Hello Nexus.
I need to start growing medicinal/edible mushrooms and I wanted to ask you all what you think is the best tek out there for this kind of work?
I am a mushroom cultivation n00b, but I've read Stamets so I have an idea. I just wanted to get your opinion on this.
I'd like to grow as many as I can. Like inoculating a bag of hay or two? (I want huge bundles of maitake!)
Also, where would one get these kinds of spores? I'm having trouble finding anything that isn't hallucinogenic

Going to go hunt some black chantrelles under manzanitas in a few, wish me luck

I have been growing Oysters as well as shiitake and lion's mane for years, it is really nice! These ones are fairly easy to grow and quite forgiving. I got my cultures from a edibles free spore ring in Europe. I had a look but I cannot locate their site any more.

Maitake on the other hand is much more difficult. I have some spores collected from the wild but they never produced anything, even though mycelial colonisation was rampant.

Oysters, shiitakes and lion's mane are woodlovers and they are best grown on hardwood sawdust or woodchips. Hay or straw doesn't do the trick for shiitakes and lion's mane, but Oysters do grow on straw and hay but the taste is not the best.

As for growing, grow them as normal, inoculate sterilised jars containing 2 parts of grain and one part of hardwood sawdust; wait till full colonisation then use these as spawn for larger amount of hardwood sawdust/chips. Grow mycelium to 20-20 celsius, fruit at 18-20. That's all in a nutshell!

Paul Stamets sells everything you need at his online store Fungi Perfecti at http://www.fungi.com/

Lotsa Luck, OF

Infundibulum, thanks for the heads up!
And Mr. Face, I saw that site but someone told me it was expensive compared to others?
Forgive my ignorance, I appreciate all the info.
I'm OBSESSED.

Hey house, I too am starting to look at edible/medicinal mushrooms and just began my hunt for oyster syringes this morning. I'll let you know what, if anything, I come across, at the moment I've only decided on oysters and am trying to figure out what else would be worth my time/effort. The edible syringes seem few and far between, but I've got some people I'll talk to and some old sites to check.

Here is an "experimental technique" for making blocks of straw based mushroom substrate. Several of my roommates are moving out due to a variety of reasons, but there's about to be two free bedrooms, one of which I will be converting to a mushroom lab and I plan on setting up a bunch of these straw blocks in the closet (probly some edibles and some cubensis, just to see how they differ with the straw substrate).

I suggested the above method due to your consideration of inoculating a bag or two of straw. However, if you've got the space, grain based teks rock, imo. You could make grain jars and then crumble and case them for multiple flushes of oysters or maitakes (oysters will work, i dunno about maitakes), I'd avoid cakes with the edibles just because of the funky way it makes the mushrooms grow.

Here are some links that may help:

Shroomery Oyster Cultivation Section

A Good Beginner's Guide to Creating Wood Substrate for Growing Woodloving Mushrooms

EDIT: Stamets site is overpriced for materials, you can piece together your own stuff relatively cheaply, mushroom cultivation can be a very inexpensive hobby with a little ingenuity. If he's got prints/syringes of edibles though, I'd at least take a look seeing as they're appearing relatively hard to locate.

SB

Oysters require a lot of fresh air exchange. So if your going be leaving them in doors, make sure your fanning them or you have a set-up that accommodates that.

Oysters are rewarding, fast and easy. As for the maitake I have never worked with it, so I hope to hear how it grows .

A cool mist humidifier rigged up to your grow chamber should handle the fresh air exchange (fae) fine. If for some reason it doesn't, a small computer fan works wonders, you just have to be more aware of the humidity and it may require occasional hand mistings or an additional humidifier.

If you can find fresh specimens at the grocery store, you could simply clone them to agar and start your own cultures that way. I've done this with oysters and a few other common varieties and it works well. I believe the Stamet's book (TMC) has a section detailing the process. Rush Wayne's H2O2 techniques are also a great help when transferring questionably sterile tissue to agar plates. Not all of his techniques are worth trying, but the agar procedures seem to work very well for me.

-JM

Oh BTW, oysters are known to produce loads of spores so it might be wise to start small if anyone living in the house has allergies. I'm not sure if oyster spores trigger reactions like other mold/fungus spores, but I've read that some people can have serious reactions to them. I've never had problems myself, but I don't suffer from allergies either.

This could be handled by cultivating in monotubs or harvesting before the veil tears (however, I'm not sure if such "early" harvesting has any effect on taste or quality of the fruit).

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe oysters form a veil like Agaricus, Lentinula and other capped mushrooms. I've never seen one anyway. To be clear, I'm speaking of Pleurotus ostreatus which is the common oyster mushroom.

jmaxton, you are correct, for pleurotus ostreatus, there is no veil. However, pleurotus dryinus and pleurotus sajor-caju are both also considered oyster mushrooms and have veils (although, to be fair, dryinus is known colloquially as the veiled oyster).

Either way, whether your species of oyster has a veil or not, the monotub makes excessive sporulation a non-issue, if handled correctly.

Also, I'm not sure, having no experience with non-veiled mushrooms, but I would assume that by harvesting these mushrooms earlier in their life cycle (just before the fruits fully mature maybe?) excessive sporulation could be avoided... not sure about this, just a thought.

SB