Hi Lee,

great to hear of your success and nice one on the experimentation with different substrate and bags!

The cooler temperaure in the garage probably helped that bag to initiate fruiting quicker as cooler temps are a pinning trigger.

Sorry the image uploader didn’t work for you – you can also use http://imgur.com/ Just click the ‘New Post’ button at the top and upload your image(s), then use the link they give you to paste in here.

Would be great to see some shots of your first crop 🙂

best wishes, Adam

Hi Daren,

great to hear of your experiments and nice tip on sieving the coffee first – makes perfect sense.

Look forward to seeing how your bags fruit. You can post photos by using the little image icon in the forum reply editor, like this:

best wishes,
Adam

Hi,

thanks for your lovely note and great to see your results 🙂
The forum is not great for posting pictures which is something we’ll look into – We’ll be in touch when there’s a nice spot to share pics and will put some up from our recent trials too.

With regards scaling up we’ll have a more indepth course up soon too which will be a perfect steppins stone for you. Again we’ll let you know and I would have thought July would be the latest as things stand now.

Keep us posted and happy growing!

Best wishes,
Eric

Hi Line,

I answered your other forum topic about moisturizing coffee grounds last week, which should be able to help you with this:

How to mosturize dry coffe grounds

(you may need to right click the link to open it)

It sounds like your coffee grounds are becoming saturated when you add the extra water – i.e. they are receiving more water than they can absorb and are then becoming too wet. This will often lead to contamination.

How dry is your coffee – have you measured it? It may be that they don’t need much water adding to them.

best wishes, Adam

• This reply was modified 9 years, 2 months ago by Adam.
• This reply was modified 9 years, 2 months ago by Adam.

Hi Line,

apologies for the slightly slow response to what is a very good question!

If the coffee you collect is too dry, then there are a couple different ways you could add moisture to it, but it depends a bit on how dry they already are.

1) easiest method (if they are only a little too dry): mix in a bit more well hydrated straw or sawdust pellets

– if the coffee is only a little too dry, then adding 20-30% well hydrated straw or pellets should help to balance out the moisture content.
– Coffee grounds are usually at maximum hydration at around 55-60% (this is the amount they can hold before they become saturated).
– Sawdust (depending on particle size) saturates at around 60-65%
– Straw saturates at around 72%
– So by adding a bit more straw or sawdust at higher moisture content, it will balance out the overall substrate moisture levels

2) less easy method (if they are very dry): add a measure amount of boiling water to the grounds to hydrate them to target moisture level

– if the coffee is very dry, then you can add more moisture by pouring and mixing in some boiling water to raise moisture levels
– follow these steps to find out what the moisture content is of the coffee you are collecting:

1) Weigh sample of 100g coffee
2) Dry sample fully in an oven for 1hr at 180C (350F) and weigh again
3) Moisture content = difference between wet and dry weight of the sample

e.g. if 100g of your fresh coffee sample coffee weighs 60g after being dried; then original moisture content of the coffee was 40%

– Then add the right amount of extra boiling water to bring the coffee up to 55% moisture content

Soaking the coffee in water then draining it doesn’t tend to work very well as you end up with a really wet over-saturated set of coffee grounds that are hard to grow with unless you then press the excess moisture back out with a wine/cheese/apple press.

Hope that all makes sense – just ask if anything is unclear 🙂

best wishes,
Adam

Hi Daren,

Sounds exciting!

Yes if you’re in the UK you would need a waste carrier license to collect coffee grounds (though I’m not sure if there is a certain amount you’d need to be collecting before you need a license)

You’d also need to register with your local council as a food producer and undergo some basic food hygiene training before selling the mushrooms. In our experience the council are very supportive and often offer the neccessary training themselves or can point you in the right direction (you can do the training online I think as well).

You’d also need to make sure any packaged products meet with the labelling and weights & measures regulations.

It all sounds more difficult than it is in practice. The environmental health department at your local council should provide you with all the info you’ll need to adhere to the law.

Best of luck with it all,

Adam

Hi Caspar,

I haven’t measured the temperature in there so don’t know I’m afraid..I’d guess it’s at least 50C+

The spent substrate definitely has plenty of energy and heat to give off, but it would be difficult to produce a whole load all at once – maybe more useful as an ongoing additive to an existing compost heap? Do you feed a biomeiler to keep the heat generation going?

We’re going to look at an outdoor setup mainly because have asked about how best to grow outdoors like this on a budget. It’s not the best way to grow mushrooms as it’s more difficult to control the environment, but I think it’d be possible to have fairly reliable production at certain times in the year in a temperate climate.

Best wishes, Adam

Hi Keith,

Timber is fine in an incubation space – we just use the steel frames because they’re the best way of hanging the larger column bags but wooden or plastic shelves are also fine in incubation space. For fruiting space, timber is not so good as it tends to rot in the high humiddity, so plastic or stainless steel is preferable there.

best wishes, Adam