Growing a variety of mushrooms from grain and sawdust spawn

I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of growing mushrooms. They’re mysterious because they seem to pop up at random places yet I’ve heard they’re difficult to grow. So I hired one of our Merit Academy teachers to be my mentor. She helped me select spawn and all of the ingredients and equipment I needed. Yesterday, we put together a mini mushroom farm in my greenhouse, veggie garden, and oak grove.

I got a truck load of woodchips at Lewis Tree Service, 2 bags of sawdust at San Lorenzo Lumber, coffee grounds at Starbucks, and compost from my garden. We mixed up all of these ingredients to make the “food” for the mycelium (mushrooms). Then we layered the grain spawn on the woodchip mixture. It felt good to turn the soil and fill the planter boxes.

We also created mini totem poles and put the mycelium between each log. Two months ago, I drilled holes in an oak log to start mushroom plugs. There are so many ways to cultivate mushrooms!

Now we wait for the mushrooms to grow. We selected Pink Oyster, Blue Oyster, Almond Agaricus, Golden Oyster, Lion’s Mane and Pioppino mushrooms. Can’t wait for our first harvest! I’ll be able to get spawn from my mushrooms to grow in our lab. If all goes right, I should have huge bounties of mushrooms in 10 days that I can propagate forever. Well, I’m not good at growing things so this is a big experiment for me.