Join Erin Hamilton and learn how to grow oyster mushrooms in buckets of straw in this hands-on workshop! Discover the joys of oyster mushrooms, from the different varieties to the flavors they can bring to your cooking.

What kinds of mushrooms can you grow at home? Erin Hamilton shares how to grow mushrooms indoors or outside in your garden, as well as some of the amazing ways that mushrooms are contributing to a more sustainable future. Are you ready to grow your own mushrooms at home? Try one of Erin's mushroom growing kits that she makes for her business, The Mushroom Conservatory. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Bevin Cohen: Today, Erin Hamilton's gonna be teaching us all about growing gourmet mushrooms in our gardens. Please give it up for my friend and yours, Ms. Erin Hamilton [00:00:18] Erin Hamilton: Thank you, Bevin, and thank you to everyone that's here today to make all this happen. I've never seen so many excited gardeners all in one place with so many seeds, and it's just incredibly exciting to me. My name is Erin Hamilton, and I own the Mushroom Conservatory, and my grandfather was a farmer, and my mother's a farmer, and I went into advertising, and I was in advertising for about 12 years, and I was really burned out on that. [00:00:44] And one day I was driving along and I saw a sign on the road that said, "Mushroom foraging class today." And so I was like, "That sounds fun," and it started in five minutes, so I just veered off the road and ran out to join the group and I was like, "Let's do this." And we spent three hours walking around the [00:01:00] woods exploring, seeing all these amazing mushrooms being warned a lot about the poisonous ones. [00:01:04] And I got to the end of the workshop completely in love with mushrooms and completely terrified I would eat the wrong thing, poison myself, and not be able to go foraging anymore. So that turned into a several-year-long journey of trying to figure out how to grow mushrooms, what it actually takes, like they have the box kits on the market, right? [00:01:22] Where you cut it open, you spray it with water, and then mushrooms come out and you're like, "I'm not sure how I just grew mushrooms, but that's cool." And it's really exciting, but I was still like not sure how that happened. So once I got down to the nitty-gritty of it, which we'll talk about today, it was so much easier than I expected, and it completely carried me away on another voyage in a totally different direction than I thought my life was gonna go. [00:01:46] And so now I too am a farmer. But we started the Mushroom Conservatory to initially to teach high school students and middle schoolers how to grow mushrooms to learn about fungi, and that went [00:02:00] viral in the educational community. And then I started getting letters from parents like, "How do we grow these?" [00:02:05] And so then we developed kits for those parents, and we started teaching hands-on workshops for everyone with the vision for making food more accessible gourmet flavors more exciting, and really giving people the ability to add something really cool to their garden that they may not have known where to begin. [00:02:23] So this is me drilling a mushroom bucket. I do a lot of bucket growing, and usually when I start people out with growing mushrooms, we start them out with oyster mushrooms or with lion's mane. They're a really good starting point. They grow very quickly, so within six to eight weeks you're seeing a really nice harvest of mushrooms that you can eat and enjoy. [00:02:43] We do those in buckets usually, but you can also grow them in straw in your garden and just layer those straw beds. So what happens is you start out with a bag of rice. You can use a bag of that [00:03:00] pre-cooked Ben's Original brown rice. I'm not sure like what kind of meal that was intended for, the pre-cooked rice, but it makes really great grain spawn to start with. [00:03:10] So you can take the mushroom culture from one of our kits or any mushroom culture and you add that to your brown rice that's been cooked, and you let that sit in the bag with paper bandage tape, making a little air filter on it, for two or three weeks, and it gets covered with this fluffy white stuff called mycelium And once you have that, you can crumble that up into a bucket of straw or coffee grounds or a lot of other things, and it will give you it will give you the ability to grow mushrooms in your substrate. [00:03:42] Substrate is whether you're using straw like we're using here, you can use coffee grounds, you can use cloth. We're working with a group in Uganda that's using dried banana leaves. There's students in Madagascar that were doing it on denim scraps. And I've worked with people in all kinds of different climates. [00:03:59] And so the [00:04:00] interesting thing is a lot of people think, "Oh maybe this is too dry of a climate," or, "We're in Michigan, we have these winters, right? And can't grow mushrooms," or, "I don't have a completely dark space to grow." So first I wanna go over some of the myths of mushroom growing and just talk about all of the reasons you should grow them, and then we'll talk about the practical steps that go into that. [00:04:21] So one of the questions I get daily is Do they have to be in total darkness? Do I have to have a dark cave in my house somewhere to grow these mushrooms? And no, you actually don't. Mushrooms do not photosynthesize the way that a plant would. They need light to know which direction they're going, and sunlight, a little bit of sunlight, will actually astronomically boost their levels of vitamin D, which is really handy in these long winters. [00:04:49] But you don't need to have a super dark growing space to do that. You also don't need to have a series of commercial growing tents or anything in your house or basement or... to do [00:05:00] this, to get started on them. If you are growing an absolute ton of mushrooms, like you're talking commercial production, then you're gonna want to n- have some kind of containment going on if you're growing them indoors, just so that you don't get a huge spore load in your house. [00:05:13] There's a really annoying thing that's been going around on Facebook lately, you've probably seen it where they're talking about these oyster mushrooms taking over your house, and they're gonna grow from the floors and the ceilings and the walls. That only happens in massively water-damaged buildings that are either severely neglected or completely abandoned and they need to have a significant amount of spore dump going on in there to even begin to go towards that. [00:05:38] So you really don't need to fear the fungi to get started on this. We do recommend if you're gonna be growing, like dozens of pounds of mushrooms, like at that point, you're gonna wanna have a grow tent with some filtration on it so that you're not sending spores through the building like crazy just at a baseline so that it's not setting off allergies and then your [00:06:00] air quality is still good. [00:06:01] But for just general, like I wanna grow some mushrooms, I wanna start a bucket or a couple buckets, you can grow those in your house or in your garage, on your deck. That's completely fine. And they do well outdoors. As long as they're above about 60 degrees, they'll do well. Once you get below 60 degrees, they start going dormant and getting a little bit sleepy. [00:06:22] So those... once you get into spring weather, you can grow them outside. So once you've started your rice with your liquid culture and you've made your grain spawn, which is way easier than it sounds, you then take straw and you pasteurize it, which means you're just going to steep it in boiling hot water. [00:06:41] You're gonna let that sit for, overnight is good eight to 10 hours if you don't have overnight. But then you hydrate it, so it's hydrated to field capacity. You're gonna layer that in a bucket with little crumbles of your grain spawn. We have a mushroom bucket building station set up out there so that you can actually go through [00:07:00] that process or watch someone go through that process if you wanna see what it looks like. [00:07:03] But basically, you layer it in there with crumbles of your grain spawn and straw, just like a lasagna. And then- you put your lid on the bucket, and you've got holes just like I was drilling in the last picture, and you put a little bit of paper bandage tape over those holes. And it's just the plain paper bandage tape that comes next to the Band-Aids at the store. [00:07:23] And what that does is it makes a really great little air filter, and it helps keep any kind of extra bacteria or other spores or any kind of contamination from sneaking into that bucket so that you have a clean growing situation going on in that bucket. A lot of the time people ask if they're going to inadvertently grow the wrong kind of mushroom if they mess up. [00:07:47] That's not going to happen. If it gets contaminated, it's just not going-- it's going to stop growing. It's probably gonna start stinking. And it will just ... It's not going to happen. But you won't have a situation [00:08:00] where I gave it too much light and too much water, and now I'm growing poisonous mushrooms. [00:08:04] That's just not how it works. So those are some of the biggest fears that I get from people are just that basic lineup. So anyway, once you have your bucket You can let that sit for a couple weeks, and after a few weeks... Let's see. There we go. You'll see these little baby mushrooms popping up. [00:08:25] Those are called pins, and that, those will all form into full-sized mushrooms. So they'll start trying to push through the tape on your bucket, and you peel that off, and you mist the outside of the bucket with water. About twice a day is good. And then within about a week, those turn into a full-size mushroom, and they're amazing, and they taste absolutely phenomenal. [00:08:50] Oyster mushrooms, which is kinda my main thing, it really-- I think it's a wonderful starting point for people who have never tried to grow mushrooms before. They have so many different flavors, and in a [00:09:00] minute, I'm gonna give you a list of all those flavors, and it's almost silly how many there are. [00:09:03] But one thing to know about oyster mushrooms right off the bat is they taste horrible raw. They taste amazing cooked. They will not mess you up if you eat them raw, but they will taste terrible, and it will give you the wrong impression. So if you go through all this work to grow oyster mushrooms, don't just chop them up and throw them on a salad raw. [00:09:21] Make sure you take the time to cook them up and enjoy them. We do everything from different pastas and soups and a-anything we can dream up. They dehydrate really well, so you can store them long-term. And they're just great. But I work with five main varieties of oyster mushrooms. So the pink oyster mushrooms, which I think are the most forgiving and easiest to grow out of all of them they actually taste like bacon and a lot like bacon. [00:09:50] So those are really fun. And actually, at the Mother Earth News Fair in Wisconsin this year, we did a oyster mushroom mac and cheese on [00:10:00] the real food stage, and it was so much fun. We had about 200 people in the crowd, and it wasn't supposed to be a taste testing situation. There were not samples involved in this. [00:10:10] And there was an aisle in the middle of the auditorium we were in. And so I'm standing there doing the cooking, and you see the smell of these mushrooms rolling row after row, and suddenly you in the back, you can smell it, and it's like everyone. And then we wrapped up and finished up- And then everyone got in a line down the middle of the aisle to snitch a little taste of this. [00:10:31] Like no silverware or anything. It was the funniest thing I've ever seen. Everyone was just like had to get a little taste test because it smelled so good and it tasted equally good. It was phenomenal. So I really love pink oyster mushrooms for mac and cheese in particular. There is a recipe for that one up on my website. [00:10:48] So you're welcome to go and try it out because it's totally worth it. And we like to fry cheese on top, which is really good. But yeah, so pink oyster mushrooms, they taste like bacon, great in macaroni and cheese. [00:11:00] Then there are blue oyster mushrooms, which are really cool. I think I have a picture. [00:11:04] These are the pink oysters here. They have such a cool shape. This lady grew this directly out of a bag of rice. So If you want, if you only wanna grow a little bit, you can actually instead of taking that colonized rice out of your bag, you can just cut a little X in the front of that bag and start misting the outside of that bag, and you'll get something like this. [00:11:25] We have a nice little cabbage of mushrooms that grow out of it. So we love that. So golden oyster mushrooms are they have a bright, tangy kind of flavor. They're not too zingy, but they're a little more nutty and earthy and just have a pop to them. Now, the interesting thing about golden oyster mushrooms is they are not native to the Midwest, and in the past year or so, we've seen a huge amount of them appearing in the wild. [00:11:53] And it's very interesting because what they're doing is decomposing wood, like dead [00:12:00] wood, about five years faster than that would happen regularly, and that means the way they're doing that is putting out a far smaller carbon footprint. So somehow these golden oysters have snuck out into the wild, but instead of, when you think of an invasive species in that way instead of doing all the things we think of in a normal invasive species type situation, I, and I hesitate to call it that with golden oyster, these are actually going out and doing cleanup on their own. [00:12:30] And that is one of the most phenomenal things about fungi to me is we believe that there are... Fungi is responsible for about 30, cleaning up about 30% of the world's pollution before we even detect it. So they're doing a huge amount of cleanup work on their own, and it's a really fascinating work look at the work that fungi is doing to restore the ecosystem. [00:12:52] And that is one of the things that's most exciting to me is I truly hope that we can inspire as many people as possible to grow mushrooms and [00:13:00] explore them and, follow these tangents of curiosity and see what we can find. There are between there are currently between 13,000 and 14,000 documented kinds of mushrooms, not just oyster mushrooms, but kinds of mushrooms. [00:13:14] And it's estimated there's between three and four million in existence. So each of those documented mushrooms has its own very specific purpose. Some are, can repair your neural system and reconnect broken, broken links in your brain. Some of them can give you energy and nutrition and protein. Some of them can poison you. [00:13:34] They all have just absolutely fascinating applications. So the idea that we have barely even touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fungi is mind-boggling to me. And so my hope is to see this generation of mushroom growers dive in and see what else we can find. So I get really excited when we start talking about golden oyster mushrooms because that is part of that iceberg, but it really is an entire [00:14:00] universe left to be explored still. [00:14:02] So those are golden oysters Blue oyster mushrooms are, if you grow them in cold temperatures, like below 70 degrees, you're gonna get these really bright blue colors. They're very vibrant. They have a really nice chickeny crab kind of flavor and a really good... It's like a typical chicken texture, so they're great for just general cooking. [00:14:24] But if you grow them at a warmer temperature, they're much warmer, or they're much larger, but they get paler colors. So there's a lot that you can do temperature-wise to dial in what you're looking for as far as appearances. So a lot of the time, if I'm at a farmer's market or at some kind of event where I'm standing there with my mushrooms and people walk by, and I always get three or four people per event that walk by and go, "I hate mushrooms." [00:14:51] And I'm like "Did you say that to the guy with the cheese over there too? Do you just walk around announcing it?" And but people have a [00:15:00] very deep reactions to mushrooms for whatever reason and strong opinions. And I really think, I always am like I totally respect that. If you hate mushrooms, that's totally okay, but I'm guessing if you hate mushrooms, you've probably been eating grocery store mushrooms that have been on the shelf for way too long." [00:15:18] Mushrooms don't really they're... You should either eat them or dehydrate them or pickle them or preserve them in some way right away. So sitting on the shelf, you're not getting the optimal mushroom experience. And then they go, "But they're so slimy." If you're eating slimy mushrooms, throw them away. [00:15:33] They should never, ever be slimy. The other thing is there's all this flavor. So there's different flavors, different textures. If you take king oyster mushrooms, they have these really thick stalks that you can slice up and sear like scallops, and they have the texture and the flavor and they're phenomenal, and they're absolutely nothing like what you would think of when you think of mushroom. [00:15:54] So it's pretty neat. But one mushroom that I think is especially dear to [00:16:00] gardeners' hearts, and I think most of you might be particularly excited about, are wine cap mushrooms, and they're really awesome. They're big. They're... I have regular wine caps and then golden wine caps. They have a very similar fl- flavor profile. [00:16:14] Color-wise, they look different. They've got this wonderful potatoiness, and you can do them in a straw bed right alongside your garden. You make the grain spawn the same way with the rice. You add this liquid culture to the rice. You let that sit for a few weeks and colonize, and then once that's colonized, you just crumble that into a straw bed, just like we prepared the straw. [00:16:37] You just do layers. I like to dig a little trench down just so wind can't catch it as that straw dries up. It doesn't have to be anything deep, just a little dip. And if you have chickens, put chicken wire over the top because they will just rip it up to pieces, and I've been down that road too many times. [00:16:53] So you wanna just layer your grain spawn with straw in a little trench [00:17:00] alongside your garden. You water it down And then every, just when you're watering your garden, you give it a good watering, and eventually you're gonna start getting these really nice big mushrooms coming up. And as long as you continue adding, some water, layer up a little more straw, a little more water, a little more straw over time, you're gonna get a nice established bed of wine caps. [00:17:21] And you can enjoy that alongside your garden throughout the harvest season. So it's not just we only have the June mushrooms. You're gonna have, you're gonna have a nice until it gets cold out harvest into even September or so. So wine caps are really fun if you love to garden. [00:17:39] They actually like a little bit of contamination, so people will mix in compost and some just the dirt of the earth into all of it. And so I really love those if you're into outdoor mushroom gardening or just outdoor gardening and you want to integrate mushrooms. So the hot one right now is lion's mane. [00:17:59] There [00:18:00] are... Everyone is really excited about lion's mane for good reason. There's a lot of really interesting research coming out about how it restores neural pathways about people are using it to... I cannot, make any formal statements about what it can or can't do, but people are using them for focus and general wellbeing, and they are absolutely incredible, and they're very delicious. [00:18:20] They make really good crab cakes, and they're very easy to grow. So those ones you can do the same way as the oysters and you can do them again on your kitchen counter or outside. The only thing I tell people with lion's mane mushrooms is that because they've got these fringy things... I'm wondering if I have a lion's mane picture up here. [00:18:41] Because they have I don't think I have a lion's mane picture up here. We'll work on that. But they have this wonderful fringy shape to them. And so in order to not let them get too dried out, I do like to mist them in extra time every day. Other than that, it's not complicated, and it's absolutely fascinating to [00:19:00] watch them grow. [00:19:01] So that is one of my favorites right now. So we covered pink oysters, blue oysters, lion's mane, golden oysters, and king oysters, and then black pearl oysters. I love black pearl oysters. They make phenomenal soups. They've got a really savory... It's like a sweet it's a little bit peppery, but not in a spicy way, flavor. [00:19:24] And so you can really get some dense layers of flavor into your cooking. And I really like them with different jambalaya type stuff. I think they're really fun to mix in when you're doing anything with peppers from the garden. And I really like taking my leftover mushrooms, and this works for any kind of oyster mushrooms, you can dehydrate them, and then grind them up into a powder, and put them in a shaker. [00:19:50] And then when you're doing soups or sauces, anything you're cooking, because you still wanna make sure that gets cooked for the flavor, you can actually just sprinkle that in any time, and then throughout the [00:20:00] year, you're getting this awesome range added to it. So that's a really good overview of kind of the ins and outs of growing mushrooms. [00:20:10] And the thing is, it's not a really rigid process. There's so much space to experiment and tinker with that you can have fun. There aren't huge mistakes you can make with it. It's still a very unexplored frontier. So there's a lot that you can discover just by, finding your own techniques. [00:20:30] So you can, follow my instructions as a baseline, but never be afraid to go, "Hey, this might be cool. Let's try this." I saw a guy try growing mushrooms out of a book, and I thought that was really cool. I'm also really weird about books. Maybe not weird. I'm very respectful about books, and I'm like, "Don't do that to the books." [00:20:47] But I had a book that didn't wanna read, and I didn't wanna give it to anyone else to read either. It was like, "Nobody needs to read this nonsense." So I was like, "We're gonna try it on this." So I tried it, and it was really cool, and we had little mushrooms growing all out of this book. [00:21:00] There are a lot of people that'll take shredded up denim, and they'll do the same thing. [00:21:04] They'll pasteurize the denim, layer it in there, and it'll eat up that cloth. So you can play with it. It's fun. It's fun fungi. So you can really tinker and do neat things with them. But I would totally recommend if you enjoy gardening Go for it. If you're terrible at gardening, I could not keep a plant alive before I started growing mushrooms. [00:21:24] My husband was like, "Please stop buying houseplants. This is not going well. It's sad to watch them die. Please don't do this anymore." And then I got into mushrooms, and then I kinda snuck in a houseplant, and I was like, "Wait, it's still alive. He's gonna find the plant, but it's still alive, so I think it's okay." [00:21:40] And I showed him, I'm like, "I kept it alive. It's been, like, a time, and it's alive." And then it just... Something changed. It really created this process in my brain where I could just, enjoy that nurturing experience of growing it up and caring for it, and there's just something about mushrooms that makes you a more caring and conscious person. [00:21:59] [00:22:00] And I really feel like it turned me into someone who can garden finally, so I'm really excited about that. And if you've ever been curious about trying, don't be intimidated. Even if you think mushrooms are gross or slimy, you should at least try growing them once, and you won't be disappointed. [00:22:20] Thank you very much.

Do you need a grow tent to grow mushrooms? Will growing mushrooms indoors mess up your other indoor ferments? Follow along with this Q&A about mushroom growing with mushroom expert Erin Hamilton of The Mushroom Conservatory.