- Today, we're going to cover how to grow
the most exciting thing
that I have ever grown in my personal garden.
And it all starts with this right here.
(mellow music)
Some of you may have already known
when I pulled this bag out.
And some of you might have been able to read that tiny text,
but basically what we're gonna be talking about today
Is growing mushrooms from spawn.
And in this particular case
we're gonna be growing the red wine cap mushroom
also known as a king stropharia
which is a quintessential garden mushroom.
We'll talk a little bit about it,
but I'm really going to be talking today
about how prep and build a bed
for growing your mushrooms.
Really quickly before we continue
let's talk about the substrate.
In this case, you see that it's called saw dust spawn
and that's because the medium
that it's growing in right here is all saw dust.
The other option is a grain spawn
and that's made with things like wheat, oat, barley berries
and what they do is they inoculate those grains
and that's which you use instead of a saw dust
which works well in applications where you could protect it.
But if you're doing an outdoor grow
you wanna make sure you get saw dust spawn,
because things like rat, mice, et cetera, won't eat it.
So in the past I have successfully grown
two types of mushrooms, and that is the oyster mushroom
and the red wine cap mushroom.
So this bed behind me
over the summer was growing oyster mushrooms.
That was quite rewarding.
I think I'm definitely gonna do that again
and probably do it in the spring.
In San Diego I have a harder time finding wood chips
which is one of the most common substrates.
And substrate is like a growing media.
It's hard to find a lot of those hardwood wood chips
that you find in places that actually have trees
besides Palm trees.
So I mostly do straw beds
because it's easier to find straw for me
and straw works well for pretty much most mushrooms.
Well, definitely works well for oysters and wine caps,
but just the caveat is that if you straw, it goes faster.
Like it won't last as long and they fruit faster.
So there is the advantage of them fruiting faster,
but usually the straw is something that's so easy
for the mushrooms to break down
that they'll rip through it in a couple months
and you get your first fruiting and that's it
if you don't properly maintain it.
So we'll talk a little bit about
maintaining your mushroom bed as well as building it.
Before we move on to building the mushroom bed
I just wanted to mention that oysters and red wine caps
are probably the best starter mushrooms
for anyone who wants to try growing mushrooms.
And the reasons are that a they fruit pretty reliably.
They're pretty easy to build beds for.
And B most importantly actually
is that they're very easy to identify.
The red wine cap mushroom doesn't really have anything else
that could be misidentified for it.
So you don't have any fear or concerns
of accidentally harvesting a poisonous mushroom
and eating that.
The oyster mushrooms as well
are generally very easy to identify.
So between the fact that they're easy to grow
and more importantly, they're easy to identify.
I highly recommend that if you did want to go down the path
of growing your own mushrooms, which I highly recommend,
that you go with the red wine caps or the oyster mushrooms.
So now let's go and build the bed.
One of the cool things about building mushroom beds
is that you can build them in places of your garden
that you usually don't use.
And what I mean by that is that you could build it
in areas that get way more shade
than most plants actually want.
So today I'm gonna do a little hybrid of that.
I'm going to build a mushroom bed in this asparagus bed
which I just prune back for the winter.
I'm also going to build a different one
in an area that I have nothing growing in
that's almost always shaded.
Using underutilized space
and in this case with the asparagus bed
I'm going to be boosting my asparagus
by inoculating it with mycelium
while also growing mushrooms.
So I'm very excited about that.
So let's talk a little bit
about the growing substrate itself.
In this bed I'm actually going to be using garden straw,
which is something that we sold
at Epic Gardening over the summer.
It's a straw product that's been processed
so that it's cut up into very small, tiny pieces.
And they've actually been split in half.
So there's a lot of surface area
and that's gonna mean that the mushrooms
are gonna have a lot of space to colonize.
So I'm really excited to try that out.
In the past I've just used regular straw
from the straw bale.
No issue whatsoever with that.
Actually the reason I'm using this I'll admit
is that I ripped the bag open and it got full of rain.
So the straws already wet.
And that's actually the ideal
when you build your mushroom bed.
If you're using straw you wanna soak it for like a day
to make sure that the straw gets totally saturated in water.
It'll make the colonizing a lot easier.
So in this case, it was actually an accident
and I'm going to turn that accident into a bonus.
So without further ado, I'm gonna go ahead
and start spreading some straw out
and I'll show you how to spread the spawn after that.
So I actually lied a little bit.
I'm gonna actually start with a standard straw bale.
And the reason is that I was thinking about it.
And what I realized in the past
is that a lot of my mushroom beds
actually get sort of wrecked by earthworms.
And that's because they really like eating the straw,
which is why it's such a good amendment in your garden
but they really made the mushroom bed last a lot less.
Like it, it died a lot sooner than I expected.
And when I dug it up, I looked and it was all worm casting,
which is great for another reason.
But this time I'm gonna give them a little decoy food.
So I'm gonna start with a base of regular straw
from a straw bale, and I'm gonna water it in.
And from there we'll apply the garden straw
and inoculate this beds.
All right, so now we have the base layer down
and you'll notice that I kind of tamped it down with a fork
and I watered it very deeply because this wasn't pre soaked.
So I wanted it to have some amount of moisture,
but now let's spread out that garden straw
that's already wet
and we'll make a nice even layer
and then we'll get it into the spot.
(mellow music)
All right, so we have our spawn now.
It's looking really well inoculated.
And what I'm gonna do now is sprinkle it across the bed,
put some more straw down on top
and repeat the process.
What we're doing here is taking the spawn
that's fully inoculated in the saw dust
and sort of breaking it up
so that we could propagate it.
So what I'm gonna do in this bed
is put down half of this spawn
and then I'll do the other half in the other bed.
Or actually I'll do a little more than half here,
because this is a bigger area.
One of these 5.5 pound bags
is enough to cover about 50 square feet,
according to the manufacturer.
And I'll put a link to a couple options
of places to get mushroom spawn in the description,
but they recommended that this can cover 50 square feet
for 5.5 pound bag.
So in total, I'm working with probably
closer to 30 or 40 square feet in the two areas I'm doing,
which is fine.
Because I think the more spawn you put
the better your chances are.
There's a first little layer
and now I'm gonna go ahead and do another layer of straw.
(mellow music)
One of the most helpful tips I I could give you guys
is that A, you want your spawn to be entirely buried.
Make sure that it's not exposed to light,
because that will kill it by drying out
and B, you really really wanna make sure
that the media is wet.
So you wanna make sure that the straw
that you're putting down is entirely wet.
You wanna basically treat this mushroom bed
like it's any other vegetable
where you give it that classic inch of water per week.
So if you start off with a very wet bed
you're going to have a much better chance
of success in the long run.
All right, we're gonna sprinkle a little bit more only.
I've decided that I don't wanna actually put that much more,
but I do wanna put another layer
and then I'm going to do the final burial in regular straw,
because I'm actually running low on garden straw.
Kind of under budgeted how much straw I needed here.
That's all right.
As long as you have some other substrate to use
you can make it work.
So this is really kind of a light coating.
I don't actually know if this
is going to be accomplishing much,
but any sort of extra spawn will be you hedging your bets.
I wanna show this, because it's not that exciting,
but what I'm gonna do next is put a sprinkler over here
for maybe an hour and make sure this gets entirely soaked.
And all the straw has a chance to soak up that moisture.
So with that, let's go move on to the other bed.
So you'll see that I'm kind of hermit crouched
into those arc little spot.
And that's because this is an ideal mushroom growing bed.
This is where I had my red wine cab mushrooms
growing last year.
And I mentioned that the earthworms
kind of ate all the straw.
So there's still a little bit of straw left,
but it's very thin.
So I'm going to rejuvenate this with that last bit of spawn.
And at the end, I'm just going to time lapse this,
because as you could see,
it's a kind of a hard spot to film.
I actually decided to get some regular straw
and bury it a little deeper
and what I'm gonna do now is kind of step on it.
So I wanna make sure that it's all compacted
and there's actually contact with the mushroom spawn.
So I'm gonna do this and water it in.
Sorry for the poor lighting guys.
But in winter you take what you can get.
Mushroom bed is now completed.
I have it fully built, fully hydrated.
And now I wanted to talk about this last little bit
which is protecting your mushroom bed.
Now I said at one point
that mushrooms don't like to be in full sun.
They can be in full sun, but if they are
they have to be protected,
because the bed will dry out so fast
that the, mycelium will die.
So in this case, you'll see that the sun
is hitting me right here
and that's west that's east.
So these Mallows will actually provide shade
for the morning sun,
but the afternoon sun is a more intense one.
So we want to protect against that as well.
So what I have here is two bamboo stakes
and an old coffee bag that I bought
for local coffee roaster for a dollar.
And so I have it hung up on there
and all I'm going to do
is sort of drape it across like this.
In this case I happen to have a fence here,
so that's gonna hold it up
but that's gonna basically provide it shade
throughout the day from the afternoon sun.
There you have it.
We built two wonderful mushroom beds.
You could see just how easy and quick it really is
to build a mushroom bed.
It's not really that intimidating or scary at all.
It's really just getting the right supplies,
whether that's straw or the right type of wood chip
and getting a nice spawn.
And that's really all there is to it.
I just wanted to share a couple more tips
sort of how to protect and ensure
you get a longer mushroom fruiting cycle.
First thing is that I'm really become a fan
of Burlap coffee bags.
You can get these for free or very cheap
from your local coffee roaster.
And the nice thing about it is
that they allow water to flow through
but they also will reduce evaporation
and keep the temperature of this bed lower,
because it's blocking the sun from direct contact.
So this will ensure that the mushroom,
the mycelium network can get robust enough
to the point that once you remove this
and say like a month, which is my plan
that it will have the right conditions
for fruiting those mushrooms
that you have actually put in this bed.
The other thing I wanted to mention
is that you wanna make sure
that you're giving your mushroom bed
at least one inch of water a week.
You basically treat it like any vegetable.
I think a lot of people fail with their mushroom beds
just because they don't actually water it
as much as they really should be.
Final little tip is that
if you are building a primarily straw based mushroom bed
it's really important that once you get your first fruiting
that you add a lot more straw right after that.
The fruiting is basically the culmination of all the efforts
of breaking down all that straw that you started with
and it's going to be reduced to almost nothing
and it's not really enough to sustain
the mycelia network to keep going
and to have a second fruiting.
So once you fruit your bed, you wanna make sure
that you add basically another three inches of straw on top.
And that's gonna ensure that you can get a second
or maybe even third fruiting if you keep feeding it.
But expect your mushroom fruiting cycle
to be in periods where you have
like abrupt changes in weather
such as a lot of rainfall events, big temperature swings
those kind of things will trigger the mushroom
to want to fruit, to sort of same idea
as like a any vegetable or fruiting plant, like a tomato.
They're producing those tomatoes so that they can
ensure that their genetics are carried forward
so they can grow more tomato plants.
The fruiting bodies of the mushroom are the same thing.
They're the fruit that's providing more spores
so the mushrooms can spread.
So you wanna make sure that you keep those things in mind.
Protect your mushroom beds, water them, and rejuvenate them.
And with that,
that's all there really is to talk about right now.
Hopefully in the spring,
I'll have a nice huge harvest of wine cap mushrooms.
If it's interesting enough
I'll try to turn it into a video.
If not, please follow me on my Instagram
and I will definitely be posting it there.
I can't wait.
It's really one of the most rewarding,
exciting things I've ever done in the garden.
So until next time Garden Hermit's out.
Thanks for watching.