Growing Mushrooms

[zarniwoop]

Hi All,

Yeah I know but you can cook stuff with mushrooms that goes with beer....

Ok now I've established a link between mushrooms and beer does anyone grow their own? If so any advice on how to start and the best/cheapest method? (Bunnings have some interesting looking kits but a bit pricey per kg for GYO)


Cheers

Zarniwoop

 

[DeGarre]

Growing them? What a strange idea...I step 50 metres from my back door in the autumn and I get buckets full of trumpet chantarelles and some horns of plenty. I dehydrate them in those machines there's a thread about here somewhere.

I love pork chops and cutlets so I fry them in butter and sage then make a mushroom bacon dijon etc cream sauce, cover the pork and let it cook in the oven. Fork tender.I'll have it with gratin dauphinois to get extra cream and calories.

 

[zarniwoop]

Alas with my level of mushroom identification skills that approach would probably result in a small section in the local Vic news of "local home brewer found dead over dinner table from suspected deadly orange mamba mushroom poisoning". (see, I even need to make up a poisonous mushroom name!)

 

[yum beer]

'orange mambo' are not poisonous, you really have no clue.

Those mushroom kits do alright, have done 2 over the years, 1st ****** out when I went away for a week and couldn't keep it wet, the other produced a couple of kilo's.
You don't really save too much but if you could get extra spores to keep it going it might be a worthwhile prospect.

 

[Hoops]

Yep, been growing my own oyster and shiitake mushrooms mainly. Also have reishi fully colonised and ready to put in the fruiting chamber.
A good place to start would be here: http://www.ediblemushroom.net/ as there's a good Australian following on there.

 

[Hoops]

Also I'd recommend oyster mushrooms, especially White Oyster mushroom as a great beginner variety - it grows really really quickly and out competes a lot of contaminants.

 

[Phoney]

I've bought one of those kits from Bunnies. Got a fair few out of it at first, they were huge! Then it got all mouldy and gross and I ended up chucking the whole lot. All in all a waste of money if you do only go into half hearted.

 

[Black Devil Dog]

Not sure if you have any mushroom farms near where you live. But they often sell mushroom compost, which is great for your garden, plus you get the added benfit of dozens of mushrooms sprouting all over your garden.

 

[TimT]

You can get plenty from Bunnings and most gardening centres; now would be the time to do it. We sometimes got boxes from a mushroom grower in Coburg - they still had plenty of mushrooms seeded in them but they were past peak growth period, and the grower would just sell them to the public. Great for the garden with the added benefit of a few mushrooms.

Mind we haven't had that much success growing them in the past.

If you have a cool room you use for lagering I reckon that might be just the place to grow 'em....

 

[heshtek]

I pick my own when they are in season. The ones I picks are commonly called Saffron Milkcaps. Eat the wrong ones and they can kill you!

Here's a blog entry I wrote on how to identify milkcaps but I would recommend that people take a short course in fungi identification if they want to pick their own

http://aggregata.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/identifying-edible-lactarius-deliciosus.html

 

[OzPaleAle]

Paul Stamets seems to be the mushroom man, there are a few good books by him around on growing them.
I had a go by cloning them from some shop bought mushrooms on agar plates then using that to innoculate some spent grain, it worked well with filling the jar with mycelium so I spread that into a corner of the garden to see if it will pop up.
No luck so far but reading Paul's book it was pretty clear each variety has specific temp triggers for them to grow the mycelium and trigger fruiting.

 

[Judanero]

If you buy a mushroom kit you can use it to inoculate a bulk substrate and then have more mushrooms than you know what to do with.

Some basic equipment to get started: Old esky (for pasteurising substrate), some ~50L plastic storage tubs with lids (if going down monotub path), and then your choice of substrate (coir/straw/well aged horse manure etc etc).

Other items that become more necessary the further into it you want to get: Pressure cooker, syringes, agar plates (disposable or auto-clavible), isopropyl alcohol, canning jars, microspore tape, spawn medium (rye/bird seed/popcorn/brown rice flour cakes etc etc), scalpels.... laminar flow hood h34r:

Or if you want to go down the shiitake path you just need some colonised dowels and fresh oak log (believe you can use Eucalypt but haven't personally done it).

http://www.fungifun.org/
http://www.shroomery.org/ (Though almost exclusively concerned with 'magic' mushrooms, there are useful guides that can be used for any type of mushroom)

Just like brewing, do a bunch of reading!! Flow on effect is the skills you learn in myco work can help with yeast work :super:

edit-spelling

 

[pat_00]

They used to sell shitake inoculated logs at ceres in brunswick.