Who Knew Growing Mushrooms was this EASY! (Pantry Chat with Chris Gilmour)

hey you guys welcome to this week's edition of The Pantry chat Food For Thought today I have a special guest and we're going to be talking about growing mushrooms at home this is something Josh and I have wanted to get into for years and we've done a little bit of it we've done some Garden mushrooms but we have not gotten any further than that so we're really excited about learning more about it so today we have Chris Gilmore with us and we're going to be talking all about growing mushrooms at home so here we go Chris welcome Hey so nice to be here this is fun I love this yeah this is a great one I think it's something that people are looking at more and more as the word has gotten out that growing mushrooms is maybe not as hard as we all thought it might have been yeah and it really I mean to me as a you know kind of a smallscale modern Homestead it just makes sense for so many reasons like it really has been a game changer on our little Homestead so so we've been growing wine caps for the last few years and we've just been doing it in our garden beds like right in the rows because we already use a lot of compost and then we mulch our walkways with uh wood chips and so they're just super happy and they grow all over the place at this point I've got more wine caps than I could ever actually consume um and so I got really interested in the idea of some of these Garden mushrooms that we could just do in the Garden Road and I tried um what do they call them almond portabellas which are the agaricus this last year and I never got them to actually do anything so I'm like ah maybe I'll try it again we'll see but I'm really excited about moving even outside of just those Garden mushrooms that you can grow in your garden rows and uh getting into some more so I'm I'm excited about today's topic it's going to be a lot of fun um but first why don't you tell us a little bit about your story and how you got started in like how did you get here where you're growing mushrooms and teaching people about growing mushrooms sure yeah um so my wife and I we've been together a little over 20 years now my wife Laura and uh when we were in our early 20s um we basically went on a farm tour uh so went and worked on various Organic Farms kind of all over really all over North America Canada and the United States and uh I landed on a farm on the west coast called uh seven Raven Farms out on Salt Spring Island we're up in Canada um and I did uh basically kind of like an apprenticeship there for a whole season or like a garden intern ship uh and that was my first exposure to both foraging and growing mushrooms so we had a Market Garden there uh but we also had an eco- forestry operation um so we would you know it was a very small like 40 acre property and uh this guy made a significant amount of money from 40 acres of woods which is actually almost unheard of in the forestry world so that was actually what kind of called me to that place but one neat layer element of that was is after we went in selectively cut trees he had a guy that would come in and inoculate the stumps right in the forest with uh mushroom melium um and they were growing edible and medicinal mushrooms right in the forest and then we were also growing them in the garden and he had this amazing Valley that was full of oyster mushrooms uh and we had a Market Garden there but we would actually go and forage oyster mushrooms for our CSA boxes so that was kind of my first paret into both growing and foraging mushrooms uh and then you know kind of Jump Ahead a decade my wife and I Laura we bought our little Homestead uh up here in Canada um and one of the first things that we got into doing was doing mushroom logs so doing shiitake mushroom logs um and uh really quickly realized like wow like out of everything that we grow on the homestead this feels like one of the best exchanges of energy like as far as like calories put in and calories that we get back um we were really really impressed um so we you know I just got super nerdy about it you know and um started doing all kinds of experiments started playing around with growing species indoors Outdoors different techniques um and then my wife you know I do a fair bit of foraging as well but my wife really went down the uh the foraging Rabbit Hole uh so she's become incredibly knowledgeable as a forager and leads you know foraging walks now mushroom walks um and then I've kind of gone more down now we both kind of know both elements but as I said Laura's really kind of gone down the the foraging route for mushrooms and she's actually a professional forager and runs a foraging business um so it makes sense she'd go that way and then I kind of went down the uh the growing route um which is uh yeah yeah kind of what I teach now through and we do workshops through wild boka that's our our forging business there on on both growing and forging mushrooms today so that is amazing you know something that I just learned in this last year at least here for us in Idaho in the United States that there are actually certifications for mushroom foragers here I don't know if that's true in Canada but um but a local restaurant was featuring these wild mushrooms and they were um you know brought in the mushroom forager actually and she was talking about all the certification levels she had to go through in order to be able to safely sell these two restaurants after she had forged them for herself and so it's really fascinating how deep you can go into that world but it is a product that is like people want that restaurants want that now it's it's a very desirable product even on kind of the professional side so that's a very fascinating that she's doing yeah absolutely people are thinking cash crops you know mushrooms are actually again you know a pretty uh potentially a pro a lucrative crop to grow you know and and that's something that I think a lot of homesteaders are always look for is like how do I make my land profitable so that I can spend more time on the land and not have to spend so much time going out to work so I think that's a a really good element to bring in now something that you're really passionate about is building Healthy Communities um and just curious as we're chatting a little bit before we dive totally into the main subject like how do mushrooms play into that because my guess is is that they actually do most things on the homestead can right um how do mushrooms play into Healthy Communities talking about ecological communities or human communities or All Above when you when you phrase that question yeah well on your website you talk about having a passion for healthy community building and so yeah so I'm you know curious how the mushroom foraging plays into that yeah awesome um you know I I I look at Community kind of in a broad way because there is there's the ecological communities and you know the more I learn about my melium the more fascinated I play with their ecological role you know just in the earth's ecology um you know um they're one of the main organisms that actually like breaks down matter so things like when a tree dies in the forest and it's hard you know mycelium plays an essential role in recycling that into soil and making the uh basically the nutrients and all the other Foods available to all the other organisms you know whether it's bacteria whether it's insects uh and then the mycelium itself becomes super important food for the organisms too you know uh in bugs uh even mammals and squirrels and birds are all coming and eating that so melium is foundational to the community if you think about the Web of Life um and then beyond that it's become a really amazing um opportunity to bridge with our community and think about local kind of food security and self-reliance because you can grow such a a small amount in a or sorry large amount in a very small space uh it's it's a very efficient one you know from a local food security perspective uh and then of course you know that creates the opportunity to kind of rally around it so where we live you know I start we were the kind of there weren't many people doing it in our region when we first started going and of course people will get out you doing mushrooms what's this all about so one of our favorite ways to grow is is shitake on logs there is a bit of upfront work you know because we're actually going to go out we're going to harvest uh green trees from the forest we're going to cut them to length uh we're going to set up all the equipment we're going to drill them we'll maybe get into that later but one of the first activities that happened when we started first people were asking us about what's this all about and two it's like wow this is a lot of Labor as people if we're going to do it any kind of quantity so we actually started throwing these Community parties um where people would come along and basically learn and be like hey you show up for the day you help us get this done you go home with a log at the end of the day um and so we're actually building Community while spreading the skill set uh that increases kind of local food resilience and local food security yeah that is so important um and I love the way you tie the ecological Community into the human Community too because uh you know for us for Josh and I here on the Homestead we talk a lot about systems and how the systems interconnect with each other and that's kind of that same concept that you know your garden should be feeding into other parts of your homestead your barn and your your animal system should be feeding into other parts of the homestead and in the same way our household should be feeding into the community at large and vice versa and so yeah it's just a such a beautiful picture so many homesteaders feel isolated and this is not just postco they just are maybe they feel like they're the only people who are doing what they're doing right and so it's an amazing way to bring um people together I know when we first got to North Idaho we um being from a very dry region of California we were not at all clued in to mushroom foraging and up up here uh you know the morel mushroom hunting is like a sacred ritual almost in the spring like it becom a really big deal up here and so I remember the first time we were here in the spring and we we went by Josh and I drove by the street corner where the um whole field had been burned the year before and there were all these people and they were slowly walking around looking at their feet and we were like we were so clueless we were really naive you know and we're like oh my gosh like what happened here was this a is this a religious ceremony like we don't know these people look like they're walking around meditating or something come to find out they're all kicking around looking for morel mushrooms you know and um but there was a whole field of them like there were people everywhere was stopping and people were greeting each other and they were saying hi and so you know as you get out there and you get to these spots where like there's Community foraging going on it really does build this community aspect if you get to know other people who are doing what you're doing and then you end up with mushrooming buddies and you know foraging buddies and it it really creates a whole another community life outside of just your own Homestead so I just really wanted to bring that out and bring that to the front about what you're doing is that you know sometimes these things don't have to be solitary and all alone like it feels like yeah and I I just spoke to you know the growing aspect I mean people love the mushroom work party in the spring you know coming and doing the logs uh but forging you know we've met so many cool people out forging you know because what you find is there's there's spots and habitats that are associated with different species you know um so and the mushroom foragers you know that's a small though it's growing quickly it's still relatively a small kind of Niche world so once you start to establish where the good habitat spots are inevitably you're going to bump into other foragers and you've got something in common and now you're making new friends and um so we've met lots of interesting folks when we're out forging or people that just come up and say hey what are you doing and then strike up a cool conversation so there there's definitely a community building component around the forging um can I just touch on one more piece on um on systems before you go in popped into my mind there uh so as far as thinking about cyclical loops on the homestead and kind of closing them things you know mushrooms have been phenomenal for that as well so when we grow our mushrooms indoors in the winter time you know one of my favorites you're not producing a lot this way but it's super fun it's a great project with kids uh is we'll grow in spent coffee grounds like literally just in mason jars you know in the kitchen we'll grow oyster mushrooms there I also grow it straw in bags but the so the first round you know we take a a a product that's a waste product from our coffee the grounds and you know we could put that right into the compost but now we put it into a mason jar and we inoculate it with mycelium then we get you know two or three flushes of mushrooms off that that coffee ground is now supercharged with this super potent Rich mycelium um so that coffee has actually become a better nutrient than it was before so we could just put that into the compost but our next step is we actually go to our Verma composter so our worm composter and we feed the mushroom mycelium coffee grounds to the worms the worms absolutely love it and you know um you think about like the superfood like kind of buzzwords that are going around like I swear like I think coffee ground melium is a superfood you know you could sell it for a ton of money for the worms if they had if they had money to buy it with you know so now we're feeding that to the worms who Now consume it which that actually causes them to create even better fertilizer and now we use that to water Our Stars in the springtime right our Burma that's kind of our main fertilizer when we're getting vegetables going is the castings from the worms which I actually think is supercharged because they're eating the mycelium from the spent mushrooms so there's just kind of a cool example of how you can kind of tie these things in and make them cyclical uh in your system as well right oh yeah I absolutely love that that's something Josh would get super excited about so he would he would be out there right now getting his worms and his mushrooms going if he heard that so so yeah that might be in our future because that is really neat and it's a great way to like you said just keep reusing the same thing but making it better and better which is really what our goal is with working with our land right as we're working on our land we want to be improving it the whole way along leaving it more fertile in better shape better condition as when we leave it and that's just a great way way to do that turning something that people are dumping in the trash don't throw your coffee grounds in the trash don't do it they're too Val yeah when we grow on straw you know you can literally take that straw and go use it for mulch afterwards too right yeah um and you know it's in most conditions you know the mushrooms probably aren't going to start growing again uh when you go in malt your bed with it you know in some conditions they actually could a lot of conditions they don't but you know if you're going to be laying down straw anyways you know as a garden mulch either to as a weed barrier or build soil if you've inoculated with mycelium you've got a few flushes of food and then you go mulch with it uh one you're just doing more uh with less and then two I I I really believe you're adding more nutrients to that soil by putting that that straw down that's laid with the the mycelium in the first place right that is amazing yeah that is really neat good well speaking of supercharging things all you have to do is go to you know Pinterest or Instagram and scroll a little bit and you're bound to find some new mushroom coffee or something like that that is kind of all the rage at the moment because people are realizing how good mushrooms really are for your health or they're kind of coming back to the Forefront I think we've always known that they can be really good but um you know the downside of them is when you go and buy them in those nice little packages they are so expensive even going to your grocery store and getting good quality or your Farmers Market getting good quality mushrooms that have been grown by somebody else or forged by somebody else is just incredibly expensive um but the good news is is you can actually grow a lot at home and that's so exciting so take us through some of the different mushrooms that you can grow at home and what their main benefits are sure um you know when people are starting out so maybe even a even if I was to back up one step as far as growing techniques you know you're you're either going to grow indoors or you're gonna grow outdoors okay right and then there's a few different techniques that you might use with each one and then the different techniques are kind of connected to different species all right um so maybe I'll start with outdoor growing um for for all the gardeners in the the crowd tonight um so Outdoors you know there's there's a ton of mushrooms you could grow but not all mushrooms are um equal as far as their ease of growing um so probably two of the easiest ones to start with uh if you're going to grow in beds wine caps are um King staria mushrooms and and the reason they're often easier is because they just have a very I don't know if it's the perfect word but like an aggressive mycelium meaning they'll like out compete other native mycelium that are in the habitat um and they're less prone to like things like bacteria and molds and stuff getting in there because they're just uh such an aggressive melium some of the slower growing mycelium um are are really amazing you know have all kinds of Med medicinal benefits but if you don't have every little piece perfectly tweaked they can actually be a lot more a lot more challenging to grow so probably the first thing I'd share with folks you know if you're just getting started uh oyster mushrooms uh wine cat mushrooms and shitake mushrooms on logs are probably three of the best start starting points um that I often recommend um because both the oysters and the wine caps are very fast growing mycelium very aggressive I always say you know you can do a few things wrong when you're growing wine caps and oysters and still have success you can do a lot of like for example something like um matake mushrooms you know um or or even Lion's man for that matter you know you can do a lot of things right and still have it go wrong when you're growing some of those other species oysters and white caps you can do a bunch of stuff wrong and still have it feel right and and get a good flush off them um so those are really good starting species uh shitake um are maybe a little bit harder if you're going to be growing them indoors but Outdoors on logs they're actually a great species to start with as well um yeah so if you're inoculating into into freshwood uh we have shitaki logs that have been fuing for literally nine years so we inoculated them once uh so it is you know it is a bit of initial work up front to actually harvest the logs cut them you know you know it take us we'll spend about two days a year inoculating mushrooms but difference is you know I spend way more than two days on my tomatoes every year and I get one Harvest at the end of the year and then I have a ton of work after I harvest them still I spend two days a year on my shitake and they produce for nine more years afterwards you know and I'd say six to nine years depending on the growing conditions of the species that you're growing on there um that that's amazing that I did not know that they went that long talk before you move on really quickly cover what each of those mushrooms are good for for the some of us who are just kind of like mushrooms or mushrooms um you know are are they medicinal are they edible for each of those three varieties you just mentioned yeah um I think of I mean all three of them are Edibles and basically all the mushrooms we're going to be talking about are Edibles um and they all have here's the thing with mushroom medicine it's quite complex when you get into it uh there's a really good book it's actually called if you know if somebody wants just like a clear diagram of like this mushroom has these properties there's a book called fungal Pharmacy uh and in the back of it it actually has tables and it's literally like you know like diabetes and anti-tumor and anti-inflamm and um and the more um you know I'll preface this by saying I don't always talk a lot about so I've spent a ton of time learning and reading about you know kind of medical value of mushrooms I'm always cautious sharing uh I'm gonna steal a line from a guy Tim Ferris he's kind of a famous guy on the internet but he always says I'm I'm I'm not a doctor and I don't pretend to be one on the internet so I'm gonna say that right now so I'm I am always cautious to just throw these broad words when it comes to Medicinal mushrooms um because I I I tend to believe that health is maybe a little bit more complex to just like mushroom does this thing um and you know that's a whole another conversation or a whole another podcast there uh but in general i' say you know a lot of the species that we're talking about are you know they're all higher in antioxidants uh most of them have some degree of anti-inflammatory properties uh there's tons of research at how they can be supportive with um as like adaptogens um and just helping your body regulate um you know various different things um you know there's tons of research coming out there on the value of mushrooms even in in cancer whether it's as a preventative through probably roles and mechanisms such as its antioxidant properties such as its anti-inflammatory properties uh but even really fascinating research at coming out how mushrooms can even be supportive to somebody going through traditional uh chemo treatments for cancer and stuff you know um so you're going through the modern treatment system and your mushrooms because of their adaptogenic properties are actually helping you buffer say the radiation you're getting from your chemo um so you know as general properties I'd say they they hold all kinds of wonderful things like that um you know shitake and oysters are probably a little bit more on the edible side you know we don't usually think of I mean they have all kinds of benefits but they're not usually the ones that come to mind when when we start talking Medicals we often think about like lies man for your brain or you know things like RI you know Rishi is probably one of the most well researched medicinal uh mushrooms out there like literally it's been used in Asia for like thousands of years um and documented for thousands of years you know so incredible bodies of literature on the the medicinal values of things like RI um you know new ones like chaga and turkey tail coming up or I shouldn't say new mushrooms but there's a lot more research those are ones that are kind of becoming new as far as being trendy mushrooms um so those are kind of some of the mushrooms I start thinking about when we go more into the medicinal realm of mushrooms um so shitake oysters uh definitely have medicinal value but um we we often put them a little bit more in the edible category than the than the medicinal category if that makes sense yeah definitely yeah that sounds good um one of the things that I have found is really fascinating I don't know if this is true of all mushrooms but I think that the research is coming out with the wine caps is their ability to actually absorb vitamin D and then to hold on to it so that if you consume them then later in the winter when you're not getting as much Sunshine that you're actually essentially taking like a vitamin D supplement by consuming them or something similar um you know so there's a lot of really interesting properties that uh mushrooms May hold answers for as we're trying to do more things oursel and be a little more self-sufficient absolutely you know and um so shiak absolutely as well so we'll actually when we Harvest our shiak fresh we'll actually set them in the Sun for a little while before we actually process them and they will literally absorb extra vitamin D out of the sun there or or at least synthesize and create exra vitamin D um just by leaving them in the Sun for longer upon harvesting um and you know an interesting just story on that to actually speak to how potent that is a few years ago this is probably about three years ago um I got some blood work done and it was in the winter time and I had almost toxic levels of vitamin D in my system oh wow yeah most people in North America are actually have a shortage of vitamin D and what I realized I so up until that point I would usually take a vitamin D supplement in the winter and then I'd go off it in the summer um and I'd never really got my blood check before while I was doing it so sure enough this one year I went to go get my blood checked I was just taking a regular vitamin E supplement exactly what it said on the label and I had almost borderline toxic levels of vitamin D uh and in chatting with the the doctor we basically realized that because I was consuming so many mushrooms already I had no need for that vitamin D supplement I was naturally getting way more or not way more than I need but I had enough yeah so I actually stopped eating mushrooms for three months and stopped the vitamin D like I had to go off of everything because vitamin D actually takes a while to actually get out of your flush out of your system like it's cumulative it's not like you know vitamin C you can flush out in 24 hours right vitamin D actually sits in in your body for a long time uh went back three months later and tested my vitamin D level had come back down uh started just eating mushrooms and not taking any vitamin D supplement anymore and now I have a very healthy uh level of vitamin D right through the winter um so I no longer need that that vitamin D supplement because of my my mushroom consumption which is kind of cool yeah that's really fascinating to me because while I don't live as far north as you do I think you're up in Ontario um you know here in North Idaho we get long dark winters also so I definitely am in that needing to supplement with vitamin D category and I get my work my blood work done also regularly to check that and I'm like it takes a lot of supplementation for me to get up to healthy levels on vitamin D during the midwinter time and that's not cheap either right there's another way you're saving money on the home stale EXA well and you know you know it's got to be more bioavailable than anything you're taking out of a a capsule so I love that that's really cool okay so I kind of sidetracked you a little bit you were working on outdoor mushrooms and growing them and so let's move on from there if uh if you are looking at at indoor mushrooms is that where you would go next yeah I mean we could either talk a little bit about the process of growing outdoors and some or we could get into indoor mushrooms where would you like to go next no let's hang with the outdoor mushrooms then and talk about some of the processes awesome yeah well like growing like things like wine caps in garden beds like you said that that's relatively straightforward because they're they're a very aggressive mycelium um you know so uh basically Mo all mushrooms um need moisture that's probably your most important thing whether you're growing indoors or Outdoors they need high humidity um so the the substrate substrate is the word we use for kind of like whatever we're going to grow our mushrooms in um so generally you want them in a in a place where that substrate is going to stay moist um so that's an important thing to know now wine caps actually the reason you can get away with them in garden beds and stuff even though they dry out a little bit they're such an aggressive mycelium and such an easy mushroom they're one of the few that can actually tolerate a little bit of sunlight and tolerate drying out a little bit uh most other mushrooms would not be able to grow in the The Garden Path in your garden now what we do with our wine cast we'll often grow them under perennial crops or under our squash beds particularly around our squash beds because the squash grow so fast um and then their leaves are so big that they actually create that bit of shade uh and increase the moisture in the mulch underneath it they're growing in uh we also have a big patch of like elderberries and blueberries um so we grow wine caps underneath our elderberries blueberries again because they have that shade cover from above them right um but yeah just just know that so moisture content is really really important in the soil uh mushrooms uh contrary to popular belief they actually do need light a lot of people there's a misconception that mushrooms are growing in the dark there's a handful of species that are but most of them actually need light but not direct sunlight right um so that's another important factor to just understand there and what mushrooms kind of need so you can go in garden beds you know you're growing in straw or in wood chips so basically you're going to take your straw you want clean straw that's nice and dry um you know it's not it doesn't have you don't want a straw Bell that for example that's been sitting out in a field for a month uh and it's been getting rained on right so you're getting nice clean straw nice and dry or you're getting nice freshly Tred uh chipped wood chips and then you literally just go and buy a kit from the store you can break it up you can put some of the melium into the the the straw there you know sometimes I'll throw down even a couple little pieces of cardboard in there um because it'll start to colonize that cardboard a little faster just you can get away with it without it but the cardboard helps kind of give it a Kickstart so that that one's fairly straightforward um beyond that we get into growing in logs and stuff like that and again it's you know it's it's not rocket science but there are definitely little tricks to increasing it but the essence of it is is I need Greenwood first of all uh so healthy trees so if you this is probably the number one question I get for log growing people like oh a tree came down on my backyard can I inoculate it with mushrooms and if the tree came down in your backyard there's a good chance it came down because there's already a fungus in it that's broken down the quality of the wood and allowed it to break in the first place now if you get a really good Windstorm and it actually breaks off a healthy Branch absolutely you can probably inoculate it but if it fell down for any other reason you know if it's got woodpecker holes in it if it's got in set holes in it if it came down naturally you probably it's already got other competing mycelium in it unless it's not going to work so usually we're we're thinning healthy branches now if you don't have access to a forest where you can Harvest get to know the local arborist right or or even just drive around the neighborhood you know even for somebody that lives in the city uh you know drive around and look for where the arborists are taking down those big trees because usually those canopies are just getting dragged off to get chipped and sometimes those logs in the canopy are actually the perfect size you know three inches four inches five inches uh canopy logs are great size for inoculating mushrooms into them right um so you basically get your medium which is going to be your log um and then you're going to buy your spawn which is usually sawdust that's been inoculated with the mycelium of choice and I I recommend shitake for getting started um and then you're going to drill holes in it and then you basically plug the spawn into the holes you seal it up with wax uh and then you're going to let them sit and um uh the myum basic will eat away at the woods so shitake log is one things interesting it can take anywhere from to 24 months before you get your first flush or mushrooms on it uh it's kind of like more like planting you know like a blueberry bush or something where you're not going to get any fruit the first couple of years uh but then once it starts producing it's incredibly prolific right um yeah well and if you're going to get fruit for up to like nine years and plus then it's worth the weight isn't it worth the weight there yeah yeah so that's kind of the essence of growing Outdoors um and then of course you can grow all kinds of other species like I grow lines M Outdoors you know which is one of the most um well researched mushrooms around brain health there's actually ton of research coming out on mushrooms even for people that have uh Dementia or at risk of dementia um you know line M being a really great supplement for them to be taking uh it's also really delicious and tasty as well just on its own um so we do eat it but we often tincture ours um into kind of a a brain medicine uh matake mushroom another incredibly medicinal one you know all kinds of good compounds so those are you know there's a bunch of mushrooms we can do outdoors but I suggest starting with Shake because it's one of the easier ones there's definitely some tricks of the trade to having success with things like mat lines me and chake as well you know there there is a little bit more to that than just what I explained on this podcast but that that gives your listeners kind of the based overview of how the process works yeah let's talk about the type of trees because here I am in the west and so I am completely surrounded by pine trees evergreen trees um so what kind of logs are we looking for yeah most of our mushrooms we are growing on deciduous trees our hardwood trees um there's a handful so for example our native RI mushroom here on the East Coast ganadera tsug it's called it's actually a Hemlock RI U and it grows exclusively actually on Hemlock which is an evergreen tree um so there are a handful of species that will grow on evergreen trees but usually we're actually looking at Hardwoods you know particularly shitake Lion's man matake a lot of the more common ones um so you know things like Oak things like Maple even like fruit trees nut trees um really most your hars poppers you know you can grow on them uh popers have a softer wood so I find that they don't last as long so you know there there be an example you know doing shitake into poppers that might be a species where you're more likely to get a fruit in eight to 12 months instead of 12 to 24 but you might only get four years out of the log whereas if you inoculate it in an oak log you know it might take you 24 months to fruit but then that's where you're getting the nine years fruit off of it right just because of the density of the wood yeah that would make a lot of sense so I would imagine that like Cottonwood would probably fall under that same category yeah with the popers yeah yeah great good well that means that we have some options around here because we definitely cottonwoods around yeah you could definitely do you could do oysters into Cottonwood you could also do shiak into Cottonwood for sure oh great okay cool and then the oysters how do you you didn't mention them with the log so do you do those the same way with the log uh you you can do them with the logs um I find so again because the oyster is such an aggressive growing mycelium I find that it actually consumes the host fairly quick and you don't get as many years of flushing that you do with things like the shakeys so I found it's not as worth it for me to actually inoculate oyster logs um for the amount of work to actually do it and how many years they produce I I just haven't found it to be as good of an exchange of energy um I mean I think still worthwhile but um we just chose not to do that so I do a technique called log Towers um where um you don't get as many years fluting off of it but it's it's way way quicker where I literally just cut log rounds and then I just lay my celium in between those rounds and sometimes you know I've got I've got them flush in four months after I've done that um oh wow okay yeah and then I do grow oysters are actually my favorite mushroom to grow indoors and I do them year round um and mostly growing on straw so a nice clean straw source and even the coffee grounds that I mentioned you earlier so yeah okay so that sounds really easy sounds like there's some good options so let's use that as a transition let's go inside and talk about the good mushrooms that we can grow inside and the different techniques for doing that yeah awesome um so again for for indoor growing I think the first thing we do need to talk safety if we're going to grow indoors right um and when we're talking about safety we're talking about both our own safety our health and the health of our home um because mushrooms when they release spores which is how they reproduce they don't reproduce by seeds they reproduce by spores they let out a lot of spores you know like I don't know what the actual number is but it's got to be like hundreds of thousands if not billions you know like crazy amounts of Spore like when they release you know there's a white film over everything around them right um and breathing in quantities of spores is not good for us um and especially over time so you know people they're really trendy right now these grow your own mushroom kits at home yes where you buy like a little mushroom block and you get it home and those are really great starting points they're fun to learn they're a cool project with kids you're probably G to get close to as many mushrooms as what you paid for it you know you're gonna pay pay $30 for your mushroom block and you might get $30 of mushrooms out of your mushroom block so you're not necessarily uh increasing your self-reliance growing on those blocks but it is a great way to learn um why I'm saying this for safety though you know most of those kits they don't come with any warning just say yeah throw it in your kitchen sink or in your bathroom or whatever let it grow uh and the general thought is that you know there's so few spores coming off of that one block that it's not going to be a health problem that's just generally what's kind of thought um if you're growing any more than that you absolutely want to think about ventilation for it or capturing those stor Force so I grow in something called a monotub so they're basically clear plastic tubs and this is actually great because it increases your success significantly uh and it sounds fancy but it's relatively simple as well I make it tub um which actually allows me now to keep an environment where the humidity is high anyways right because if you're just growing on your counter chances are your house especially in the winter time is too dry anyways and your mushrooms are going to start to grow and then they're just going to dry up you put it inside of a chamber you're able to actually control the humidity in there and keep it kind of up around like 80 90% which you're actually going to get way better flushes to begin with but the great part now is when the Spore is released they're doing it inside of your tub um and it's not spreading through your home you're not leing them in and then of course there's the RIS of the home as well too you know it's probably low risk that spores are actually going to float through your home and inoculate something in your home like I'd say very low risk but interesting enough I had um I was growing mushrooms in these old Garden tubs like Garden pots in my basement um and I had a block that I thought was kind of finished and I just stuck it down in my root cell and I kind of forgot about it for a couple of months and I went back and the my celium had literally grown across the Flor and into the wood frame of my door yeah which that's that's not good you don't you don't actually want that to happen right um fortunately my house is dry enough that it had already kind of died by the time I found it but if you lived in a very moist home you know theoretically you could end up with oyster mushrooms growing out of your wall uh and now you know if your home is kind of susceptible to mold and bacteria in the first place or not bacteria but if your home is susceptible to mold it's definitely susceptible to mycelium potentially getting into you know some of your boards and stuff like that so just just something to figure out you know probably low risk but not impossible and there's my story about growing in the RO Sal there you go so keep I like to create a chamber to grow inside of and if you want to grow more than what you can grow in a couple of Chambers then you can actually kind of like and if you have a wood shop and you create a little fan goes to the outside you can actually create ventilation to now take those spores outside through a window as well but that's getting a little more advanced yeah so when you're talking about a chamber I mean it sounds to me like you're actually talking about like a storage container that's clear almost isn't that simple yeah like it's like a rubber Ma you know fairly straightforward and what's cool like in a small amount of space you could literally stack like six of those on top of each other and in a two by two space going up the side of your wall you've almost got a constant supply of mushrooms right wow that's pretty cool that's actually really neat it you know the one on the bottom it's kind of inoculating right now and the one on the middle is a boat to fruit and the one on the top is the one that's actually fruiting and you actually cycle them so they're they're constantly coming like you could do that in an urban apartment um if you wanted to and then you're actually able to look and if there's any sign that Spore is actually released you could actually just take it outside and open it up outside to actually Harvest it or tend it so you're not letting out that large quantity of Spore into your house right yeah yeah that is pretty neat so let's talk about the light requirements like I know you said they're not grown in the dark but they don't like direct light so do we need grow lights or is just ambient no indirect light you know so if you're in a if you have them in a room with a window in it and you just have them off to the side so that the sun's not hitting right on them you know just that light of the room is generally uh generally all you need for it if it's a darker space then you know some people will set up grow lights i' I've seen more advanced kind of monoch Chambers and monot tubs and fooding Chambers that have lights in them but I don't so I I basically have them in my laundry room in these clear tubs and they're just sitting on a shelf in the corner um you know just indirect light in that room there well that's easier than growing just about anything else you can grow inside right yeah yeah yeah yeah and again there's a little bit of work to that initial inoculation step but once you kind of get your systems dialed for it uh it's actually it's actually pretty quick to to get them cycling and keep that constant Supply going yeah that's really neat so let's talk about the medium that you're growing in when you're in those chambers is that you've you've mentioned straw you've mentioned coffee grounds um what's your favorite for that sort of scenario yeah well I I mostly grow oysters indoors so straw works great and coffee grounds work because they're well coffee grounds are just a waste product I have straw is relatively cheap and very accessible um you know one thing I would encourage people to just think about is where they're getting their Straw from um and there is you know there's definitely some controversy around that you know some mushroom Growers just grow on whatever straw and they're not worried about it um and I I've actually just grown on straw I've grown on straw many times where I had no idea where it came from but we know you know straw is sprayed you know using things like round up on straw is is common uh you know everything I've read suggests that things have broken down so much by the time that you're getting it that it's not a worry but mushrooms are accumulators of you know mushrooms are used in you know bio remediation projects where they're literally using mushrooms to pull toxins out of soil you know mushrooms can accumulate lead and um and different things like that so you know I do suggest trying to get a clean straw Source if that's an option um so whether you can get organic straw or if you just know a farmer and you know what they're putting on their fields uh that that's kind of helpful um there's all kinds of other mediums you can grow on you know things like coconut husks really there's all kinds of different carbon sources that we grow on um you can get compressed uh wood chips you know when you get into the Realms of growing things like Lion Man and matake and Rishi like some of those more medicinal mushrooms um usually they're not growing on straw at that point they're actually growing on wood chips and you can actually or sorry compress like sawdust fibers so you literally can buy bags of it through like mushroom Grove stores and there're these little pellets and when you mix them with the water they actually expand um and then you inoculate them often you're adding a little bit of uh food in there as well so like you know things like wheat germ or things like that uh to feed them it gets a little bit uh when you get into the realm of like r makaki lines man it it definitely gets a lot more complex than this basic oyster on straw or oyster on coffee that I I chat about and again because oysters is so aggressive you can get away with this really simple system that you can just do in your kitchen and likely have a fair bit of success with um when you get into the more medicinal projects that are a bit harder uh absolutely doable but there's a little bit more to it you know you're suddenly you're talking about using your pressure caner and bringing it up to certain temperature for your wood chips and then you're inoculating it with the Spore literally through a syringe in the the screen and it it gets a little more fancy at that point you know yeah definitely you know all of these things you can get really technical um yeah which is why people start with oysters yeah well I mean with your Tomatoes like you can dial in tomato growing to a crazy science and you can spend thousands of dollars on producing the best tomatoes you know so it's always fun to see things that we have the really simple version and the really easy thing to do so I love the idea of being able to reuse something that we already have on the homestead the coffee grounds if you're drinking coffee and again that's probably another one has a a propensity to have a lot of toxins in it and actually a lot of funguses and molds in it if you're not getting really good quality coffee to begin with which you should be if you're drinking it and putting it into your body all the time um so start with a good medium but you know you're talking about straw what if you don't have straw on the homestead but you do have you know really good quality hay for animals or maybe even grass clippings from your lawn that hasn't been sprayed do you have flexibility to bring that type of stuff in does it need to be carbonous and so just dry and then it's okay or there are more requirements yeah I haven't played around with grass or hay but theoretically it makes sense to me that it would work um you know I'm sure if you did a quick little internet search I can't really speak to it because I haven't done it um so I'm sure you could do a quick internet search but you know uh I'm I would be surprised if it wouldn't work um the thing you're going to want you're going to want to make sure it's dry uh it's clean you know you wouldn't want to be um uh you know r up grass that had sat there and been rained on multiple times right so you'd want to get it fresh you'd want to dry it out uh you'd want to know that it's nice and clean and then you probably would want to go through a pasteurization process for it you know where you kind of bring it up to I forget the exact number but I want to say it's like around 165 degrees Fahrenheit or something like that whatever the pasteurization temperature is there's chemical ways you can you can pasteurize as well you know with like peroxide or with with lime uh so there's there's different ways you could do that but I would probably want to pasteurize it um you know I I get away with by straw you can you can pasturize a lot of people pasturize straw as well although I've gotten away with just using it literally straight from the Braille again because oysters are so aggressive uh same with your coffee you know you may uh and if you're having trouble with mold you know you may want to pasteurize your coffee first but I've had success just literally I take the coffee I throw it into the freezer bag wait till I have enough to fill a mason jar take it out put it in there layer my mycelium in and let it do its thing you know and I've had success that way as well so and of course the reason behind the pasteurization IDE idea is that we don't want a lot of competing molds or other funguses in order you know we want to make sure that we're inoculating and growing what we're trying to grow and something else isn't killing it off so yeah that that kind of starts to open up a lot of things if you can look around and start going hey maybe you know maybe those grass clippings would work if you've got them nice and clean and they haven't gotten moldy sitting around and had the opportunity for things to um to grow in them but that is really fascinating are there any other mushrooms that kind of outside of the um the the methods that you've talked about here that are your favorite to grow or things that you really like growing um yeah no th those are kind of the main on I mean I'm really excited about lions main these days um you know we've been doing a lot of research in in again in Laura's family um there's a a few people in her family have had dementia issues you know and with some of the um some of the aunts and uncles starting to age we've been really thinking about you know Lion's main tincture as as being a really good medicine just to be supportive of them and and for our own brains you know as we age um so so lines m is one I'm pretty excited about um I do grow it outside already but I'm just starting to to play around with growing it indoors um which is kind of getting into this more extensive setup where we're literally using an autoclave and we're sterilizing and we're not pasteurizing at this place we're fully sterilizing you know Under Pressure um yeah so that takes it a whole another step forward but that's really neat yeah and then of course foraging you know opens up a whole another world there's all kinds of mushrooms that we we forage uh and dry and preserve you know in that medicinal realm and use year round you know um we love doing H one of our favorites in the winter is a mushroom chai uh with a lot of the tree mushrooms so we do a chai you know with your typical like cinnamon and cardamon and all your chai spices um but then we'll actually steep things like turkey tail and Birch Poore and foies feris and H Rishi mushroom you know um so we'll have basically all these kind of tree polypore mushrooms that are all just chalk full of all kinds of great stuff and we'll we'll steep those for multiple days with the chai spices and just have that either going in the crock pot or or sometimes it's just sitting on the wood stove you know and just you come in there and pour it out and put a little honey in there and wow what a great drink it is oh that sounds amazing and it sounds like it would be absolutely amazing for your immune Health too well especially the and we don't tend to do it in the summer but in the winter time when we're you know during cold and flu season seems to be when we we tend to do that you know yeah that is really neat so really quickly what do you think the number one mistake that you see beginners making when it comes to Growing mushroom that you would warn people off of um probably just really understanding the growing needs at the different stages is really really important you know when you first inoculate them their needs are a little bit different than when they're ready to fruit yeah um so that would probably be like the base one just kind of understand what they need while they're growing and understand what they need to fruit and then beyond that you know so if you're growing indoors probably the two biggest ones are not enough so if people are growing in tubs not enough oxygen okay is a big issue and then you get really long spindly mushrooms so that can be a problem or just not being meticulous enough and keeping everything clean and then all of a sudden you've got more growing on your mushrooms right so those those are probably the basics for there um outdoor growing um probably actually one is just not waiting long enough when people are doing shitaki you know people will go and do their shiitake logs actually I'll share two for Shi Takis keep them moist um so the very first year I I keep the logs close to my house and if it doesn't rain once a week I'll actually water them like throw the sprinkler on them sure once they've uh we call it being colonized so once the log is fully full of mycelium they're actually incredibly hearty so the first year I baby them a little bit you know and I will actually keep them close to the house I'll throw a sprinkler on them so they're in the shade full they can be full shade at this point uh because the mycelium is just growing inside of the log uh make sure that they got watered once or twice a week until you basically see the mycelium growing on the end of the logs once you see the myum on the end of the logs then you I just toss them into the forest and now they're just good I don't do anything I don't water them I basic all I do is Harvest after that so keeping the moisture in that first year is huge for outdoors and then two uh people will often let the log sit for a year or two and they're like oh it didn't work and they forget about it and then three four years later they walk past it like oh my goodness there's mushrooms grown out of that you know we've actually given up on logs when we first started in the early days and we'd go and build them into our garden and use them like as like Terraces and stuff and then we' come back in like a year or later they'd be fruiting and we thought they were no good and we just didn't wait long enough so so patience is a virtue as well well I am really encouraged by this because it while I while I understand there's details there's ways you know you want to do it the right way it's actually way more simple in the process than I had been under the impression of so that's really exciting and um something that I'm really looking forward to getting into so you guys I want to tell you if you are interested in this also Chris has been incredibly generous and offered you guys as listeners a 25% off coupon for his um growing and foraging wild mushrooms course which is amazing and I am so excited I have uh one of his courses I haven't gotten into it yet but I'm really excited that Josh and I are going to sit down with all the kids and we are going to watch it we're going to be taking it and learning a lot about growing our own mushrooms specifically but we have a lot to forage up here too that we need to learn too we are in a very damp environment forested environment so we have tons of mushrooms all around us and we've only learned how to find and identify a couple of the top ones so if you're interested in this topic make sure you go um grab the link that's associated with this podcast show notes um so we'll put it in the description and make sure you use the coupon code that we'll have down there for you too for 25% off and if you just want to know a little bit more about Chris or check out what he's doing visit him at www. Chris outdoors with s doca um for Canada there so this has just been amazing and really encouraging Chris thank you so much for joining us yeah you're welcome that was a blast fun to fun to chat with you there all right thank you we'll see you guys real soon goodbye

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 14,643

Keywords: Homesteading, Homesteading Family, how to grow mushrooms, wild foods, mushroom cultivation, mushroom cultivation training, mushroom cultivation process, how to grow mushrooms in your garden, how to grow mushrooms indoors, how to grow mushrooms outside, how to grow mushrooms at home from spore, how to grow mushrooms in a bucket, how to grow mushrooms on logs

Id: zMWQO8FMJIw

Length: 48min 15sec (2895 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2024