3. Troubleshoot Your Mushroom Growing Q&A

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.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Erin Hamilton: I would love to hear if anybody has any specific questions about mushrooms

If you’re growing these ouside, is it a problem if they get really wet?

Erin Hamilton: Actually, mushrooms love that. A lot of the time if you’re into foraging, the best time to go foraging is always after a good rainstorm. So the only thing you have to look out for is if you’re getting a lot of wind and it’s actually blowing away the straw, then they’re not gonna like that.

But as far as if it’s just getting really densely hydrated, that usually works out pretty well. We usually see a lot of mushrooms pop up after a good rainstorm, and that is a good tip. If you’re into foraging or curious about… I always tell people make absolutely certain you know what you’re picking if you’re out in the wild looking for mushrooms, but that really is a great time to go look for them.

So yeah, I would say lunchtime if it rains.

What are your thoughts on growing mushrooms on logs?

Erin Hamilton: So I think it’s awesome to grow them [00:01:00] in logs, and there’s a couple things you have to know, though. One thing is it takes a lot longer to get a harvest out of a log. If you do … If you’re making grain spawn and putting it in straw or a straw bed or something like that, then you’re gonna see a harvest in six to eight weeks.

But if you grow them in a log, you may be looking upwards of two years. So it is a patient person’s game. But the, the trade-off there is that you’re going to get a long-term harvest. You can keep coming back to that for a couple years and expect to see those coming back. So that can work out really well, and one note on that in particular with growing them in logs is that they

A lot of people are like, “I have all this dead wood. Can I just use all these old logs I have sitting here?” You really want to use wood that’s been cut within six weeks of when you’re gonna use it. You generally, if you’re m- professionally making mushroom growing logs, you’re going to take those, and you cut them while they’re still alive, and you let them sit for a [00:02:00] couple weeks to just settle, and then you would put the plugs in and seal that with beeswax.

Now, to make the plugs, what you do to do that is you’re gonna take … You’re gonna make grain spawn, just like we did with the rice for the oysters or any other variety, and once that’s ready, you prepare wood dowels. You use hardwood dowels. You can get them at the hardware store, or they actually make a drill bit where you can cut your own.

And you take those, and you pressure cook them in a … with water in a jar or bag so they’re sterile, and then you take those, you drain out the water, and you put them in a bag with some of that grain spawn so that can colonize those. Once that’s ready, you can ha- you can drill your log and hammer those into your log, and then you seal it with beeswax.

Some people use paraffin. I’m a beeswax fan. But then you do that, and then you wait sometimes for a long time, but it’s a really nice payoff. So I’m a fan. If anyone’s patient enough to do that, I always recommend it. You can also do log totems. [00:03:00] So if you take a log also within that six weeks, and you cut it, and you slice it in disks like you were doing a Pinterest project or something , and you actually layer crumbles of that grain spawn in between layers of those disks, and then you just let it be, and that will also colonize the log that way, and that can be a little faster.

It’s not a high-speed process, but you can get a nice growth that way.

How does [the mushroom] get out [of the log]?

Erin Hamilton: That’s a good question. It basically just colonizes to a point where it’s gets within the log itself, and then it’s going to push for those exit points where it’s been drilled already. But it’s wild because mycelium is so strong, like physically, structurally strong. It’s actually like there have been a few instances where if it’s under cement and it’s got enough to feed it down there, they will crack through the cement.

And so it will find a way out. But it’s very [00:04:00] much like just, we’re here, we’re ready to grow, I’ve got enough nutrients, it’s colonized enough, and it usually does tend to go for where it was drilled. But sometimes you get nearby spots that it’s also managed to get through usually it just grows out and around the plugs, but I bet if I looked around, there’s probably some that are pushed out.

But it really does depend too, like how much bigger the drill you use than the plugs you’re using. If they’re like loose or if they’re really, if they’re really densely packed in there, then it might be a little more difficult

If you’re growing [mushrooms] inside your house and doing ferments, are there any cross-contamination risks?

Erin Hamilton: So my mom actually just did kombucha and mushrooms right next to each other on her counter, and it worked out well. I can’t guarantee, like always and forever, that nothing would ever happen, but the worst case scenario would just be that your mushrooms would stop growing. [00:05:00] But it’s not likely that they would interfere with each other unless you’re getting like some really overgrown…

I can’t imagine a situation where the kombucha would be so aggressively overtaking the mushroom, but it should be perfectly fine. But worst case scenario, it could halt growth on the other if it took over enough. Usually, once mycelium’s established, it’s strong enough to fight off a lot, and it’s also, as long as you have that paper tape on it while it’s colonizing, it’s not gonna get any spores from your SCOBY in there. And by the time it’s colonized enough that you’re taking that tape off where it doesn’t have the filter, it’s too strong for anything to stop. So

What are you using as a substrate for your lion’s mane?

Erin Hamilton: We usually use straw for everything, but lion’s mane likes a little bit of coffee in there. Yeah, so if you add a little bit of coffee into the straw the straw substrate that you prep, then it will actually give it a really nice boost and you can you get happier lion’s mane that way [00:06:00] You can use used grounds and but it has to be within a few days of using them.

And so our household does consume that much coffee. We have four kids under six, so we drink a lot of coffee at my house. So we always have extra coffee grounds. But you wanna use used coffee grounds. That way they’re hydrated, they’ve been through hot water recently, and they’re like, so they’ve kinda pasteurized on their own.

If you don’t drink an entire can of Maxwell House in two days in your house and you don’t have enough to fill a bucket I always tell people go to your local coffee shop. Starbucks will actually, they have, I think it’s called their Green Garden program, but they will actually give you a sealed bag of used coffee grounds for free.

You just have to go ask for it. Most locations do it. Some don’t, but most locations have it, and they’ll just give you coffee grounds for your garden or for your mushrooms, and you can use that right away. You don’t have to do anything extra to it. So it’s a really handy substrate trick if you don’t have any.

[00:07:00] Yes?

How many mushrooms do you get from a bucket?

Erin Hamilton: It depends on the size of the bucket, but each round of harvest is called a flush. And so most buckets will get two or three flushes, sometimes four. And what happens is every time you get a flush, you cut off all of your mushrooms, and then you soak that bucket in water overnight. If it’s a small bucket, you can put it in a pot in the sink.

Mycelium floats, so you gotta put something heavy on top or it’ll bob away and try and float. If you’re using a five-gallon bucket, stick it in a big Rubbermaid bin or something, but you wanna soak that. Then you drain it out and you let it grow again, and then you’ll get mushroom pins start over again, and then you’ll grow more mushrooms.

You can do that several times. And each flush, when you’re looking at a gallon-sized bucket, you might get a pound per flush. If you’re looking… If you’re working with a five-gallon bucket, the average is about four pounds of flush. So you can get a nice thing going there with it

Do you have any concerns about using food-grade or non-food-grade buckets?

[00:08:00]

Erin Hamilton: So legally I have to tell you to use food grade buckets. I use all kinds of buckets. But I also have a really good friend at the local deli that saves me all of their pickle buckets, and I love pickle buckets. They’re great. I even… If you go to my table over there I have pickle buckets all over the place with all of our straw that we brought for our mushroom thing, so that’s why there’s pickle buckets all over my table.

But I generally do recommend using food-grade buckets just because, like, why would we chance anything? But at the same time, people use all kinds of containers, so it’s really your comfort level. I’ve grown mushrooms in everything from a trash bag with holes punched into it, in it, to a five-gallon bucket, to laundry basket.

You can use a laundry basket. It’s already got the holes in it. You just have to make sure it doesn’t get dried out because obviously with more holes, it’s more airflow and all of that. But yeah, so you can get creative with your containers. Just I think the biggest thing is be conscious of what’s been in that container before, and [00:09:00] that’s the kind of thing you really need to look out for because oyster mushrooms in particular they’re actually have been used for a lot of bioremediation and cleaning up oil spills, and what happens is they actually eat up all of that toxin and waste and everything.

So if you have any kind of toxin in there that from something previous, I wouldn’t mess with it. But in general, yeah, just you should be all right

After the third or fourth flush, are you able to take it out of the bucket, soak it overnight and use the pins to start a new bucket?

Erin Hamilton: So you could definitely do that. I think at the pinning point, I wouldn’t, just because you’re about to get a nice harvest off of it. But if that’s all the way colonized and it’s… once you get down into the dwindling, like you’ve- you’re a couple flushes in, it’s starting to get… you’ll feel the bucket will get ph- physically a lot lighter because it’s been eaten away at by that mycelium.

If you have this is the first round on that bucket that’s been colonized and is well colonized, I have had plenty [00:10:00] of times where we’ve cut up the contents of that before it gets to the pinning point and put that in other containers or out in a straw bed, and you can get it’ll just keep going.

Mycelium is very exponential. It’s really cool. That’s what fascinates me with the liquid culture, is because it just keeps going and going, and it’s really neat. But yeah, so mycelium wants to grow, and so a lot of the time people will be like, “I’m using a bigger bag of rice. Do I need to use more culture?”

And actually, you could, but it really is just you could use the exact same amount. It’ll just take slightly longer to colonize because it’s got more space to cover, but it’s just gonna keep going. So there’s the point when you’re like, “Okay, we’re gonna add a little more so we don’t have to wait five years for this giant vat to colonize.”

M- I usually recommend using multiple small containers, doing each of those. That way, if one of them contaminates, you still got your other assortment of them. But yeah, so you can really have a lot of fun with taking something that’s already colonized and going, “All right, now we’re gonna put it on this.

We’re gonna try that.” It’s very tinkery, and it’s really fun.

Do mushrooms always overwinter well?

[00:11:00]

Erin Hamilton: So it’s 50/50. It really depends. If we have a winter like this, they’ll probably come back. I generally tell people if they want them to come back, you wanna put a thick layer of straw over that before winter hits and really just let it kinda get some insulation there, and you’ve got a good shot of it coming back.

If you get a really harsh winter like we do get sometimes, there’s a good chance they won’t make it through. But it’s always worth a try, an extra straw. I just, when in doubt, add straw.

Do you grow raw mushroom varieties, like to put on a salad?

Erin Hamilton: Raw mushroom varieties?

Honestly, most of the mushrooms that I grow are all you wanna cook them. There are… You can grow like portabellas and different button mushrooms. I don’t do a lot with those so I don’t feel like authorized to direct you on those. But but yeah, I would steer towards like portabella and those types of mushrooms if you’re into the more like [00:12:00] raw, put them on a salad kind of mushroom

How do you store dried mushrooms for long-term shelf life?

Erin Hamilton: Oh, nice Oh, okay. You know what we do is we’ll dehydrate them and then we’ll get silica gel packets, and you can just stick those in the bag or bottle or jar or whatever you put them in. And that works really well whether or not they’re powdered or they’re in full form, and that’s like indefinitely.

They store for a very long time. I’ve had them last several… I think several years is the longest I’ve managed to ever store a mushroom before I’m like, “Okay, we’re eating that now. It looks delicious.” But you can get a lot of shelf life out of it. We also have one of those vacuum sealers, and that works really well.

If you know it’s gonna be… I don’t like doing it if I’m like, “We’re gonna eat this next month,” because it seems like I’m using up my vacuum sealer materials too fast. But if it’s like, we’re not gonna eat these for six, 12 months or something, then I’ll use the vacuum sealer and throw a silica packet in there, [00:13:00] and that gives you pretty indefinite shelf life

How many holes are you putting in a bucket?

Erin Hamilton: So a five gallon bucket I usually do like I would say eight to 10 is my typical. Sometimes I’ll do a little bit more, but I really like the size mushrooms I get when I do that many. If you do… So if you have a ton of holes, you’ll find that you get a lot of smaller mushrooms. But if you only have a few holes, you’ll get several really big mushrooms.

So part of that is what size mushrooms you want. And but also if you’re in a really dry place, you’re gonna wanna steer towards less holes because it’ll dry out too much.

After harvesting mushrooms, do you throw the straw into your compost pile?

Erin Hamilton: Yes. I have the coolest compost pile on Earth. It’s so much fun because there’s several years worth of any kind of mushroom I’ve tried growing just thrown in there with layers of all other compost. And so it’s really fun, especially in spring when it’s just starting [00:14:00] to get warm, to see what starts to grow out of it.

So there’s a lot of oyster mushrooms. You get all these different ones. So yeah a lot of people… I just say if you throw meat… some people throw meat in their compost. If you do that, don’t eat what you find there. But if you’re not throwing meat or anything else too gnarly in there, then you can have a nice, exciting compost pile that gives you surprise mushrooms.

And as long as those are familiar mushrooms that you did put in there, then go for it. But yeah. Yeah, so that can be really cool Oh, way up there

If you decide to grow outside, what other animals, pests or other mushrooms do you have to look out for?

Erin Hamilton: Chipmunks. I have really had some bratty chipmunks take some of the most beautiful mushrooms away from me. I had one one time, it was like the most flawless flush of mushrooms. I was so excited. I ran inside. I normally will just twist and pull to pick a mushroom, but [00:15:00] these were, like, so pretty that I wanted to go get a knife to cut ’ems because I didn’t wanna damage them at all.

I ran inside to get a knife. I came back, and it was just chewed up. I was so sad. And I don’t really know how to stop them. Maybe a peace offering, like a little dish of acorns along the side. So they are the inevitable

“Does picking mushrooms damage the underground mycelium?”

Erin Hamilton: So to a point. I feel like that, like with morels, like I’m a little more aggressive about that ’cause I’m like, you wanna like definitely leave a good chunk there ’cause you don’t ever want the morels to stop. But mycelium is much more like an, the root system of mushrooms. It goes deep under the ground in the forest, and it ranges wide.

So when you’re seeing a mushroom, there is so much more going on beneath the surface than you can see. So to a point, you’re not going to damage the mycelial system by twisting it and picking it. But again, we do like to leave like a little extra, especially when it comes to morels. And [00:16:00] also, if you’re a morel hunter, always use the onion bag so you’re like sprinkling spores around.

And that is a really… I know you didn’t ask me about morels, but now I’m thinking about morels, so we’re gonna talk about morels for a minute. So morels are amazing. If you’re from Michigan, I hope you’ve gotten to taste some. If not, find a friend that’s a forager that you can convince to let you taste them, ’cause they’re so wonderful.

But I always get people that come up, and they get like really twinkly, and they’re like, “Can you grow morels?” And I’m like you can.” But the thing is that they take between three to five years to grow. So most people are not patient enough, or they can’t remember where they started them, or they moved, or like all of these layers of things.

So it’s definitely a, a very patient person’s game. But you can start morels. And it’s again, not a guarantee, but it’s pretty awesome when they start. So you do that by taking… You can either take a morel mushroom or a morel culture, and then you blend that up with water and [00:17:00] like a spoonful of molasses in your blender.

And then you let that sit overnight, and then you put that in a five-gallon bucket with a couple scoops of ash, just wood ash from your fireplace. And then you top up the bucket with water, and you let that sit overnight. And then, so that’s your morel slurry, and you take that, and you take it to a nice mulchy like spot on your property that you can remember where it is.

And you pour it all over the place in like a three-foot square area. And just keep an eye on it. I do have one friend, and she had it work after a year, which is like a miracle case. That does not happen very often. But usually three to five years if it’s gonna pop up, that’s when you should be expecting that to happen.

So if you’re curious about morels, that’s the way you do that.

What kind of area should you grow your mushrooms in outside?

Erin Hamilton: So they say generally like a forest floor mulch is really the description. So it’s okay if there’s like other stuff around there, but you want something shady that doesn’t get disturbed much, that’s maybe got some like wood [00:18:00] bits and leaves and sticks, and just when you think of forest floor Michigan dirt, that’s about what you’re after.

But definitely do it like out of the way of general traffic, and it doesn’t wanna be in direct sunlight

Yeah, the golden oysters.

If you have pieces of wood or copper, could you naturalize golden oysters in that area?

Erin Hamilton: Yes. Yes, you could. To do that, you would probably want to take the plug spawn approach to that. And you would inoculate dead wood and let that spread naturally. They are recommending that people are being careful with how much they’re introducing it to the wild on purpose right now because it’s spreading so fast.

As of right now, it does not look like a negative thing that it’s happening right now. All the research I can find is really positive, and I’ve had some really intense conversations with a lot of mycologists about it, [00:19:00] and everyone is like, “This is really cool.” But but I would just say start small because we want to see what happens in five, 10 years before we go too wild with it, just because otherwise we may have a lot of golden oysters out there.

Is there a way to propagate your mushroom flushes?

Erin Hamilton: Yes. So what you would do in order to keep your mushrooms going is you would create your own culture. It’s a process, but it’s not as hard as it sounds. So it’s basically what you do is you take a mushroom that you’ve grown, and you put it on a petri dish with agar. And you let that sit on there and colonize the plate, and then you take some of that, and you create a nutrient broth, which is really just either a malt extract or honey or something sweet. You put about 4% of the total volume of the container you’re using, and you fill it up. So I usually use a quart size [00:20:00] jar, and then 4% either honey or malt extract or something like that, that will feed the mycelium.

And then you inject the mycelium that you grew from the petri dish into that. Now, you can actually skip the petri dish if you want, and just… if you’re doing c- commercial culture cultivation, you gotta go with the petri dish just for sterile process and making sure that you’re, like, really maintaining quality control.

But if you’re, like, on your farm, and you want to make your own liquid culture that you’re just gonna keep using for your farm, there’s no reason you have to get that scientific about it. And you can definitely take a piece of the mushroom. You have to still do the jar. You do the jar with the sweetener in it.

You pressure cook that, and you have a special lid on there that allows you to inject into it. It’s called a self-healing injection port, and then you put an air patch filter on it. You can order them online. They’re not expensive. And you pressure cook that like that with your water and [00:21:00] sweetener in it, and then you add your mushroom tissue or bits to it, and you let that sit, and you shake it up every so often.

And then it will start growing this gel inside of it, which is actually mycelium suspended in your culture. At that point, you just wanna shake it up so it breaks up enough to use it, and then you can use that as culture to continue going. There’s a… it’s a whole rabbit hole but that is the baseline of how you would do that.

But you can have so much fun with it. So if you’re a tinkery person, and you have any access to a pressure canner, which you can… i’m a huge fan of All American pressure canners, but you can also find them on Marketplace or thrift shops or all over the place. Make sure your gaskets on there are good.

If you get a thrift shop pressure canner you can buy replacement gaskets. That’s usually if someone’s getting an older canner. All Americans don’t use a gasket, but if you’re getting another brand canner that’s been around for a while, spend 10 bucks and get a replacement gasket for it because that’s usually [00:22:00] where people run into problems with pressure canners.

If you’re scared of pressure canners, they’re not that scary. You just have to make sure there’s enough water in them to sustain what you’re trying to do. How long

Six to nine months, but most liquid culture you can also refrigerate for a fairly long term. Pink oyster mushroom does not like being refrigerated. It’s got more of tropical origin, so it doesn’t do well with cold. But the other varieties usually can be stored for quite a while at cold temps

They turn what? They turn brown. Ooh. Do they smell bad? No. That’s good

They started looking like- Okay. They may have [00:23:00] gotten a little bit too warm or a little bit too dry, or they may have just been ready to harvest. I had some that I found in the wild that were golden oysters, and they did the same thing, and it seemed like maybe I missed them by a day or two and I just waited a little too long for them.

But that’s really cool that you grew those. Did you cook them at all? No.

I think that was a wise choice. Are you gonna try again? Good. Send me a picture when you try. I would love to see how they turn out

How much doi you get of the liquid culture out of the syringe that you buy?

Erin Hamilton: So it’s generational the way culture works. So you can get about three generations down from that, and then it starts getting weaker. So it depends where you’re getting your culture from and where it’s at in that generational line. If you have a generation one or two, you’re probably gonna be able to [00:24:00] make a really nice culture off of that.

If it’s further down the line, you may not be able to get a, a culture to grow off of it, or if you do, it might be a little more feeble. So it just depends on where it’s at in the generational line. We do aim to keep our cultures, usually roll out either first or second generation and again I always tell people start a few, like whether you’re doing your grain spawn or your jars. I just think that if you do a few jars at once, like one of them’s gonna contaminate. It just will. It’s the nature of the beast. But if you do that, then you’ll have a few that turn out well, and then you’re gonna be like, “Why do I have so much culture?”

And then you can have fun with it. If you go on the downloads page on the Mushroom Conservatory website, you can grab our, like, regular growing instructions, and if you followed that process but added that tissue to your rice, it might take a little longer than using a culture would take, but it should get you somewhere.

I wouldn’t use a huge container [00:25:00] though. I would use … I would start with a small container to get that going, but it would probably work

Yeah. In general, it tends to… Anything with mycelium is gonna kinda keep trying to go on anything that it can eat, unless it’s just exhausted. Once it’s been, like, grown out of a bunch or it’s just old, then it might get a lot weaker. But in general, as long as it’s fresh, relatively new mycelium, then you’re probably gonna get something good happening with it.

When you grow in a bucket, how do you water them?

Erin Hamilton: Yeah, you actually … It’s, that’s a really good question, and it comes up a lot. So it’s weird. You wanna actually keep that lid on. The funny thing I always tell people, it, people always wanna peek. They can’t help it. It’s it’s so interesting, and it’s within a day of you putting it all in there.

You’re like, “I just need to peek under the lid.” And then once it’s had a little bit of time to go, the thing is that it starts building up CO2 in there, and that actually causes it to understand start growing in the opposite direction. Look for the, [00:26:00] the holes in the sides to grow out of. So no matter how desperately tempting it becomes to look under the lid, you have to leave the lid on until you’re adding more water for another flush.

But there was another half to that question. I just got excited about keeping the lid on. Watering it. Yes, so when you water it, yeah. So when you take the tape off, what you actually do is you spray water above the hole. I just use a little spray bottle or a misting bottle. You don’t wanna spray directly at the mushrooms, because it’ll bruise them.

It, they’ll still be good, but they’ll have spots on them. So you don’t wanna bruise them because of that. But yes, you just mist above the holes, and that’s just enough to keep it going. If you live in a very, very dry place, you’ll actually wanna set a damp towel or washcloth or something on top and that actually helps keep a little bit more ambient humidity on it.

Or if it’s like you’re really fighting to keep them humidified enough, then you can use a plastic bag to make a tent over it or whatever you need to do to just keep it more humid. You just don’t wanna be starving it of air, because they get really spindly if they don’t have enough [00:27:00] air.

Can you grow them in the bathroom?

Erin Hamilton: Yeah, you could do that. I don’t know that I’d wanna eat ’em if I grew ’em in the bathroom. But again whatever your comfort zone is there. But , I think they would as far as the actual environment, they would grow great in there.

It just depends if you would want to eat them in there. So yeah. But I like the way you think. I think we would have fun together.