Oyster Mushrooms

Nutrition

Oyster mushrooms have some nutritious properties that are too numerous for me to reproduce here now. Vitamin D is among them, though. Mushrooms have been used throughout history as well for medicinal applications.

Sourcing

These dowels did work for me. As mentioned in the videos (including episode 1), I sterilized (boiled) straw before inoculating with the dowel spawn.

• These dowels are available here: Oyster Mushroom Mycelium Plug Spawn - 100 Count

I've also heard from listeners that inoculating logs should give 3-4 years of fruiting mushrooms, yet often they'll get as many as 6 years of good production. So maybe that's a better way to go than boiling bags of straw...

Cycle

The cycle is LONG -- it can take 3-6-9 months after inoculating a medium depending on conditions before actually yielding fruit (mushrooms). Bear in mind then, that to keep a constant production of mushrooms -- if this is even feasible given that they will only fruit in certain temperatures! -- would require a significant investment into building up a pipeline for months, before collecting any yield.

Any feedback here?

This project took so long to complete, that my data is not flawless on timeline. Sorry for the sloppy write-up; hope to improve soon.

Here is a first video

And a second video

Months later (9/11/2017), I awoke to find that mushrooms had fruited out of one of the bags. Perhaps it is because it's finally getting cool at night? I cut open the other bags to try to encourage fruiting there too, as the mycelium has fully colonized the medium, but nothing much has happened.