Try This At Home: Grow Your Own Mushrooms

Over the long, slow winter, when our garden is bedded down with snow, we decided to try growing mushrooms. We had heard Paul Stamets speak at the NOFA 2009 Summer Conference and had picked up his Fungi Perfecti catalog. After much deliberation, we chose to try out the Pearl Oyster mushroom kit ($24.00) and the Shiitake mushroom kit ($26.00). These are pretty standard, tried-and-true shrooms, and they looked fairly easy to care for. They arrived six days ago on Friday, January 8th. We waited until we got the girls to bed, then gleefully unpacked them and figured out how to get our shrooms growing.

Each kit came packed in a plastic bag with an instruction manual and an additional, larger plastic bag with holes punched in it:

The pearl oyster mushroom kit (left) came as packed straw inoculated with mushroom spawn. The shiitake kit (right) turned out to be a pressed brick of wood chips. It looked remarkably like popcorn. Reading the manual and checking the date on the bag (Nov. 20 was less than 40 days from the date of arrival), we learned that the shiitakes were not yet ready to bloom. We were advised to keep them in the refrigerator for 3-5 days (picture was in fact taken in the fridge).

The pearl oysters, however, were ready to go. I placed them in a clean pink hospital tub:

Then, according to the directions, I used two wire coat hangers to create a tree, straightening out the hook ends and pushing them firmly into the straw.

I misted the kit all over with water. The water cannot be chlorinated; the instructions recommend rainwater, but since it's January in Massachusetts, I filled a pot with snow and melted it on the stove, then let it cool before spraying the kit.

Once I misted the kit, I covered it with the large plastic bag provided:

We mist the kit every morning. We keep it in our second floor bathroom with the blinds down, where it benefits from low natural light and steam from morning showers.

After keeping the shiitakes in the fridge for 5 days, we took them out. The instructions say to open the bag they come in and fill the bag with water. Alternatively, you can soak them in a 5-gallon tub. Since we chose to melt snow, the 5-gallon tub sounded like a good idea. We unwrapped the brick and placed it in the tub full of snowmelt... where it floated. (I completely failed to take pictures of this, sorry.) We weighted it down with a pyrex pan and a rock inside it so that it would stay submerged, and let it soak for 24 hours as recommended.

Today, I tried to take the brick out of the tub, and it disintegrated in my hands. I strained the crumbled block out in a colander and did my best to press it back into shape with the popcorn-y outer crust on the outside:

The bag provided had also disappeared, so I made do with another bag, punching holes in it approximately the size and frequency of the bag on the pearl oysters. The instructions say to use skewers or chopsticks pressed into the block to keep the bag open over the shiitakes, but there was no way they'd stay in. So I used four angle brackets that were lying around and hung the bag over the remains of the block.

At this point, I have very low expectations for the shiitakes. If they bloom, I'll be amazed. What went wrong? Did I miscount the days and kill off the shrooms in the fridge? Was there something in the snow? We took it from the garden, and we don't use salt on our walks. We also cleaned out the tub first. Should we have left the block in the bag? Been more careful removing it from the tub? I'll write Fungi Perfecti and ask.

The pearl oysters, on the other hand, seem to be doing fine on day 6:

There's clearly a lot of moisture inside the kit bag, but not too much. Misting appears to be working well. I see no sign that the shrooms are beginning to form, but we're not supposed to see anything until day 7. I'll post again as soon as something comes up.