Outdoor Mushroom Beds- The Easiest Way to Grow Edible Mushrooms in Your Garden or Back Yard!

there are ways to grow edible mushrooms that don't require any special sensors any special technology climate control systems or indoor spaces these methods use waste materials like straw woodchips compost or composted animal manure or fallen leaves [Music] we visited our friend Chuck from Shady Grove farm to see how he grows mushrooms on his homestead with his partner Sarah [Music] in this video we'll show you the easiest method for growing mushrooms simple outdoor beds hey there i'm kevin with north sport we're here at our facility in westbrook it's the middle of winter but we wanted to show you guys some of the stuff you can start doing in the spring and summer to cultivate mushrooms outdoors and the methods we're talking about today in particular are really low-tech they don't require any special sensors or climate control systems all they require is a shady place close to water some waste materials and some sort of spawn you can use either sawdust or grain spawn for all these methods we're gonna talk about nama goes on woodchips growing almond agaricus on composted animal manure and we're going to talk about growing oyster mushrooms and straw all of these methods are really easy all these species are pretty aggressive they like to grow and you can really utilize some areas of your property that are maybe a little too wet a little too shady and you can utilize waste resources which is why we really like this so a lot of these different methods will work on different species one that we don't talk about in this video so much but I wanted to mention is the wine cap and wine caps are great addition to any garden that you have any part of your property making you straw woodchips compost fallen leaves combination of all of them so we were lucky enough to go out in the summer to visit our friend Chuck and his partner Sarah and we were able to see how they established beds and how they end up fruiting when we returned in the fall and they utilize varying levels of complexity for their homestead scale mushroom cultivation approach they have indoor systems like we do here at North spore they have logs outdoors and they also use these really really simple outdoor beds and utilizing all of these methods can help sustain yields over time with varying degrees of work and that might even help you tap into a market for selling mushrooms that maybe no one has tapped into yet in your area so when you're making an outdoor mushroom bed there's some broad considerations one is your site location which includes shade access to water how often you visit it the other is the material that you have available to use as a substrate whether that's wood chips straw or leaves or a compost or accomplished animal manure another consideration of course is the type of mushroom you want to grow in this part of the video Chuck is making a nama ko bed the material we're using for this is a mixed hardwood chip this is a really really great material anything like that is gonna work you can have some amount of softwood in there but you really want to make sure it's a nice hardwood chip and we're using the lasagna method here so chuck is laying down a layer of woodchips and then taking his broken up grain spawn you could also use sawdust spawn and layering that on top of the wood chips and then he's watering it in and then on top of that he's adding another layer of woodchips and another layer of spawn and then watering it so on and so forth until you reach your desired height of your bed so the height of your bed can be dictated by a few things one of them being how much spawn you have how much substrate material you have and these are some of the considerations that you want to think about when you're making a bed and it's always good to experiment because every site is different for example chuck is here in western Maine it's a pretty humid temperate area the summers are warm and wet and he's not gonna have to worry as much about making sure this bed stays hydrated as you might if you were say somewhere in the West the Rocky Mountain West so again in this video Chuck's burying nama clothes in here but you could use the same method to grow wine caps if you're not familiar with nama COEs they're a really beautiful really delicious mushroom that is not widely cultivated in the United States but as a long history of cultivation in Japan it's traditionally used in miso soup it's got a beautiful orange brown mottled cap it's a little bit slimy a little bit gelatinous which lends itself really nicely to different types of soups like miso it's a cold fruiting mushroom which means we're gonna get most of our fruit ings from the species in the fall and you want to make sure you visit it often enough so you don't miss them [Music] you in this segment Chuck's gonna be making a almond a beer at his bed and he's gonna be utilizing natural topography like you can see and he's gonna be using a mixture of substrates here so he's starting off with our prepared bulk substrate which is called the boomer bag and then he's also gonna be adding on top of it he's gonna be adding some composted animal manure you could use either of these if you didn't have access to good animal manure you could use our boomer bags you could really use any combination of them we just wanted to show you that it's a versatile method so this method using this substrate you can grow a lot of different varieties of mushrooms any of the manure lovers Shaggy Mane's you could grow other types of agaricus you could grow LeWitt's if it was a bit more composted any of them are great choices Alma de garis is a really cool mushroom they have a nice light almond flavor but they're really versatile very similar to button mushrooms they are a heat lover so in northern climates they're gonna be annual they're not gonna come back they're not gonna make it through the winter but if you live in a more southern or Mediterranean climate the last year round they'll be perennial and all you have to do is keep feeding the bed and they'll keep growing they because of their heat loving nature if you're in a northern climate you're going to want to make sure you make these beds after it's pretty hot out already and if you have a greenhouse or a hot house this is gonna be a great great addition to that environment in this segment Chuck's making a really simple really low-tech straw bed to grow oysters mushrooms again this is another great system you could grow wine caps in wine caps love growing in straw one thing we haven't really touched on that much yet but we should is particle size of your substrate particle size influences a lot of different factors generally it's best to have a mix of particle sizes so smaller to larger pieces straw like this it's pretty big particle size there's gonna be a lot of interstitial spacing there's gonna be a lot of room in between these pieces the ideal substrate has a mix of particle sizes so if it's a wood chip bed you want big wood chips you want little wood chips and want little pieces of sawdust in there you want it to be nice and mixed if it's too uniform or if it's too small it can compact over time and if your substrate compacts over time it's gonna create an anaerobic environment that anaerobic environment is good for the types of fungus we want to go it's great for growing bacteria and mold but that's not what we want so it's gonna really limit the life of your bed if you have too small of a space and it might not even be able to colonize if on the other hand like in this segment where we using straw the particle size is a bit large you're gonna need to make sure that you're watering it more frequently because it's gonna dry out and you're gonna want to make sure that there's enough contact between your spawn and the other pieces of straw otherwise they're gonna have a really slow colonization you have really slow colonization you're inviting other types of fungus to go in there once you have other types of fungus going to really limit the life of your bed and maybe not grow the species that you want like oyster mushrooms and this example oyster mushrooms are very aggressive they love growing in straw you can see how we're compacting it down a bit now and watering it so again we're using the lasagne method here the same old method substrate spawn water substrate spawn water in with straw like this it's a really big particle size there's gonna be a lot of air in between it it's gonna dry out quick you want to just make sure you're kind of pressing it down compacting it a little bit but not too much [Music] hey thanks for watching if you like this video hit the like button check out our description on this video and you can find our social media handles our Facebook our Instagram our website is north spore calm be sure to check it out there's lots of great content there as well if you have any questions or comments throw them down below we'll get to them as quick as we can we love answering your questions and we'll take the most frequently asked questions and pin them to a comment on top so you can all reference that really quick - thanks for checking in hope you all have a great day [Music]

Channel: North Spore

Views: 382,846

Keywords: mushrooms, edible, fungi, growing, cultivation, homesteading, spawn, foraging, wild foods, oyster, shiitake, grow, cultivate, north, spore, spores, laboratory, beds, nameko, wine, cap, winecap, stropharia, garden giant, king stropharia, straw, wood chips, woodchips, manure, how to grow, how to make, mushroom beds, easy, beginner, easiest, start, starting, simple

Id: 9jovIxInkRs

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020