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AdamDiana’s question (the forum appears to be having a problem showing the first message of each topic, we’re trying to fix it but for the meantime, we’ll re-post each new topic so all can see):
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Hello,
I have done some coffe grounds collection from a number of local shops. They produce about 1Kg/day. I understand fresh coffe grounds are the best, but could it work a 2 day collection (e.g. Tuesday, thursday, saturday)? would the coffee be too old?
AdamHi Greta,
I believe there are at least one or two Italians on the course. I’ll look up who they are and see if they’re happy for me to put you in touch.
Best wishes,
Adam
AdamGreta’s Message:
Ciao to everyone,
I am curious whether there is an Italian taking this course?
Id love to connect,
ciao.
AdamQ: Does anybody now what is the best way to pasteurise coffee grounds?
1) refridgerate
2) freeze
The key thing to bear in mind is that from the moment the grounds go through the coffee machine, the door is open to growth from competing moulds, so you want to do one of these options as soon as you can. When refridgerating, spores of competing moulds can still germinate and start to grow, but their growth will be much slower than if left at room temperature. We’ve found refriderating for up to 4 or 5 days can have reasonable success. Freezing will prevent competitor organisms from growing completely, but you will need to wait for the coffee to de-frost when you take it out before inoculating (which can take some time if it freezes into a large block!)
These options are preferable to re-pastuerising at a later date – not just because of the extra effort and expense of re-pasteurising, but also because you standa greater chance of ending up with contamination when re-pastuerising coffee grounds which have already developed alot of mould growth. To avoid this, you would need to fully dry the grounds as soon as you picked them up, and then re-hydrate them, before then pasteurising. This is alot of extra work so I would choose to refridgerate if you can inoculate within 5 days of collection, or freeze if it will be for longer. Do bear in mind that both of these options are likely to increase your chance of contamination over just inoculating straight away.
Best wishes,
Adam
AdamHi Viktor,
Thanks for your message and great to hear you are in the beginning stages of setting something up there in Sweden 🙂
With regards to weight of fresh mushrooms you may expect from growing mushrooms on coffee – it tends to be around 25% of the weighto of the substrate over a period of 2-3 crops.
Unfortunately the rest of your questions are a little beyond the scope of the course and forum, which is simply focussed on teaching the technique of how to grow mushrooms on coffee. Like other similar cultivation courses, it is not aiming to help people set up a business, as this is an entirely different and more complicated area. We are thinking about a follow up course which may look in more detail at business advice and also grow room design, but this would be at some point in the future.
Hopefully you’ll understand this and won’t find its too disheartening – it sounds like you are well on the way already 😉
Best of luck with it and do let us know if you need any help with the growing.
Adam
AdamFirstly, a big welcome to everybody who has just joined the GroCycle Online Course. We’re pretty excited to form this online hub based around growing mushrooms on coffee and we’re really pleased that you’re part of it.
The purpose of this forum is to add to and follow on from the course materials by providing a place for on-going learning and discussion and for you to connect with other course members around the world. It is made primarily for the community to use and to support each other in the learning, but we will try to contribute as much as we can as well wherever time allows.
We have a large workload for a small non-profit business so this means that we won’t always be able to reply instantly, or to every post. However we will do our best and we’d also really welcome the community to help each other out and contribute as much as you can. We’re pretty sure there are some people out there that have some great knowledge to share!
In general the topics should relate to the technique of how to grow mushrooms on coffee grounds or areas covered in the course.
As much as we’d like to be able to help answer questions about different ways to build a growing room or offer business advice, these topics usually depend on many variables and are full of further questions which we just don’t have enough time to support. We are looking at creating a follow up course to address these areas which will be a much more efficient way of helping.
The forum is organised into 4 main sub-forums:
To create a new topic:
Due to a bug in the way the forum integrates with this site, there is a slightly laborious way you will need to follow to start a topic by copy and pasting your topic text as a reply (we are working to fix this asap)
i.) Pick the relevent forum and then under where it says ‘Create New Topic’ add a title, followed by your text in the box below.
ii.) Now select and copy the text you have written for the topic (you will need to re-paste this text as a ‘reply’ for it to display under your topic).
iii.) Click ‘submit’ to create your topic and then when you see it published in the forum, click through to view it and paste your text as a reply.
This will then show as the text for your topic underneath the topic title.
To reply to someone else’s topic:
i.) Navigate to the forum the topic is in
ii.) Click through to the topic itself
iii.) Below the topic there is a text box to add your reply and click submit.
If you have a suggestion for us to add a new area to the forum, just drop us an email to support@growmushroomsoncoffee.com and let us know your thoughts.
Happy growing!
Adam & Eric
AdamHi Kris,
Congratulations on being the first to post in the forum and great to hear you’ve completed the course already and enjoyed it! In answer to your very good questions:
1) Are the grow bags punched before incubation, or after incubation?
If you use the Unicorn or SacO2 cultivation bags, you would cut/punch holes just when you move them to the fruiting room, as the bags have filters on to enable air exchange. If you were using a plastic growing bag without special mushrom cultivation filters, you would need to punch small holes all around the bag before you placed it in incubation to allow for air exchange. The downside to this is it also opens the door for contaminants to get in before spawn run is complete, so it’s definitely best to use Unicorn or SacO2 bags if you can.
2) Have you actually built/used the apparatus pictured in the incubation module — i.e. the rolling “greenhouse” grow tent?
The very first grows I did 6 or 7 years ago when I was starting out as a hobby mushroom grower (growing Oysters on straw) used this exact setup of a 4 tier plastic greenhouse for the fruiting chamber. I completely take your point though that the stock image we used in that course slide leaves alot to be desired! The truth is that we didn’t have a suitable image of a greenhouse in use as it’s been so long since we’ve grown in this way. Here’s a link to the blog of a guy detailing how he made one with some photos showing how it looks populated with grow bags:
Hope this helps and best of luck with the growing – let us know how you get on 🙂
Kind regards, Adam
