Learning to grow mushrooms in 15 years

I have had an on-and-off fascination with growing mushrooms for the past 15 years.   My failed attempts at trying to grow them were chronicled in some earlier letters.  I since learned to grow mushrooms and at a small scale, I'd say I have a reasonable measure of success.  This is the entire story, including the early failures and later learning.  Hope my experience is of use for those entering into this fascinating activity.

---

That note above was the email I sent to my father-in-law on October 24, 2016, seven years after he had brought a pile of 3-foot logs from a freshly cut ash all the way from his woods in Utica, New York to our house in the Boston area. ​In 2009, my husband Mark and I had inoculated those logs with shiitake spawn and closed the holes up with beeswax with the help of our young daughters, Charlotte (10) and Josephine (9), and their two cousins, Saitha and Max.  We had followed the directions from Field and Forest, our source for the spawn to a tee – choose hardwood, let the logs rest for two weeks, and put the logs in a nice shady spot in moist woods in the back of the house – so we were sure we that a whole series of delicious and bountiful shiitake harvests were just a year or two away.  As those two years went by, we made sure to spray the logs if some weeks of the summer got too dry.   After two years, we started to check for shiitake after rainfalls.   Nothing came.  No worries, we’ll wait another year.  Nothing came.  And so, it went.   Until, having given up all expectation, on that October day, a little flush of shiitake came our way.  And that was it.
 
This little story is the first in a series of mushroom growing mishaps – some of which are recounted here. I have been fascinated by fungi for more than 15 years – in their role helping plants grow by transporting nutrients; in their destructive role as decimators of animals and plants (American Chestnut!); and in their role as delicious and healing food.  Current mushroom farming is booming, which is a wonderful thing, but even organic mushrooms tend to be material- and energy intensive, including single-use, virgin plastic, and climate-controlling machinery inside large enclosures.  I wanted to grow them in a low-tech, low-input, and small-scale way on logs, on waste, outdoors, and in re-usable containers.   And today, I do. Our mushrooms grow outdoors 6 months of the year in buckets, tubs, and on logs.  In the future, I hope to move even more in the log- and field-growing direction.  We sell them at the Greenfield Farmer’s Market and to a local bakery for pizza, as part of the diversified products from our farm, Big Foot Food Forest. 
 
It's good now, but I would say that early mushroom growing fail rate was close to 100 percent.  It is possible that I started out my mushroom growing career being the least talented mushroom grower in the Universe.   On the other hand, I have been persistent, prolific, and creative in my attempts (including dumb creative), and in this way, I racked up a unique collection of experiences, many of them involving green mold, but some fraction actually producing delicious fungi.  I would like to share some of my early experiences, because frankly, we need some information balance in the mushroom information world. 
 
Today, there are numerous practical and color-illustrated books, as well as countless YouTube videos all telling you how you too can grow mushrooms, just like we did, if you just do This!   Nowhere are there accounts of people who did those things but did not grow anything.  Yet, I am sure that growing nothing is the experience of many beginners.  People, I am here to tell you that you are not alone nor are you just crooked-handed and clumsy.  Growing mushrooms is persnickety and a lot can go wrong.   Here are some stories of my early failures - and then some stories of success.
 
Some early mushroom defeats
 
At the time when I started to try to grow mushrooms in the 2000’s, I was fascinated by the possibility of growing this delicious food organically and on waste.  I was still an urban worker and denizen at the time, but with seeds of transitioning farming in my mind. I could imagine a small mushroom business,  say bringing mushrooms to my farmer friend Kate’s stand at the local farmers market. 
 
I was encouraged by the expansive writings of Paul Stamets, the undisputed Guru of modern American mushroom growing and his book “Mycelium Running”.  Stamets says you can cultivate gourmet oyster mushrooms on waste products like old newspaper, and they basically grow themselves.  Now that spoke to my live-sustainably heart!  Next thing you know, I ordered two bags of grain spawn from Field and Forest.  When I got them, I realized I wasn’t quite sure, from Stamets’ description, what to do with them.  Like, what should the newspaper be contained in?  What do I do to prepare the newspaper – is it just a pile of old newspapers, is it shredded or crumpled?  I looked it up online and managed to find a little article with pictures.  It said to crumple the newspaper and shred it into big pieces; pasteurize it in hot water (160 degrees for some number of hours) or bleach water; mix it with spawn in an old plastic bag – I had one from CVS - and wait.  Wait for “pinheads” to appear to “initiate fruiting”.  Now what the heck are pinheads and how does one initiate fruiting?  On both questions – which seemed to me to be basic to the mushroom project – my article and the rest of the internet seemed silent.  I suppose it was common knowledge once you knew how to do it. 
 
I figured I’d find out.  Sure enough, a few weeks later, white mycelium – these are the filament-like threads part of a fungus – had covered large parts of the newspaper, and in some spots, it started to concentrate and grow tiny little white stubble.  Hm.  Stubble – those must be the pinheads!  Super!
 
Now, how to initiate the fruiting?  I did not find the answer directly but it had something to do with moisture.  To initiate fruiting on logs, submerge the logs in water for 24 hours, then set out and sprinkle twice a day.  I figured: keep the pinheads moist, so I sprayed twice a day.  Oddly, the spraying seemed like a lot more work to me than I wanted to put into little suburban farming project even if it did produce delicious oyster mushrooms!  Chalk it up to urban pigheadedness.  Result….  Oyster mushrooms grew out of the bags!   They were yummy!  But: they were not very many.  And only one bag produced mushrooms, once, the rest did nothing.   For the harvest obtained, the project was too much work. I still had half a bag each of Gray Dove and PoHo Oyster mushroom spawn in the fridge and decided to find a better way.  
 
I returned to Stamets.  There, I found descriptions of how you can remediate whole forests from one mother culture of spawn grown outside on corrugated cardboard with some woodchips (but he said you can also keep it to a smaller scale, like what I was looking for).  My I-love-recycling, looking-for-the-natural-way-to-grow-mushrooms heart was once again inspired.  When Spring came, I followed Stamets’ expert advice from chapter 9 in the book “Mycelium Running” and put the spawn in between wetted, clean pieces of old cardboard, pasteurized in hot water, with the corrugated side open to the spawn.  I made a pile with wood chips, put the pile or inoculated cardboard on it, and put it all under a bush where it would remain nice and cool and moist. It was exactly the simple type of project I was looking for!  Well, when Stamets does this kind of thing, he gets a bountiful flush of mushrooms after six weeks, and theoretically multiplies the result again and again to create 1,000,000 little colonies.  Likely because he whispers Shroom.  For me, all I got was a pile of decomposing mush and my nice spawn gone to waste.  Dang!  That took some recovery time!  So much for my budding little mushroom business.   
 
I was groping around with little guidance.  At this time, around the 2010’s, the only mushroom books easily available were the ones by Stamets.  Of these, I read “Mycelium Running” and “Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms”. Both are hundreds of pages long, and pretty dense textbooks, in which the how-to chapters were somewhat vague on the details (although there is no lack of grand vision for the role of mushrooms in saving the planet).
 
I wanted practical sources on how to grow mushrooms.  There was very little on the internet – I mentioned the little newspaper article.  You could also find short, practical descriptions on the website of Field and Forest, one of the two places in the US where you could order mushroom spawn at the time.  That’s how we knew how to inoculate those shiitake logs from the earlier letter.  The other shop was Paul Stamets’ store Fungi Perfecti in Oregon with no practical infos. 
 
Being a bit of a polyglot, I scoured the internet for mushroom growing articles and books in Dutch, German, and French.  The French language connection turned up one book, “Cultiver les champignons” which seemed practical and which I ordered, but in the end could not follow.  There was one other English language book I purchased, "Growing Mushrooms" by Arthur J. Simons from 1972.  But it turned out to be about cultivating button mushrooms in basements on horse manure.  Maybe not quite relevant... 
 
What was needed was a simple, practical book on growing mushrooms at home for the beginner.  Something along the lines of the many great gardening and vegetable growing books.  I told my husband, Mark, “I am going to write a simple book about growing mushrooms”.  He looked at me skeptically.  Really?  But you have not successfully grown any yet – which was not entirely true; I had grown that pound of oyster mushrooms on the old newspaper in a recycled CVS bag.  Well, I said, I have found a fool proof method somewhere on the internet – it is growing mushrooms on coffee grounds in a jar, and I am going to write about it. 
 
I went up to our local Starbucks and asked if they would save their coffee grounds for me.  Sure, as long as I picked them up end of the day.  Which I did.  But they had forgotten to put them aside.  Come back tomorrow.  Which I did, but too late and they had thrown them away.  Come back tomorrow.  Which I did - again.  But they could not find where they had put them.  Come back in the morning when the person who is responsible for this is back.  I came one more time, and finally got my bag of day-old coffee grounds!  At home, I mixed them up with some more mushroom spawn and made a nice little row of jars with black mix in them, covered with lids with holes.  I had even started to write the directions and made little drawings of the jars with the coffee grounds and the mycelium in them.  I was confident that here was the secret mix, and soon, I would be Queen of the Practical Mushroom Book.   
 
Boy, did I come down.  Some weeks went by, and instead of nice white mycelium growth that was supposed to happen, I saw a bit of green mold.  Oh, maybe that is a mistake; the mushroom will take over.  Then, more green mold, and more and more.  In all the jars.  One hundred percent.   The growing mushrooms on coffee grounds project was a resounding failure.  I would not have a small business and would not write the simple how-to book on growing mushrooms with whimsical drawings.  It was quite the malperformance, and it kept me quiet about mushrooms for a good while. 
 
Taking workshops on growing mushrooms – still no success.
 
But the mushrooms kept whispering and coming back to me.  In 2013, a few years after waiting for the shiitake, I was working with a wonderful young farmer named Heather Borkowski at the Needham Community Farm where I taught vegetable growing workshops. Heather and I talked about mushrooms and soon enough she had us signed up for a semi-private mushroom class and we were on our way to New Hampshire to David Wichland’s farm, Wichlandwoods.  At David’s place we saw mushroom logs he had strewn about his woods; and his log dunking tub (shiitakes like to be dunked before fruiting, but it’s not a requirement); and his quirky self-built workshop house on poles.  He gave us a tour to teach us about good log location and then we set about to inoculate our little collection of logs. After that official teaching, I says to my logs: “Haha shiitakes!  Now you will grow at my house because I took a bona fide workshop and did everything right!”.   I did not hear the small mushroom voices sing back: “Haha Babette!  We will not, we will not!  Even if you dunk us in a bucket!”.   Grrr.
 
I believe this experience with mushroom workshops is not uncommon.  Shiitake log workshops are popular.  And why not?  Shiitake are eminently desirable, and what could be simpler than leaving a log in some shady spot in your back yard for a year or two before you go out and pick off a nice little basket of beautiful round and speckled mushrooms?   If you take such a workshop, your instructor will tell you about the life cycle of mushrooms, how much of that life cycle is in the form of mycelium that grows into a substrate like logs, gradually colonizing it, and how when the log or other growth medium is fully colonized, the fungus will start to sprout fruits, which are the mushrooms that we eat.  They will explain how shiitake have traditionally been grown on inoculated hardwood logs stacked in a wooded area, and how we are now going to inoculate some logs ourselves.  Most likely, they will have spawn plugs, which are little hardwood dowels that have themselves been inoculated with mushroom spawn (by a professional mushroom growing company).   The workshop participants each get their logs and drill little holes spaced about 4 to 6 inches apart all along the log and put the plugs in.  This is typically a lot of fun since you get to use a power tool and a hammer.  You then close the holes up with molten beeswax.  That’s it!   It is possible you’ll get to make three or four logs to take home – that makes for happy workshop customers :).   Put them in a shady spot, in hot, dry weather moisten them, and wait for shiitakes.   My father’s partner did a log workshop like that and was so confident she would have shiitake soon.  I could tell she thought I had probably just done something silly. But also at her house, none came…
 
I got roped into two more log workshops. In 2018 at a permaculture course I was taking and in 2019 as part of the Applied Permaculture Series I had organized with the Boston Food Forest.  I took four oak logs home from each event.   Maple and oak are great shiitake growing wood species.  All the logs got stacked under the Green Giant arborvitae tree in our yard (a more perfect spot could not be imagined).  I faithfully checked those logs for a couple of years after rains.  And still, on the perfect logs, in the perfect spot, with workshop-led and pro-tools inoculation: no shiitakes.   I was just hoping other regular folks were having better luck than I with their shiitake logs, but I was taking a break! 
 
After all the failed attempts and dashed grandiose plans, I did kind of give up on mushrooms for short while.  In fact, I was not thinking about them at all anymore.  As we purchased land in Montague, Mass and started thinking about farming it:  no mushrooms.  In the business plan for the farm (2019), and in a vision for the farm written with the Regenerative Design Group (2019): no mushrooms.  But they came back to me.
 
A simple mushroom business plan using kits

In autumn 2020, I was on a walk around the quiet roads behind Montague Village minding my own business when I ran into two fellow travelers at a crossroad.  Since they had a dog and I had one, and since folks in the country are chatty, we got to talking and telling each other what we’re doing.  It just so happened that one of the fellows was Willie Crosby, owner of Fungi Ally, and he was about to start a zoom course on how to grow mushrooms.  It was fate. 
 
Of course, I signed up for the class, and of course Willie was brilliant and of course I took copious notes and of course I figured with all this new info there was no way the ‘shrooms could fail me again.  The course was great – despite all the reading that had gone before, I only then felt like I was beginning to understand fungi.  Plus, Willie told us about a fail-free way that folks get into the mushroom business, namely, by buying kits.  Kits are bags of mushroom spawn that are all ready to fruit.  All you need to do is to make some slits in the bag and mist the mushrooms as they grow.  Fungi Ally offers a 25% discount if you order in bulk, which came out to $24 per kit, and on average, you could get about 2 pounds of mushrooms per kit.  I figured the math and saw I could run a (small) profit by buying bulk mushroom kits, growing them out of the bags, and selling the harvest.   Bingo!
 
Here was my business plan.  Buy 10 mushroom kits per week for a cost of $240 and harvest an average of 20 lbs per week.  Sell them at $15/lb for $300 and net $60 per week.  It was small, but it was a start. 
 
In March, I ordered nine kits of nine different kinds of mushrooms: shiitake, four different kinds of oysters, lion’s mane, reishi, pioppino, and chestnut.   I wanted to try them all out and see which ones would work best in my mushroom business.  In my mind, I saw myself with lots of mushrooms asking a wonderful, approachable farmer, Meryl LaTronica who I knew from back in the Needham days, if she’d be interested in selling them at her farmers market stand.  We got the bags set up in the little garden house Mark had built, and I dutifully misted them.   Sure enough, it worked!  A few weeks later, we harvested a big flush of varied mushrooms! 
 
Excited and very nervous, I arranged them artfully in a basket and went off to Meryl’s farm, Just Roots.  I remember vividly walking around the farm on a gorgeous day, looking for someone in the just-plowed fields, and in the greenhouses bursting with seedlings, but finding nobody.   I knocked on the door of her home.  No answer.  Almost relieved, I left my basket by her door and sent an email.  “Dear Meryl, I left you these mushrooms.  Would you be interested in selling them at your farmstand?”.    Not long after, she wrote back: she’d love to sell them!  Oh my!  I was in the mushroom business!  I wrote to Willie and asked him if I could order the mushroom kits in bulk at a discount.  Yes, sure.  In May, I ordered six kits for some more testing and some other mushroom spawn (I had also had some success growing oysters from spawn that Spring). 
 
Now, recall that the business plan included harvesting about 2 pounds of mushrooms per kit.  That first flush of mushrooms, some of which went to Meryl, was only about 1-1.5 lbs per kit.  To get to the two-pound average, I needed what is called a second and third flush – this is where the mushrooms send out a new harvest after a few weeks interval.  Problem was, I had no idea how to get a second flush.  Willie just said, “wait, they will come.”  What does that mean?!  I just left the bags out without spraying them.  After a while no flushes had come; I gave up on the kits and put them away.  I thought, I can’t do this second flush thing, so this little business doesn’t make sense.  That was all.  When the newly ordered kits came, I didn’t take care of them.  They sat in the refrigerator. I never went back to Meryl with more mushrooms.  I was in a fungal funk: feeling hopeless about anything to do with mushrooms.
 
This time though, it was not the fungi that tricked me.  It was my own lack of confidence.  After a month or so, I found those tossed out kit bags, and some of them had flushed again, quite generously.  I saw that all I had needed was more patience. 
 
The methodical road to mushroom success
 
It did not feel good to leave the mushrooms there, having disappointed myself and Meryl.  I needed to come back to mushrooms again.  I had tried growing on logs through workshops and on my own; I had tried the Stamets methods with cardboard, coffee grounds, and old newspaper; I had tried mushroom kits and Willie’s methods for expanding spawn, all with zero or mediocre success.  I was an expert at growing green mold!   Perhaps it was the sheer embarrassment of it – being humiliated by a fungus, or worse, by multiple fungi.  Aren’t we supposed to be the intelligent ones?  What was needed, obviously, was a more rigorous, methodial approach.  I would create my own Mushroom Laboratory, the Big Foot MushLab.   In the MushLab I would try many different growing methods and learn which ones avoid mold and promote mushrooms.  It was extremely helpful that by 2021 the internet was positively exploding with YouTube videos and written guides with hundreds of different variations on growing mushrooms.  I enrolled in YouTube University and spent weeks looking at all of them, taking notes, comparing, and deciding which ones I would try.  Those many years while I was struggling in the mushroom wilderness, these people had figured out how to grow mushrooms profitably using the same information base I had.  I could have been envious, but it didn’t occur to me; I was so happy and grateful they had shared what they learned.
 
I wanted success, but I also wanted to adhere to my principles.  As I was checking out all the methods, I was looking for ways to: reduce buying – make, reuse, or repurpose - or buy the lowest cost technology; and minimize single-use, virgin plastic.  We all want organic of course, but we should not lose sight of reducing waste!  I still ended up buying so much stuff, including plastic, but I really wanted success.  Sigh.
 
In the end, I learned a lot.  I realized that to grow mushrooms, it helps to understand what makes it difficult. Why is it so easy to grow green mold when you are trying to grow mushrooms?  The answer is: because they are related, they both are forms of fungi.   They both like to grow in the same moist environments and on the same food.  But mold tends to be aggressive.  You have to be clever to create conditions that are conducive to fungi (mold and mushrooms) but that allow mushrooms to get ahead. 
 
Nature does this with overwhelming numbers.  A single mature mushroom releases a gazillion spores.  These float around until a few million find a good spot.  There, they germinate and start to grow mycelium.  If nobody eats them and nothing else bad happens, then, when they are ready and the conditions are right, another mushroom grows, and the cycle starts again.  Success is rare but the process is simple.
 
Humans like to control the success rate, and control, as we all know, makes things complicated. Here is what modern, human mushroom growing looks like.  In a sterile lab, a person in a hazmat suit collects mushroom spores from a mushroom.  They are extremely careful to avoid getting mold into the spores.  The spores are grown out in a petri dish in the lab.  The petri dish concoction is injected into sterile syringes.  Be careful: mold can get into the syringe.  The liquid mycelium is then injected into a bag with water-saturated grain that has been sterilized by heat.  Avoid mold getting in with the injection or being present in the grain!  If all goes well, the spores colonize the grain with mycelium – thin white strands that smell earthy.  Once the bag is colonized the person gets six or ten or twenty more bags with sterilized grain and distributes the colonized grain into these bags.  For this, they don’t need a hazmat suit, but they do use a laminar flow hood to create a mold-free workspace.  This second generation (G2) colonizes the bags.  The expansion can go on for a while if you want (G3, G4 …), but the spawn gets weaker with each generation.  To get mushrooms (the fruits of the fungus), you need to put the mycelium, also called spawn, into something with lots of cellulose, like a log, newspaper, straw, or sawdust pellets, and create conditions so that the mycelium gets ahead of the mold, colonizes the substrate, and wins the race. 
 
My MushLab was going to focus on two of these steps: expanding purchased G2 mushroom grain spawn to G3 grain spawn; and growing actual mushrooms using the G3 spawn and cellulose-rich fruiting mediums.   And, because it was a laboratory, I was getting serious, and that meant no more growing in trash bags or on old cardboard; this was going to be official.  I would also put everything into a big excel sheet and record what I learned. 
 
I still wanted to adhere to my principles of buy less and produce less waste, i.e virgin single-use plastic, but I wanted success and so, for this phase of my mushroom education, I kind of threw those principles overboard.  I’d get back to them later.  
 
Even though I hungered for success, I guessed there would be lots of failures as I was learning and that would require a fair number of spawn bags.  Spawn bags are expensive ($30 a pop).  By expanding from G2 to G3, I could make 6-8 bags of spawn (value: $180-240) out of one.  To get there, I had to buy a pressure cooker ($150), millet and rye, and single-use, virgin plastic grow bags specially for mushrooms that can withstand heat and have a small patch with tiny micron size holes for air circulation. To compensate, instead of buying an expensive laminar flow hood, I re-used some plastic lying around to jerry-rig a still air box (a 2 cubic foot transparent container with holes for your arms, inside of which you can create a clean environment).
 
I would try different growing techniques from different online sources, aiming for success and replicability. I would follow instructions of whatever YouTube video on online guide I was using to a tee, (contrary to my usual habit of trying something slightly different).
 
In November 2021 I purchased grain spawn bags (on sale) from Willie’s company, FungiAlly: Reishi, Chestnut, Pioppino, Black King Oyster, and Blue Oyster.  The idea was to expand these grain spawn bags into enough for me to play around with.
 
To start, I had to make sterilized grain bags.  Then I would need to transfer the purchased G2 grain spawn into those bags for my own G3 grain spawn bags.   Perhaps unsurprisingly, the enterprising mushroom aficionados that post on the internet have developed different methods for making sterilized grain bags.  People use a variety of grains: millet, rye, oats, even birdseed!  I tried millet, rye, and 50:50 of each.  Then, the grain needs to be hydrated.  Everyone agrees that the grain for spawn bags needs to be hydrated to just the right level – when you squeeze it tightly, just a few drops of water should come out.  Too wet or too dry weakens the mycelial growth.  This can be done with a simmer method (for 30 minutes then drain), a soak method (24 hours then drain, and a no soak no simmer (NSNS) method (mix correct ratio of grain and water). Then the grains need to be sterilized.  Everyone agrees that if you are making bags with approximately 6 cups of grain, they need to be in the pressure cooker at 15 PSI for about 2.5 hours  I found the cooker to be pretty fussy and had a number of instances of melted bags – this happens when there is too little water left and the temperature rises.  Not my favorite enterprise!
 
Once the bags are cooled, you need to transfer some of your G2 grain spawn into each bag.  You do this in a clean environment, either in front of a laminar hood, or a still air chamber.  I had made one of the latter since the laminar hood is a big investment.  You put everything inside the still air chamber, including alcohol to spray everything down.  Open your purchased G2 grain bag, and then one of your own sterilized grain bags.  Drop 1/6 or so of the G2 grain spawn into your G3 bag without touching the grain.  This is where mold contamination can creep in!   Spray down your hands as you work and close your G3 bag up quickly avoiding touching the inside of the bag before you do to the next one.  It’s all a bit nerve-wracking.  However, I made approximately six G3 bags out of each G2 bag. 
 
Then, I put them on a shelf and started to wait about four weeks until the bags would be fully colonized – that means they are pretty grown through with mycelium.  Of course, I checked them all the time!  The mycelial growth started within a few days; very exciting!   Amazingly, the overall G2 to G3 expansion results were pretty good, with two notable exceptions.   All of the Pioppino and Shiitake bags succumbed to green or black mold.  The Pioppinos are a mystery; but the Shiitake bags succumbed because we closed the bags outside the still air box.  Those mushrooms are fussy!  Of the Oyster, Chestnut, and Reishi all but two of the bags colonized successfully.  The three grain mixes and the three hydration methods all performed similarly, although it looked like some of the NSNS bags had some excess moisture on the bottom where there was no colonization. Clearly, the hydration matters.  I also noted in the next step, that the millet grain seemed to produce larger harvests. I refrained from getting giddy, and set to work on the next step, which was to put the spawn into growing containers. 
 
I had Black Oyster, Blue Oyster, Chestnut and Reishi bags to work with.  Now, how to grow mushrooms?  In all of my mushrooms adventures, I had wanted, by hook or by crook, to avoid buying single-use, virgin plastic mushroom growing bags.  I tried yoghurt containers, ball jars, old plastic shopping bags, cardboard, logs, and New York Times delivery bags.  Of these, the last was the most successful, which just proves the value of good journalism, but unfortunately, we had just gone to electronic newspaper delivery, and our supply of these bags dried up.  The most ecological and plastic-free way to grow mushrooms is on logs, for sure, but I had had very little success with this, and was in the mood for something to work.  According to all the Internet tecs, plastic seemed to be part of that equation. 
 
It was wonderful to have instructions for just about any mushroom!  What a new world!  It made it much more straightforward to grow the darn things!
 
For the Reishi, the only option seemed to be the single-use virgin mushroom grow bags (well, I’d already gone down that path with the spawn expansion).  You mix 5 cups of hardwood pellets and 6 cups of water into each mushroom bag and sterilized those in my pressure cooker for 2.5 hours at 15 PSI.  Then, into the still air box, and basically the same procedure as with the G2 to G3 bags, putting everything in the box, spraying with alcohol, working one bag at a time, not touching the grain spawn or the inside of the bag, and sealing each bag up before anything leaves the box.   This works!  We made seven bags and had a bounty of cool-looking reishi antlers!
 
For my King oyster and the Chestnut mushrooms I found it was possible to use a re-usable plastic container called a monotub.  The monotub advertises itself as a care-free self-regulating tool to grow mushrooms.  Hooray!  It’s a rectangular growing container 22.5” wide, 15.5 deep, and 12” tall with strategically placed holes.  It self-maintains the high moisture mushrooms love.  It regulates the air and moisture through the holes.  You cover the holes with paper tape during the colonization phase when the mycelium loves lots of carbon dioxide, and then cover with something air-permeable during the oxygen-loving fruiting phase.   Even though they are pricey (they were $48 a pop in 2021 with 20% off and by 2023 they cost $75 per tub!), I was so hungry for some success that I purchased eight of them!  
 
Here's what you do with a monotub.   Work quickly in a clean space to minimize contamination.  In an enormous bowl, hydrate a mix of pellets according to a recipe you find online.  You can vary the substrate (newspaper or hardwood pellets) and the additives (alfalfa or soy).   Then, spray your monotub with alcohol.  Spray your hands with alcohol.  Open your bag of spawn with alcohol-sprayed scissors.  Spray the monotub again.  Put in a layer of the hydrated pellets, a layer of spawn, pellets, spawn, pellets.  Close the monotub.  Cover the holes in the monotub with masking tape.  Done.  There is no sterilizing or pasteurizing - awesome! - you just work quickly with the pellets.
 
Then you wait for the stuff to get nicely colonized with mycelium, which you can tell when the substrate is more or less white and starts to show small dew-like drops on the top.  At that point, to initiate fruiting, remove the masking tape and put on some air permeable micropore tape to start airflow and increase oxygen in the tub but still regulate contamination.  So easy, right?  That’s why we pay the big bucks for monotubs.
 
Some sources say to case the colonized substrate with a layer of peat moss once you initiate fruiting.  I tried this, and also using hardwood pellets, and adding lime to raise the Ph, but for me all of those options led to my old friend the green mold; only un-cased newspaper pellets with one additive produced mushrooms.  Of those, it seemed like the soy pellet additive led to higher harvests than alfalfa.   When successful we harvested many pounds of really nice-looking King Oyster and Chestnut mushrooms.  The only downside was that I found the monotubs reliability to be mediocre: the Black Oyster was attacked by green mold in about half of the trials, even with newspaper pellets only.  They’re OK, but I’m not a huge fan.  I have not found another way to grow Chestnut and King Oyster though.
 
The third method for growing mushrooms was the one I loved the best: using cheap, ubiquitous 5-gallon buckets.  Buckets are good for shelf mushrooms that are pretty hardy and not finicky – basically that means oyster mushrooms (except for the upright oysters like King).  They are inexpensive and easy to obtain, and you can use ones that you have at home that have sprung a leak on the bottom.   To prepare your 5-gallon bucket for growing mushrooms, first clean it well.  Duh.  Then drill little ¼” holes in it in a diamond pattern, each about 4 inches apart and some small drainage holes in the bottom.  For the growing substrate I used straw.  Following some online directions, I filled a pillow-case with 5-gallons worth of cut straw, and put the bag in a large pot and poured boiling water over it.  The next day, I drained the straw and then layered it in the prepared 5-gallon buckets with about 1/3 of a grain spawn bag. It worked!  We had oyster mushrooms reliably sprouting out of buckets.  I did try some experiments using newspaper pellets – since they worked so nicely in the monotubs – but this did not work in the buckets.
 
Finally, thanks to all those folks who had figured it out, and shared their knowledge, and thanks to my sheer pig-headedness, my MushLab was reliably producing mushrooms! 
 
It was time for the next step, to go back to Meryl.  I sent her a blog I had written about pruning blueberries that featured her and my embarrassment about another failed attempt at market growing – namely to bring her blueberries.  She reacted so encouragingly: “I love this!  Thank you so much for sharing! I so get it--so many misses in farming, alongside all the wins!  One thing is that you never have to feel embarrassed with me!! One time a brand new greenhouse I put together blew apart only a week later. Yoder sat with me on my kitchen floor while I was a puddle of mush and failure.  but I got up and built it again! (with help from all the other farmers I knew).”  Wow!  Meryl is an amazing farmer.  With this warm reaction all the shame and frustration washed away.  Yes, I had failed a million times.  But I did keep getting up to try again – a little differently.  I followed up by asking her if she would trust me to bring her mushrooms this season, after flaking out on her the year before.  YES.  And so it went.  All that summer, we brought small batches of mushroom pints to the Just Roots farmstand at the Greenfield Farmer’s Market on Saturdays.  We did it again in 2023 and are doing it again in 2024.  This year, I added Rise Above bakery to my clients - they get the mushrooms for their Friday pizzas.  Maybe I’ll try some restaurants next.  The mushroom field has gotten pretty crowded, but with a beautiful product and good relationships, I think you can still make some sales. 

Those shiitake logs had a coda of their own.  By chance, in 2022, at the end of my first summer with Just Roots, I met a wonderful woman who grows shiitake on logs.  Ellena Baum was at that time the Land and Community Education Manager at Grow Food in Northampton and she overheard me talking about shiitake while a group of us was harvesting hazelnuts at Nutwood Farm in Cummington.  She said she had had luck growing shiitake, right from the beginning.  Naturally, I was all ears, and wanted to know the all the details of her process, which she generously shared.  Here is what she told me to do. In April, get about 40 hardwood logs.  Oak best, then sugar maple, but other maples and birch also work.  Ash – which my father-in-law had brought those many years ago – is not a good shiitake wood.  Cut logs that are about 6-inch diameter and 3-4 feet long.  As soon as your schedule allows (don’t wait two weeks), inoculate them with shiitake sawdust spawn, cover holes with wax, and stack them in a forest area.  She also has hers covered with a shade cloth.  The following year, in June, after some rainy days, soak for 24 hours, and set them vertically.  A week or two weeks later you’ll have your first flush.  You can get a second flush 8-12 weeks later.  The second and third years are the best, while output tapers off in the fourth and fifth years.  I thought I would definitely have to try that!  Maybe the colony of dozens of logs would do the trick….
 
Ellena came to our farm a few weeks later and we scoped out a good spot for the mushroom logs.  We have some mixed woods out back with white pines, and there was a good little area underneath a group of those that seemed perfect.  Then I had to wait all winter.  I can’t believe I was even still believing!  Finally in April 2023, I went out with a friend, Peter, and my brand new, battery-operated chainsaw to cut down some small oak trees that had volunteered in our blueberry patch.  We managed to get 35 logs before the chainsaw ran out (I was a little disappointed at its performance).   We inoculated them within a few days and laid them out in a crisscross pile underneath the pines, 5 rows of 7 logs each. It was a wet summer, so there was no need to water the logs.  In fact, I was so confident, that even before seeing whether this first batch was going to produce, I just went ahead the next year in April, recruited my husband Mark to go out with me, and got another batch of 45 logs with me (he fixed the chainsaw – someone named Babette had put the chain on backwards the year before…).  We inoculated all of those and laid them out in their own pile next to the logs from 2023.
 
June, 2024 came around.  It was time to get the first batch of shiitake logs out from the woods, and to shock them into fruiting.  I made a soaking tub by cutting a rectangle out of the side of a 55-gallon drum and laying it on its side.  We put the logs in for 24 hours, and the next day, put them upright under the table that has the oyster mushroom buckets.   I then casually walked by daily, not letting the logs know I was checking on them (you never know - watched pot doesn’t boil and all that…).  And… drumroll… yes!  A little flush of shiitake appeared!  Maybe two or three pints worth. OMG!  In fact, through June and July we did four more flushes of 7 logs each, with the last two flushes each providing more than 3 pounds of the best shiitake I have had in my life. What. A. Rush.  It was so simple in the end.  All the shiitake needed was the right wood (oak), lots of companions and a bit of evergreen forest.
 
In the future, I hope to grow more mushrooms on logs or on woodchips outdoors, scaling back even the re-usable plastic bucket use.  I feel like that is where they really belong and like to be – even if they oblige us by growing out of plastic bags and plastic buckets.  But that is a story for a future date.