Menu
Assign a 'primary' menu
.Hi everybody,
I thought that it is the time now to share how I’ve got to the point where I grew a plentifull of delicious edible oyster mushrooms. My methods somewhat differ from what the course teaches us, because I started just before enrolling into course. However, I must stress out that the principles are the same and that I learned few new thins from Adam and Eric. I also plan to test their method as well.
First of all, I pasteurise my coffee. Next picture is showing where the coffee waste is coming from.
Yeah, we love our espressos. ?☕️
Secondly, I lime soak the straw. I didn’t use the dishwashing liquid simply becase a have a bucket full of hydrated lime.
And thirdly, I couldn’t find the bales of wheat straw here in Sydney, so I bought the sugar cane mulch from our hardware chain ‘Bunnings’. Furthermore, I found out that oyster mushrooms are happily growing on sugar cane from shroomery.org.
This is how I lime soak:
I keep the sugar cane straw in the old pillow case. I am aware that these days many are calling this method ‘outdated’, but it works well for me. I soak the straw for 16 hours, weighted down by the clay pawers. I then put the same pwers on top of the bag to help water come out faster. NOTE: I saw a number of arguments stating that the lime soaking should not last more than 12-16 hours for whole sort of reasons. I also came acrodd the scientific study showing how the yields increased with longer times for up to 36 hours. So, my view is that 12-16 hours is just enough, and no other reason.
This is how I pasteurise my coffee waste:
I collect the coffee waste in the plastic container, which I bought with the wheat protein. This way I am preventing coffee from getting spoiled, but it is still not good enough to prevent germs getting there. I bought a very cheap 15l stainless steel pot with glass lid in K-Mart. It can be used on the induction cooktop, but I since decided not to use the induction cooktop, because I courced on ebay the most ideal hot plate for what I want to do. I will write more later about it. I put coffee waste into plastic bag. I use 3 at once the moment. They are thin and I managed to puncture them in the past. This is not neccessary if you premix your substrate. You can then pasteurise it in your grow bag or in a mason jar.
I use a piece of granite pawer to weigh down the bag with the coffee waste. I can comfrotably pasteurise a bag with up to 4 kg of coffee waste in it. Make sure your bag is not touching the bottom. I am using plastic support from the following picture.
I use TODO portable infrared ceramic hot plate.
I bought if from eBay for AUD $60. The hotplate is amazing. It is set to start at 1800W by default, but the maximum rating, that can be selected, is 2000W. The 2000W infrared hot plate is perfect for the pressure cooker made out of aluminium, which can not be used on the induction stove. I use it for sterilisation of mason jars filled with substrate. What I like the most on this hot plate, are the multiple power settings 200W/500W/800W/1000W/1200W/1600W/1800W/2000W. I normaly start process withh 2000W settings. When the water temperature reaches 70 Celsius degrees, I drop it down to 500W. When the coffee waste temperature reaches 74 degrees, I drop power down to 200W. This way I maintain the coffee temperature at around 75 degrees for 2 hours.
I also bought from eBay Ink Bird’s BBQ Go IBT-2X. It has 2 temperature probes. I insert one probe into a coffee waste and use another one for monitoring of water temperature.
The readings can be remotely monitored by an app.
The alarm sound is a bit annoying, but it such a small price to pay for the actulo functionality.
And finaly. The following two pictures show current results. This is my laundry basket filled with 11kg of straw and coffee waste. I put a thin layer of coffee between two layers of sugar cane. I then laid crumbled mycelium on the top of it. I repeated the layering until I ran out of straw.
The substrate was incubated on May 31st. It took less than 5 weeks to come up to this stage.
I successfully started growing mushrooms after I abandoned sterilisation for the time being untill I learn what I was doing wrong.
The laundry basket was one of my 3 experiments to prove if my method(s) will produce mushrooms. I also grew the same strain in the bag filled with 2.5kg of substrate made of sugar cane at coffee, with the 1:1 ratio. However, my first success was with few white oyster mushrooms grown from a tiny coffee/coconut coir cake in the mason jar. I incubated substrate with few pieces of stem cut offs on May 14th. I had 2 mushrooms growing on it on 4th of June. See the last photo.
Happy shrooming!
Great!
Usually temperature pasteurisation (i’m still confused if English would be pasteurization or pasteurisation) is a good way to reduce the microbiote in the substrate, if using straw or sawdust, for example. We found out that coffee grounds require higher standards, since the coffee substrate is attacked easily by moulds if pasteurised. It is suppoosed to be due to the high nutrient content in coffee grounds (although I believe the tropical enviroment here contributes a little, giving more heat-resistant strains). That’s the reason I was suggesting pasteurisation actually! Our heat-pasteurised substrates were always moulded by 4 days.
Regarding chemical pasteurisation, we are still making tests to make it work. Lime didn’t work properly for us (specifically because this particular material is quite expensive around here, and our bags didn’t present any growth at all!), and using washing soap already started growing after 24 hours.
Of course grains for mycellium has to be sterilised! Altough our experience is (as mentioned by adam & eric) to just buy it, because the time investment is high (and, in our case, sorghum seed is not avalaible to buy locally, we don’t have the propper equipment on hand and goverment charges higher taxes for making it yourself), I can understand the “do it yourself”. I can mention that we have tried barley seed as well, and has amazing results on mycellium (higher that corn seed and wheat seed), but the only problem is that the mycellium ends up “compacted”, clay-like, like a block of whiteness glory (I mean it). But once mixed with the substrate, works amazing.
My experimental jars, which I mentioned in the previous post. This is pure coffee waste inoculated with the small cutoffs made from the clusters of pinheads, which never developed into fully grown fruits. I made sure that the coffe is losely packed and not pressed in. The first jar to the left has the most of empty spaces where air coud penetrate. But the test was initiated 3 weeks ago. The same strain of mushroom developed this much after less then 2 weeks in the mix of coffee waste and the coconut coir.
