Homemade Grey Oyster MUSHROOM BAGS

We recently harvested some sawdust block grown grey oyster mushrooms and then used the remaining block to inoculate new substrate to see if we could get additional mushrooms in the weeks to come. There are many ways to grow mushrooms and many of these options are with controlled environmental conditions. But I need a way to grow them simply and off the grid.

Here is a quick post of the process. We started as soon as the first flush harvest of mushrooms was finished from the block.

First, you will notice that I took over the kitchen while Jaimie was tending to chores in the outdoor kitchen. "...as long as you clean up your mess", she said. LOL! So off I go!

Here are my buckets of substrate. I did an approximate 50/50 mix of small hickory wood chips and rice hulls. Both of these materials are abundant in my area. The stainless steel pot in the picture is what I heated the mix in to pasteurize it as to kill any harmful bacteria.

After the mix was sufficiently heated and drained of water, I began to put the mix into bags and included crumbled up parts of the sawdust block to inoculate the bag. I also added crushed Wheaties as additional energy for the mycelium to feed on as it grows in the bag.

This is a close up of the block that the original mushrooms were growing out from. Normally you can get 2 or 3 more flushes of mushrooms from the block but the longer you wait, the more opportunity you have of introducing harmful bacteria or mold into the block and that would not be good for your new promising batches of substrate bags.

The substrate is loaded into store bought bags that are sealed with a piece of PVC and a cotton ball that allows them to breathe. I learned this trick from a video of people growing mushrooms in Africa. You can buy mushroom growing bags with included cotton filters but I decided to do this first experiment with this method to see if it would work. The video example is at the end of this post.

In all, I got 11 bags of substrate put together and 6 half pint jars of grain spawn (not pictured) that can be used to inoculate additional bags later.

The bags will now be placed into a dark area of the pantry to allow the mycelium to grow and populate the substrate mix. When the bags seem to be fully consumed, we will open the bags up and place them in an area that has partial light to fruit. I'll do a part 2 of this post at that point. Any bags that appear to be contaminated will be thrown out.

I only water heated about half the bags. The other half was water treated with a small amount of Nixall disinfectant that kills bacteria. It's a totally natural product and one we use a lot of the homestead. All the bags were marked so we could record the success and fail rates of the different preparation methods.