Propagating Edible Gourmet Mushrooms Outdoors Using Cardboard, Woodchips & Straw!

hey there how's it going everybody so check this out just receive this order a mushroom spawn in the mail and I'm going to be getting some patches of gourmet mushrooms established back here in the backyard first off I got this tree far er Ragusa Anya Lada also known as wine cap mushroom or garden giant I've also got some pearl oyster or pleurotus Stratos and last but definitely not least we got the shitake mushroom also known as Lenten ela Edo dense quick shout-out to fungi prefect died over at fungi calm that's where I picked up this order and man everything arrived really quick and in great condition so thank you alright so first things first is I need to locate the best location and get these mushrooms going now just like in a forest what I'm looking for is a mostly shaded area maybe a little bit of sunlight peeking through midday or later in the day very similar to where these chickens are hanging out here under this garden are burrow post area but I definitely don't want to be established for mushrooms where I'm going to be walking through all the time so I'm just going to keep looking around probably somewhere around the border of the garden where I'm not really going to be walking around too often is going to be best and you know I want to try to grow these around either plants shrubs or trees as these mushrooms are really a symbiotic part of the food forest they really help to break down woody and organic matter and turn that into fertilizer for the surrounding plants so maybe back here by this cherry tree would work this is a nice little shady spot what it is is the most southern facing part of the garden is going to get the most Sun obviously so pretty much going directly to the opposite side on the most northern facing side of the garden this area gets the most shade and you can see after the recent rains that we had we've got mushrooms popping up over here so all the indicators are here and telling me that this is going to be a great place to get a mushroom patch going right here into the loquat tree so the first step I'm just going to scrape back the woodchips as I'm doing this I noticed quite a bit of mycelium already spread throughout these wood chips so I'm also scraping that back to try to hinder any competitors as I'm trying to establish my own mycelium into this area all right so we got all that prepped next and this might be the absolute key to making this whole thing work great is this corrugated cardboard we're going to be using this as part of the substrate that the mycelium that we inoculate the area with is going to just fully engulf it with its strands and it's just going to make the perfect landing pad for the mushroom spawn what you want to do is you want to rip apart the cardboard exposing the corrugated area you also want to soak the cardboard down now you can also soak the cardboard down first and it'll pull apart easier but I found separating it first allows it to soak up water quicker so so next I just want to place that soaked cardboard corrugated side down on the ground around the tree where I'm going to spread out the spawn now if you build up the cardboard really thick you could poke some holes there to allow a little bit more oxygen into the system otherwise you should be okay next I'm going to go ahead and load up on some wood chips here now this is a power mix wood and unfortunately I don't have the luxury of knowing exactly what's in this pile I do know that what's going to work best our hardwoods woods like oak beech or alder and you want to try to stay away from woods like pine as they could be detrimental to your mushroom patch now I'm pretty sure there's even pine wood mixed in here but from what I gather online and I was already intuitively feeling this is that if you do get woods like pine if you allow them to compost down for a certain amount of time they become safer to use and there's folks out there who've had good results using this technique so seeing as this pile here is a year old it should work out okay but I'm also going to be doing a couple other things to increase my chances of success I'll be sharing those tips with you shortly so I'm just going to put a nice layer of wood chips all atop the cardboard now so it's best if you use wood chips that have been soaking for a couple days or so these wood chips have been sitting in a pile and we've just had some really good rain events so they've been soaking in that but I also went ahead and wetted it down again with the hose just to fully saturate them all right now I'm going to take my spawn and check it out really healthy-looking so I'm just going to crumble this spawn all atop the wood chips here and it's okay if some big chunks get slung about it can actually even be a good thing next I'm just going to come back with the wood chips and make another layer on top of this you could just repeat this whole process and layer after layer just do the same thing that we just did or you could call it good right here you just want to end it preferably with a nice layer of wood chips it's going to act as what's known as a casing layer and it's going to further protect this plot from inclement weather amongst other things but I'm going to move forward and as I mentioned before I'm going to try to hedge my chance of success here by adding some soak straw using a cold incubation method developed by none other than Paul Stamets and illustrated in his book mycelium running so typically when using straw as part of a substrate for a mushroom spawn you're going to need the heat pasteurize the straw with hot water now the whole idea behind pasteurizing the straw is you're reducing some of that biology lessening the competition that the mycelium that you're trying to establish is going to have with other forms of fungi but in the case of cold tolerant mushrooms and spawn like what I'm going to be inoculating out here today competitors are already reduced as most of them are more heat loving organisms therefore simply soaking the straw for an hour and even cold water will suffice as we're already in November the weather is cooling down and when you're in the range of 30 to 50 degrees the competitors are gone this mycelium is going to get running and it's going to do just fine as is so I love this technique it's quick it's easy and has a proven track record now no doubt the chickens would love to just come through here and tear all this work up so I'm going to go ahead and protect this patch with some chicken wire fencing it's small but effective it usually does the job all right so patch number one of wine cap mushrooms is all set to go moving forward I'm not going to go ahead and establish another patch of wine caps under these tree collards over here this is eventually going to be a mini tree Collard forest creating the perfect environment for some mushrooms same area over towards the fence and a shaded area of the yard where these tree collards still do very well so first order of business I'm just going to stake these up real quick and again with the corrugated side down I'm just going to lay this moist cardboard all around where I just scrape back the wood chips so I had ordered two bags of this stuff Aria and my own thought is that one of these bags is sufficient for inoculating maybe a six by six foot area around the tree now folks who live in a colder climate or just want to further proliferate their spawn there's actually a way that you can create a substrate using buckets or a storage tub something like that and layer your ingredients in just like we're doing out here but you can keep that in a more controlled environment like a garage or a greenhouse put a humidity dome on it and you can let that mycelium just proliferate all throughout the winter and then come spring you can go ahead and take all that substrate out to your garden and again just do what I'm doing here and you'd probably end up with about 10 times as much spawn so with the last patch I sprinkled the spawn on top of the woodchips this time I'm doing it on top of the cardboard and then I'm going to layer it with woodchips and straw it's all the same idea I'm not compacting anything down everything is nice and loose and airy I want little humid pockets to be forming within the substrate so I'm putting in the work today getting this done it could be many months before we see a fruiting body some mushrooms popping up but I'm going to be looking at this after a few days and then maybe a few weeks and hopefully really soon we're going to be able to just look up under some of this mulch at the cardboard and just see that mycelium running all throughout that that's going to be the indicator letting us know we had successful inoculation and then it will just really be a waiting game waiting for those delicious abundant mushrooms to start popping up and then again just protecting it with a little chicken wire so the chickens don't get in here now if everything goes well and we've got a nice established patch of mushrooms at that point the chickens aren't going to really go in there and destroy anything they just don't do that out here there's just too much variety for them but while we're getting things established definitely need to protect so moving along I'm going to go ahead now and do a patch of the shiitake mushrooms around this tree over here same process you know this really has been a lot of fun and just imagining all these gourmet mushrooms popping up all over the place back here has really brought a smile to my face so really look forward to seeing how things go and update new folks on that so I'll be out here in a few weeks and I'll be peeling back some of these wood chips and investigating the cardboard see if we got that mycelium spreading throughout this substrate that we've now created with the wood chips the straw the cardboard that's it for now everybody thanks for tuning in and stay tuned I'll be updating you on this project real soon take care

Channel: Plant Abundance

Views: 75,810

Rating: 4.9584489 out of 5

Keywords: Mushroom, Cultivation, Propagation, Grow, Edible, Gourmet, Shitake, Wine Cap, Oyster Mushrooms, Woodchips, Cardboard, Substrate, Inoculate, Spawn, Mycelium, Garden, Fugi, DIY, Food Forest, Layers, Permaculture, Straw, How to, Homesteading

Id: EAJIeVpGY2I

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2016