunch of different bacteria and yeasts and fungal spores in that straw, and we need to get rid of them. The other thing that you'll need is a cloth bag of some kind. I've got these brew bags. They're from online brewing supply companies and they work really well for this, but you could use an old pillowcase or any kind of cloth bag that you've got. So, the first thing we're going to do is going to get the straw in the bag and then... we're going to do the bag up tight so none of that straw can get out. The way we're going to pasteurise it and get rid of those other little critters is by submerging it in hot water for an hour. That way, everything that's going to act as a contaminant is going to get destroyed. So right here, I've got a simple setup with a big pot on a stove and a thermometer on it, and we need to make sure that the water in our pot is between 60 degrees and 80 degrees Celsius. That translates to between 140 and 175 degrees Fahrenheit. So this water is at that temperature, so now all we have to do is submerge our bag of straw in our pot of water. Just be careful that's pretty hot; it's definitely hot enough to give you an uncomfortable burn. We want to make sure that the whole bag is completely submerged. So once it's submerged, you can put the lid back on the pot and... start a timer, for one hour. So while our straw is pasteurising, we need to prepare our bucket, or buckets if you're doing multiple ones of these. The first thing we have to do is, we need to drill a whole bunch of holes in the bucket so that the mushrooms have got somewhere to fruit out. So I've got one here that I prepared earlier. And I've drilled about eight holes around this bucket to make sure there's lots of different spots. And the holes are about ten millimetres, about a half an inch in diameter, and I've spaced them vertically up near the top of the bucket and about two-thirds of the way down the bucket. It's not hard to drill buckets like this with, any drill will work. I do find that the cone drill bits seem to work the best, and I'll show you down below what they look like. Once you've drilled those holes, we then want to make sure the bucket is very clean, so give it a good wash, or even wipe it out with a little bit of alcohol as a disinfectant. Then, each of the holes need to be covered in surgical tape, that's what the surgical tapes for. So we don't need a lot of surgical tape, just a little square like this. Break it off and paste it over the outside of the hole in the bucket. What the surgical tape does is, it allows air to pass through it so that our mycelium growing in our bucket can get the oxygen that it needs. And it also protects the mycelium from other organisms getting in. So it protects it from insects and the like but also from microscopic organisms like bacteria and other fungi. So, once we've got the tape on, give your bucket another wipe, make sure it's nice and spotless like this one. And now we're ready to drain our pasteurised substrate. We've made sure that for that full hour, it was kept in that temperature range. All we need to do now is drain and cool our substrate. So I've got a bit of a drying rack here. From now on, we want to make sure that everything is kept very, very clean. So make sure your drying racks are clean and make sure your hands are clean. In fact, you can use alcohol-based hand sterilizer if you want to be really sure that this will work perfectly without any contamination by mold or something else. So nice clean hands, nice clean rack. Now, I'm just going to fish this out. You can see tea-like straw water coming up from underneath. We're going to have to leave that to drain for probably about 20 minutes to make sure that there's no water dripping out of it. Once it's cooled down quite a bit, you'll be able to grab hold of the bag and give it a squeeze to make sure there's no excess moisture in the straw. So again we wait, this time for about 15 or 20 minutes, until it's cooled down a bit. We want to then pick it up, give it a good squeeze to make sure there's no excess water in it. It shouldn't have any water dripping out the bottom at this point. I mean, you might be able to get a drop or two if you squeeze really hard, but it should be pretty well like that, not dripping water at the bottom. That's very important, otherwise it will get contaminated. Next, we want to transfer it out of the bag into a clean bowl. You could use a large plastic crate or any kind of container, which you can keep nice and clean. I often do it just on a clean stainless steel bench top or a plastic folding table of some kind, that works as well, but something with sides really helps. So we're just going to undo our bag, open up your pillow case and ... make sure we don't have any stray knots. And tip our straw out into our bowl. Make sure that bowl is really clean. Now with clean hands, test the temperature a little bit. As long as it's not hot to the touch, as long as you can leave your hand in there, then that should be cool enough for us to now inoculate with our mycelium or our grain spawn. So in this case, I've got, this is a pint jar, that's about 500 millilitres of grain spawn, and our bucket and straw have got about five litres of straw or just over a gallon. That works out to be a ratio of about 10% grain spawn to 90% straw. So now all we need to do is open our jar and release our mycelium into its new food, its new home. You can see there the little kind of grains of mycelium. I just want to make sure we try and break up all those clumps of mycelium into individual grains. Depending on how fresh your grain spawn is, that might be easier or harder to do, but even if it's quite solid, break it up as best you can. If you've had to buy a larger container of grain spawn, often it comes in bags that are maybe a few kilos or four or five pound bags of grain spawn, then you don't have to use it all at once. As long as you're reasonably clean about the process, you can use part of it and then fold it up and keep it in a fridge, not too cold though, you don't want to freeze it. The next thing to do once you've got all your grains put in there is mix it all together really thoroughly. You want to make sure that the mycelium doesn't have to travel very far to get to every bit of straw when it goes into your bucket. So just combining it all together so that it's really well- mixed. Alright, once it's well-mixed, our next job is to get it all into that bucket. We want to get as much straw and grain spawn into the bucket as possible. The more that we get in there, the more mushrooms we'll get at the end. One of the good things about this type of mushroom cultivation is you don't need any special equipment at all, just things you have around, and you don't need very much space. In fact, you don't need mushroom at all. (Laughter) Sorry about that. So make sure you get every last little bit of straw out of your bowl and into that container. I could have filled that and packed it tight if I'd had more straw. You don't need to leave any space in the top. And then, just seal the lid tightly on your container. Now the next step is to just put this somewhere where you would be comfortable. Often, I find that in your living room or your kitchen is a good place to keep it. You don't want it to get cold, and you don't want it to get too hot, so definitely no direct sunlight and a stable temperature that you would be comfortable at. And leave it there for about two weeks. It's got enough moisture in there for the mycelium to be able to grow and consume all that straw and start to turn it into more mycelium, which eventually will turn into mushrooms. In about two weeks, the mycelium will have colonized all that straw. So here's one I did a few weeks back. It's just about ready to fruit, and after a week or two, you can take a look and see the way that the mycelium has grown over the surface of the sawdust, in this case, that's in this bucket. Indeed, after a few weeks, what you'll start to see is ... the mycelium trying to push its way out past the surgical tape, and it's got so much strength that it'll just be able to push that surgical tape out and flush into mushrooms. It's important that you keep an eye out at this point. As soon as it pushes one of those bits of tape off, as soon as it's fully colonized and needs to fruit, we have to move it. We need to move it to an environment, which is really moist. So that could be somewhere in your house, it could be your bathroom, or it could be somewhere outside your home if it's not too cold and not too hot. So maybe next to a pond or under a tree fern or down the side of your house where the moss grows. Anywhere that's really humid. If you don't think, or you're worried that it might not be humid enough, then you need to increase the humidity somehow. The easiest way to do that is just with a simple mister like this, full of water, and once those mushrooms start to form, every day we want to mist the area around the bucket. We don't want to spray the mushrooms directly, we just want to keep the air really humid. The more you do that, the better your mushrooms will grow, and a few weeks after that, you'll have some super tasty oyster mushrooms to eat. So whether you decide to get to know fungi by learning to forage in a nearby wild place or by having a go at cultivating your own oyster mushrooms, you'll be using and valuing the marginal and getting to know this fascinating kingdom of life. We've included lots of resources below to help you along the way. Good luck.
Saving this for later!
Thanks, very informative.