The joy of cultivating Oyster Mushrooms - A Grow Log

I made this grow log about 6 years ago and I felt that it should be shared here. Cultivating mushrooms is easy to do and a very fulfilling and exciting hobby. I started off with a pink oyster mushroom liquid culture and a king oyster mushroom liquid culture that I purchased from ebay. I do not recommend starting with a liquid culture. Contamination is your worst enemy and this adds another layer of contamination risk. At the time I had access to a sterile lab with two flow hoods running 24/7. I would recommend you purchase some mushroom spawn from a commercial vendor and bypass the need for a sterile lab environment.

I decided to make quite a few agar plates to put it on because I started making my own agar for a change and poured several plates. Dog food agar and malt yeast were the two kinds I cooked up.

After a few of the master plates grew out, they were cut up and applied to the remaining plates. After a few days, they were moving through the agar with ease.

You can see the mycelium strands branching out on the pink oyster

Meanwhile the king plate is tearing through the agar.

Once these plates are covered in mycelium, we cut them into wedges and add them to our sterilized rye grain bags, or "grain masters".

The mycelium will "colonize" the entire bag of grain as it did the agar plates. This grain, once fully colonized, will be added to pasteurized wheat straw and combined inside poly tubing, making the shape of what we call "straw logs".

After the log is made, we punched holes all over the tubing using an arrow head to allow air exchange while the straw logs fully colonize. We set them inside of a dark room until fully colonized which took about 9 days. Once they were fully colonized, the temperature of the room was dropped slightly and the humidity was increased to induce "fruiting" of the mushrooms.

Didn't take them long to grow out fully.

MAJESTIC!

A king oyster log was fruited laying on its side, the poly tubing was cut down the middle, opened up, and then covered up right away. This stimulated a massive pinning of mushrooms all over.

AMAZING!

The kings are full of texture and a great meat substitute in any dish!

Time to harvest-

17lbs of pink oysters and 30 lbs of kings made this harvest. All sold in one day at our local farmers market. The rye grain we used to make our spawn was purchased from our local farmers cooperative, and the wheat straw was purchased from a nearby farm. Rye grain and straw are two very easy things to find here in the midwest. I hope you enjoyed this grow log, and look forward to answering any of your questions in the comments!