We grew Oyster Mushrooms!
First you have to sterilize the hay its going to grow on. Most people say to boil/steam the hay to kill competing organisms on the hay, but there was no good way for us to do that. So we researched different ways and came across a method that uses dish soap. We soaked hay in a 55 gallon barrel and added dish soap.
We then put one of our garbage cans on top and put cynder blocks in it to weigh the hay down. So we could make sure the hay was fully submerged. Then we let it soak over night.
This is the oyster spawn. We got it from Field and Forest Products, which is a mushroom farm near Green Bay.
Per the instructions, we crumbled up the block...
...and divided it between 4 bags.
We then added the fairly clean hay, and tied up the bags.
We put the bags in our greenhouse to sit in the toasty heat for 3-4 weeks. We let them sit in there until we saw white growing in the hay.
Here are a few kind of blurry pictures of the white growth. I had a hard time getting the camera to focus through the plastic bag.
We poked holes for the mushrooms to grow through, and hung up the bag in the basement. Moving the bag from a hot and humid environment to a cool one will stimulate fruiting.
After quite a while, about 2 months, we finally started seeing fruiting! It started with little buds that came poking through.
Very quickly (2-3 days) we had this...
The mushrooms had a good taste and texture. The only down side was that it fruited during our wedding so we didn't really untilize the mushrooms like we should have. I thought we had time but it only lasted for 2 weeks.
