Tek Check 9 Miscellaneous Mush & Lion’s Mane

Another day, another mushroom, that’s what I’m saying right now in Portland town. A few months in at this point and I was tightening up my tek and trying some jar grows alongside the spawns and bag grows.

mmmm sneaky snacks. I didn’t have much luck with the jar grows while I was here due to the building’s mold issues which would be addressed later…as in I moved the heck out of there to try to find a better place to do this work.

Another blue oyster mushroom block just starting to colonize the bag.

Got some shiitake mushrooms growing now too

I believe this was my 3rd attempt at Lion’s Mane. I don’t think it was getting enough air back here in the grow room. I feel like Lion’s Mane is one of those mushrooms that needs lots of fresh air. I also need to get better at making my substrates drier.

Of course, just because you grow an ugly mushroom, doesn’t mean that it’s not still useful medicinally. I dried this one out to use at a later time.

That’s okay, I had made some more lion’s mane mushroom spawn from corn and could plant it right away.

This time it looked promising, so I took the block to the kitchen counter instead…

…Then Portland had another stupid heat wave, destroying my grow (no AC). :*) One day I’ll be allowed to grow a healthy lion’s mane. It’s my tragic mushroom comedy, every time I try to grow lion’s mane, something out of my control gets in the way…2 times being heat waves. Not digging the heat waves.

-sigh- here we go again…

Tek Check 1: Doing it Right

My shop is open at Portland Saturday Market March-September. I also travel (when it’s safe to do so) to shows and events around the country. During the busy season that doesn’t leave time for much else. So I was very excited when October rolled around. I’d managed to save up enough money to just buy a whole bunch of mushrooming supplies, a months long plan set into action. I wanted to take several weeks to dive deep, exploring at least a few different species. So that’s what I did. I bought jars, grow bags, a pressure cooker, spores, spawns, substrates, scale, mixer, etc. If I lived in a safer neighborhood, I’d might have invested in a fancy microscope. I was so excited to start. Let’s grow!

My initial plan was to take on Pink Oyster mushrooms and get good at growing those in order to have them at Saturday Market in the spring, however they are a warm weather mushroom and most of my grows so far have deformed or aborted. Perhaps the Pacific Northwest is no place for a pink oyster mushroom. Maybe I should just wait until it gets warmer or I get better at growing in general first. Pictured above are different grains I’ve tried using for pink oyster spawns. Corn, rye berries, they’ll definitely eat those. Quinoa, not so much. Nowadays I’m using corn more than anything else because it’s cheap and easiest to come by. Even the corner markets around here have it. You can boil popcorn that would otherwise be popped, and use that for grain spawn given it’s absorbed enough water but not soggy. I’ve tried Ben Tek (Uncle Ben’s brown rice bags, already sterilized, just inoculate), but no luck. I’ve got 2 more bags growing in the back at the time of writing this. I’d love if it’d actually work.

Pink oyster mushroom mycelium growing on rye berries. You can make mushroom spawn out of tons of different materials, depending on which kinds of mushroom you’re trying to grow. Oyster mushrooms aren’t picky and are great for beginners.

My first set of grow blocks after I got my substrate sterilized. A funny thing happened when I ordered my substrates. The first two bags I ordered were taking too long to get to me so I thought they got lost in the mail but my spawn was ready to be planted so I freaked out and bought more. Two days after those were delivered, the other ones showed up and I wound up with 4 full bags of masters mix in the living room of my small apartment. Better to have too much than too little I guess. I wish the same could be said about the amount of moisture in my substrate. I think the first batch was way too moist so the mycelium was slower to grow. I found that having the substrate be a little dry is better than having it too moist as moisture also invites contamination. I’ll have a whole post about those too, don’t you worry. All of these made it to fruiting except the piopini mushrooms. The maitake aborted half way through fruiting then were attacked by trich mold. The blocks now reside in my patio garden compost box.

The Blue Oyster Mushroom Spawn that I ordered from Etsy grew really well in this substrate. It was the fastest of all of the mushrooms to grow.

A healthy jar of mushroom grain spawn with fluffy white mycelium visible.

This jar of spawn is growing slower than the other. Different fungi behave differently and watching the various ways they grow is part of the fun of growing them. Some grow thick rope like mycelium, some grow fluffier more delicate mycelium. Some of them grow aggressively, while others are more timid and take longer to process the substrate. It really is like they have their own little personalities.

I had bought a mixer for my live mushroom cultures, but the magnets never arrived. This culture sat for too long without being checked and a mycelial mat has formed on top of the liquid. It’s still fine to use, but it’s a good example of why you need to keep an eye on your very alive cultures. Labeling and dating everything is essential and keeping a journal of your progress is helpful.

Did you know you could grow some mushroom spawns on used coffee grounds? I tried but was not successful, maybe I will try again later. Maybe not.

Just some healthy mycelium. The spot you see in the middle there is some of the enzymes the fungi uses to break down the substrate, its food. It grows into its food and breaks it down by secreting these liquids. We jokingly refer to it around here as ‘mushroom piss’. It sometimes smells that way if it doesn’t get enough air. Usually healthy mycelium will smell like, well, a fresh mushroom. Sometimes they can get a little too, uh, ripe. Any kinds of ‘sour’ smells usually mean contamination and a trashed grow. This one? This one is fine. Smells like a mushroom. 🙂

Tek Check 0 – Humble Beginnings

Oh boy, where do we even start?

So…like, what’s a mushroom anyways? It’s not a plant, it’s not an animal. It’s its own thing, belonging to the kingdom Funga. Mushrooms are actually the fruiting bodies of fungi, which are mostly underground most of the time. Some fungi don’t even grow fruits. In nature they are decomposers, breaking down dead stuff into nutrients for other things and passing along information and energy along their mycelial webs under forest floors. They’re kind of amazing and essential to our existence, in case you didn’t know. Before I got into mushroom growing, I actually didn’t know a dang thing about mushrooms. As far as I knew they were just a thing you find in the produce isle. I would say I was fungi-neutral. It’s come to my attention that some people are actually fungi-phobic and I’d like to help change that view. They can be quite cute and seemingly full of personality. Their variety is endless and endlessly interesting. There are so many uses for them too! I wasn’t sure how I would format this blog because I’m coming at it from many angles at once so I’m doing some posts that are about growing, some that are articles, and others that are just fun mushroom pics and things, recipes (maybe?), and whatever else seems like it should fit here. The following pictures were from my misadventures just getting into growing, when I was still working at my shop full time and didn’t yet have the time nor money to dedicate to it fully. It was a start, and things really took off when I did have time to take a whole month to dive in back in October, but we’ll get to that later.

As my first attempt to grow, I thought I’d try buying a ready to grow lion’s mane kit. Unfortunately, this was right before our freak heat wave and my apartment doesn’t have air conditioning. It dried up and aborted no matter how hard I tried to keep it moist. It was a miserable experience. But it was certainly an experience.

Not quite liquid culture. I put some shiitake spores in some water just to watch them. I’d never worked with spores or spawn or any of that yet. Just reading stuff online at this point and getting curious to see what these dudes are all about.

The first liquid culture I purchased because I figured if I didn’t have time to learn/improve tek just yet, it’d probably be best to get something I could maybe grow on my patio (spoiler; it doesn’t work out and that will probably be a whole post itself later). Wine Cap mushrooms seemed aesthetically pleasing.

Slowly gathering things that I think I might need for upcoming projects. This was also before I invested in a pressure cooker or purchased the right substrates. What do you think are the most essential mushroom growing supplies? Leave your top items in the comments.

I tried doing some agar tek (just some oyster mushrooms from the grocery store) but most of those samples contaminated. I would eventually invest in glass dishes but still haven’t had time to mess with agar stuff. Maybe later. There are so many entry points to growing mushrooms. Do you want to start with spores? Live culture? Spawn? Just buy a kit? Literally a billion ways to grow mushrooms. I’m not even sure I want to mess with this stuff to be honest. Live cultures have seem to been working out for me. I’ve grown fond of my collection of jars.

Itty bitty grow space with nothing going on just yet. Stay tuned.

This poor Lion’s Mane mushroom block couldn’t handle the freak heat wave that hit the pacific northwest in the summer of 2021. RIP first (sort of) mushroom.

Just early stuff in a box. Most of it contaminated, spawns survived. Pay no attention to the box in the box in the box, that will be another post too. It was a weird thing. We’ll get to it.

That does it for entry 0 of Tek Check. Next post will probably be something more informative than this embarrassing show and tell of my early lack of knowledge of anything fungi. Can’t wait to share my successes. We grew some cute ones (and some grotesque ones too!).