I reckon mushrooms are the most
exciting thing you can grow. Quick, fun and always tasty. Now mushroom growing kits offer
an easy way to get started but they can be on the pricey side. So in this video I'm going to show you a deliciously simple way to
grow mushrooms like these and once you've got the hang of it
you will be hooked I just know it. Because you can never have
enough mushrooms, right? I'm opting for a system that should prove
both very cost effective and time saving so I can grow more mushrooms repeatedly. With this in mind I've opted for these 1
gallon or 5 L lided plastic containers. These can be found very cheaply indeed,
or you may even be able to find them for free by asking a local restaurant. They may have contained for example pickles. We'll need something for the
mushrooms to grow on, our substrate, and for this I'm using straw
which is very cheap indeed. Then of course there's the mushroom spawn itself and for this I am using grain spawn which
is really easy to crumble apart and handle. And today we're going to be
growing oyster mushrooms, specifically blue oysters which are
amongst the very easiest to grow at home and the most delicious in my humble opinion. The mushroom world's your oyster. And then we've got some surgical
tape here and this netting sack and if you're wondering what on
Earth these are for don't worry, all will become clear in a bit. Let's start by preparing the buckets. Now I don't have a suitable size
drill bit but I know a man who does. Cheers Trevor, really appreciate that. No problem. Thanks a lot. I'm just drilling a series of
holes across the wall of the bucket and finally I'm just going to drill some
holes across the bottom for drainage. This will stop water pooling at the bottom
and creating kind of unpleasant conditions. Okay that's the drainage holes done. And then to finish finish off I'm
just going to pick off these kind of bits of sticking out plastic here
and give it a bit of a sand as well, just to give nice smooth edges. Now you can use special mushroom growing bags, but by drilling our own buckets like this we can reuse these time and time
again and get our costs down. If you want to use something a bit bigger then you could go for something like
this 5 gallon or say 25 L bucket and for something this size I
would suggest around 20 holes. And they would be spaced about 6 in or 15 cm apart and probably have up to four rows
of holes in something this size. Let me show you the straw I'm using today. I'm using this straw from a pet store. It's clean, but crucially it comes
chopped up into these smaller pieces, and that's important because
it means the mycelium, that's like the roots of
the mushrooms if you like, can get in and colonize it a little bit quicker
so we'll get our mushrooms that much sooner. You you could use straw from a bale
but it will need chopping up into smaller pieces first, so do bear that in mind. To ensure trouble-free growth free
of any contaminants or weed fungi I'm going to pasteurize my straw and I'm just going to plunge it in
here in a bucket full of hot water. Now this is where the sack comes in of course, but if you don't have one of these you
could use for example an old pillowcase or kind of hessian sack, something
like that just to hold our straw. now we are looking for a temperature of 140
to 175 Farenheit, that is 60 to 80° Celsius. This hot water will pasteurize
our straw by killing off most of the microorganisms but not all of them. It will leave some of the good guys that
will actually help our mushrooms to grow. If I was to sterilize the straw by boiling
it up and killing absolutely everything, perversely our straw is
more open to contamination. This offers us that sweet spot
hot water but not boiling. Now I've already got some hot water
in here from the faucet or tap and I've just topped it up with the boiling water to give us that kind of perfect
temperature range we're after. That should be enough I reckon. Now let's just get our straw in there. We want all of the straw to be in contact with the
water so just weigh it down with something heavy, just so it's completely underwater and now this will stay in here for about 1 hour. Kind of feels like a witch's cauldron doesn't it? Double double, toil and trouble,
fire burn and cauldron bubble... Great stuff, this has had its allotted
time, let's drain it all off now and it should take about half an hour to drip dry. So this is now cool to the
touch and it's drained off and if I give it a squeeze you can see there's there's no more drips coming
from it so this is good to go. The wet straw will be quite heavy,
about three times its original weight. And now for the real magic, inoculation time. But before we do anything else
we need to make sure everything is squeaky clean because we don't want any contaminants spoiling
our whole efforts here and turning things sour. Now you could use something
like this isopropyl alcohol here with gloved hands, but I'm just going to use this kind of sterilizing
powder which I use for my home brewing, that's another story. Now this is quite safe and I'm just going to rub
the surfaces clean with it, obviously the buckets and the lids, anything that's going to come
into contact with that spawn and my hands as well. So give it a stir and then
just wipe everything down. Don't forget to wipe down the actual
surfaces of wherever you're working as well and even the outside of the spawn bag itself, so every single surface is super squeaky clean. Time to fill. And I'm going to start with a
good handful or two of our straw and just push it right down, don't be
afraid to squeeze it down like that. That'll do. And then in with our first layer of our spawn. Just break it up as best as you can like this and sprinkle over the top and we'll be working in layers like this
till we get to the top of our bucket. Now as a rule we're aiming for between
5 and 10% by volume of our grain spawn to 90 to 95% of volume of our straw. You can get away with a little less of the spawn but that opens us up to the risk
of weed mushrooms getting in there so this gives it a bit of a head start and
ensures that we get our mushrooms quicker. And and that's us right up to the top now
so, let's get those last stragglers in and it's on with the top which I
have of course sterilized first. 'And what about that surgical
tape?' I hear you ask. Well good question. What we're going to do now is simply cover up
each of our holes with a little bit of tape. Now this serves two purposes: Firstly it's going to keep
the straw and our spawn nice and protected from contaminants kind of blowing in and because it's breathable it's going to keep
everything nice and airy while it does that, but it will also help to retain some of the
moisture in the straw and keep the humidity up, which of course we know mushrooms absolutely love. There we go, that's the last one. Now these are going to be kept at room temperature
away from wild fluctuations in temperature. Now over the next 2 weeks or so the mycelium
and will spread out from the grain spawn and throughout the straw completely
colonizing it, ready for our next stage. Look at this one. Now this is one I started
two weeks and two days ago only and you can see it's completely turned white, the mycelium has fully colonized our straw so we're on to the next stage of the
actual mushrooms being produced. So I'm going to remove the surgical
tape from this one and you can see here we've got the white of the
mycelium right up to the holes here and obviously the holes are where
the mushrooms going to come from. Just pop the lid back on to keep
it nice and clean and protected. As our mushrooms grow it's really
important to offer them somewhere that's really humid and also get some light. Now in the summer that could be
underneath the shade of a tree, but as it's winter I'm going to put
them near this window here but it's out of direct sunshine and that's important. To keep the the humidity up I'm
simply misting my shrooms twice a day, once in the morning and once again in the evening. If I can remember, at lunchtime as well. Just give them a good mist like that. And I've got them on a plate
there to keep everything tidy. It's another few days on and
look, we've already got pinning. That's just the tiny embryonic
fruiting bodies that are ready to kind of pop out and explode into growth
now mushrooms don't grow like plants. These guys, believe it or not will
pretty much double in size every day. It's the speed with which these mushrooms
grow that is the most exciting part. I get giddy with excitement coming down the stairs in the morning and seeing how much
they've grown, it's just incredible. Imagine getting the kids involved
with this, how much they'd love it. Never mind Xbox or Playstation, this is where it's at! These guys are now ready to harvest
I reckon, or at least some of them. Let me bring them over. Now the the best time to harvest is when the caps haven't quite fully opened out
and they're not flattened out. Harvest them while they're still
curled over a bit otherwise the spores which they produce when they're
fully open will go absolutely everywhere. And to harvest, very simple just reach behind
and pull and twist your clump free like that. Now all of these holes are growing at different
rates so they won't all be ready at the same time, so just take them when they are
ready and leave the others to grow on and of course during that time keep the humidity
up by spraying again morning and evening. Now once you've harvested all of the holes just leave it a few more
weeks keeping the humidity up and you may well find that you get a
second flush or harvest of mushrooms and perhaps even a third flush. Once your bucket is completely done cropping
you can try using the mycelium-laid straw as seed for a new batch of mushrooms. I'd suggest breaking it down into thirds to inoculate three new buckets. And I'd do it exactly the same as before. Layer your pasturized straw with
some of the mycelium-laden straw and then more pasturized straw and so on in layers until
you've populated a new bucket and then grow it on in exactly the same way. Now it's a couple of weeks on from using the
old straw to inoculate the new pasteurized straw and I'm really pleased to see there is some mycelium colonizing the new
straw pushing through to the top and it's all layered up, so I'm pretty
confident that another kind of 2, 3 weeks this lot will be bearing mushrooms as well so we can keep the cycle going. If you'd like to try growing mushrooms from
kits before launching into buckets like this, then do check out this video next. In the meantime these guys are
destined for deeply delicious things. If you have any recipes for using them by the way
please do share them in the comments below. I'll catch you next time.
