Hi there,
My name is Felix. Since I came to know mushrooms as a little kid, I am a mycophile. That should be enough introduction for now.
This post is some kind of a documentation of the process, but also I want to ask some questions.
At the end of last year I got super excited about oyster mushrooms. I found them in the wild and made cardboard spawn with it. Some more, some less successful. The best outcome was putting whole fruiting bodys inside a zip-loc bag with torn cardboard pieces.
This is it from both sides.
The brown color is from excess metabolites I guess.
It’s over 3 months old now…
So my plan is not only trying to isolate it onto agar, to work with it in the future, but also to use that spawn to produce fruiting somehow.
The Idea was to put it into a bucket, filled with a mixture of coffee grounds and either cardboard or straw for better texture.
I thought about sterilizing the coffee grounds, because they are not fresh anymore. Then doing a lasagna method alternating between the grounds and cardboard (or straw for that matter).
The volume of the big bucket is 20 Liters, and I also have smaller ones (see picture).
The cardboard spawn wheighs around 100g and I have more than 10 Liters of coffee grounds available.
Does anyone have a feeling for the best ratio of ingredients? A fruiting substrate formula?
A minimum inoculation rate of 10% is recommended probably for something like this?
So for weight that would mean the total mass of the fruiting block should not exceed 1 Kg, right?
Might the 20 L bucket be too big? Should I use growing bags instead?
And also how would you go about having the right moisture content for sterilizing the coffee grounds? They are pretty dry, not fully dry but maybe too dry for the autoclave?
These were just some of the questions that could be asked for this odd experiment.
Any considerations? Any thoughts?
I’m super excited to hear your opinion and suggestions on this!
Until then, thanks for taking the time to read this!
Greets Felix