Tissue culturing is an easy cheat code for unlimited fungi. I burned some arm holes into a clear storage box and use that as a clean space. If you have a $10 spore syringe or a tiny piece of an existing colony, each agar plate can become 10 grain colonies that become 20 fruiting chambers/bags/logs.
15
LaughingLion [any, any] - 2w
on her channel she has a whole budget setup if someone where to want to do tissue culturing as a cottage business that invlolves that kind of stuff
17
WilsonWilson [comrade/them, any] - 2w
Once you get everything up and running is the price comparable? Before the pandemic I could get 8 oz container of white button mushrooms or baby portobello for $1 to $2 on sale but they start at $5 now and no price breaks. It would be nice if it came out cheaper. Added bonus I could maybe grow oysters, hen of the woods, shiitakes which are unobtainium at any price where I'm at.
15
happybadger [he/him] - 2w
I've never grown button mushrooms or portobellos because I don't like cooking with them. The slimy pizza ones turned me off to fungi until my 20s. In terms of the others:
Oysters - The easiest genus to grow outside of Psilocybe mushrooms. The different species have different preferred temperatures so you just rotate them seasonally. I grow them in buckets with holes drilled around the sides, stuffed with pasteurised wheat straw. Lion's mane grow the same way. Each colony will give you too much to use every two weeks or so. Then the straw is great livestock food or green manure in the garden. You will need a grow tent if you do oysters indoors though. The spores will cause an allergy to them within about a year of growing them if you don't use a respirator/grow them outdoors.
Hen of the woods - These take longer than straw to colonise because you have to do them in hardwood sawdust bags or logs with inoculated wooden dowels hammered into them. The sawdust has to be sterilised for 90 minutes at 15-18PSI depending on elevation, the logs can be pasteurised. Pressure cooker/pot capacity becomes your limiting factor. Each colony will produce a single yearly crop in the autumn for 5+ years.
Shiitake- Very similar to maitake but they prefer logs to sawdust bags. You'll get a lot of them yearly and can use the logs as things like living fences.
If you were to use a sterile scalpel to cut some of the internal mycelium tissue out of a large mushroom from the store, cloning that on agar is easy. Any small portion of that plate can then be used with whatever your cheapest local grain is. Here I use whole oats for horses, recycling the oatwater as a nutrient for my agar plates.
My unit price worked out to something like $1 per oyster colony, and each might fruit 3-5 times over a couple months with one bunch per hole in the bucket. Logs are more expensive because they only like hardwoods, but if you have deciduous forests nearby that's a waste product that's easy to scavenge. Other waste products like coffee grounds and cellulose-containing things can be used as fertiliser and substrates, although they bioaccumulate heavy metals. It'd be hard to eat all the mushrooms you get from a grow chamber the size of a bathroom.
12
carpoftruth [any, any] - 2w
hot damn, I need to get on this with lion's manes. I have a little grow kit in a box on the go and they're very tasty, but I'm not very sophisticated about my setup. do you have any pictures you can share? how do you pasteurize your substrate?
This kind of gardening grow tent set up in the kitchen is what most people use. A swamp humidifier- some stones in a bowl of water- is all that's needed to keep 6-12 colonies fruiting in one of those.
Grow tents like this cost about twice as much, but you're still looking at around $100 for a walk-in space that can fit 20-50 colonies. These allow you to use filtered air systems since airborne contaminants are the main threat with fungiculture. It's also helpful to have a fan and these tents give you more variety. Either of these setups will likely provide a full family's consumption of multiple species. Outdoors you just have to look at all the nonproductive areas of your yard and do guerilla gardening in forest patches where you're also seeding liquid cultures of mycorrhizal fungi like morels/porcinis/chanterelles.
Pasteurising is only for things that are so nutrient-poor that they aren't preferential food for other microbes. Coconut coir, straw, logs, paper and carboard- anything like that you just need to put in near-boiling water for 1.5-3 hours. I use a big stock pot either on the stove or on the ground with periodic refills. It's then left to cool to room temperature which takes 12 hours or so. For nutrient-rich substrates like grains, sawdust, and oatwater liquid cultures I put them in mason jars with the lids slightly loosened and stick them in my instantpot for 1.5 hours before cooling overnight.
7
carpoftruth [any, any] - 2w
Awesome, thank you for the resources, this will give me something to work on over holidays. My biggest constraint is indoor floor space.
4
happybadger [he/him] - 2w
Fungiculture is a great hobby. It really expanded my horizons as a gardener.
4
mickey [he/him] - 1w
The spores will cause an allergy to them within about a year of growing them if you don't use a respirator/grow them outdoors.
I've grown Oysters on straw and Shiitake, Lion's Mane and Reishii on wood substrate bags and I did not know this, thanks for the tip. I am planning in the future to tissue culture from store bought mushrooms in the manner you've described.
Button mushrooms seem like too much trouble to grow yourself because they're secondary decomposers they need compost to grow on and they're affordable in the store, but we diverge on their culinary use 'cause I think they are some tasty buggers.
In commercial fungi farms, usually they'll use respirators if not clean suits when working around oysters. I always just take them outside when harvesting and open them with a KN95 mask on.
3
chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them] - 2w
I don't think you come out ahead with mushroom growing kits but if you it yourself, the materials are very cheap.
I produced some mycelium cultures from cell samples I took from store bought mushrooms. But never went ahead growing any because I didn't have a suitable space.
Just a small piece of the mushroom in a sterile mixture of water, agave sirup and molasses. Prepared the container by cutting a hole in the top of the lid and sealed it with high temperature silicone to be able to transfer some with a syringe without contamination.
LaughingLion in videos
I accidentally crashed the rare plant market
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dk3uSLxMI4plant piracy is cool fuck the police
Tissue culturing is an easy cheat code for unlimited fungi. I burned some arm holes into a clear storage box and use that as a clean space. If you have a $10 spore syringe or a tiny piece of an existing colony, each agar plate can become 10 grain colonies that become 20 fruiting chambers/bags/logs.
on her channel she has a whole budget setup if someone where to want to do tissue culturing as a cottage business that invlolves that kind of stuff
Once you get everything up and running is the price comparable? Before the pandemic I could get 8 oz container of white button mushrooms or baby portobello for $1 to $2 on sale but they start at $5 now and no price breaks. It would be nice if it came out cheaper. Added bonus I could maybe grow oysters, hen of the woods, shiitakes which are unobtainium at any price where I'm at.
I've never grown button mushrooms or portobellos because I don't like cooking with them. The slimy pizza ones turned me off to fungi until my 20s. In terms of the others:
Oysters - The easiest genus to grow outside of Psilocybe mushrooms. The different species have different preferred temperatures so you just rotate them seasonally. I grow them in buckets with holes drilled around the sides, stuffed with pasteurised wheat straw. Lion's mane grow the same way. Each colony will give you too much to use every two weeks or so. Then the straw is great livestock food or green manure in the garden. You will need a grow tent if you do oysters indoors though. The spores will cause an allergy to them within about a year of growing them if you don't use a respirator/grow them outdoors.
Hen of the woods - These take longer than straw to colonise because you have to do them in hardwood sawdust bags or logs with inoculated wooden dowels hammered into them. The sawdust has to be sterilised for 90 minutes at 15-18PSI depending on elevation, the logs can be pasteurised. Pressure cooker/pot capacity becomes your limiting factor. Each colony will produce a single yearly crop in the autumn for 5+ years.
Shiitake- Very similar to maitake but they prefer logs to sawdust bags. You'll get a lot of them yearly and can use the logs as things like living fences.
If you were to use a sterile scalpel to cut some of the internal mycelium tissue out of a large mushroom from the store, cloning that on agar is easy. Any small portion of that plate can then be used with whatever your cheapest local grain is. Here I use whole oats for horses, recycling the oatwater as a nutrient for my agar plates.
My unit price worked out to something like $1 per oyster colony, and each might fruit 3-5 times over a couple months with one bunch per hole in the bucket. Logs are more expensive because they only like hardwoods, but if you have deciduous forests nearby that's a waste product that's easy to scavenge. Other waste products like coffee grounds and cellulose-containing things can be used as fertiliser and substrates, although they bioaccumulate heavy metals. It'd be hard to eat all the mushrooms you get from a grow chamber the size of a bathroom.
hot damn, I need to get on this with lion's manes. I have a little grow kit in a box on the go and they're very tasty, but I'm not very sophisticated about my setup. do you have any pictures you can share? how do you pasteurize your substrate?
https://zombiemyco.com/blogs/mushroom-teks/martha-tent-tek
This kind of gardening grow tent set up in the kitchen is what most people use. A swamp humidifier- some stones in a bowl of water- is all that's needed to keep 6-12 colonies fruiting in one of those.
https://vivosun.com/Grow_Tent_Kit-c11
Grow tents like this cost about twice as much, but you're still looking at around $100 for a walk-in space that can fit 20-50 colonies. These allow you to use filtered air systems since airborne contaminants are the main threat with fungiculture. It's also helpful to have a fan and these tents give you more variety. Either of these setups will likely provide a full family's consumption of multiple species. Outdoors you just have to look at all the nonproductive areas of your yard and do guerilla gardening in forest patches where you're also seeding liquid cultures of mycorrhizal fungi like morels/porcinis/chanterelles.
Pasteurising is only for things that are so nutrient-poor that they aren't preferential food for other microbes. Coconut coir, straw, logs, paper and carboard- anything like that you just need to put in near-boiling water for 1.5-3 hours. I use a big stock pot either on the stove or on the ground with periodic refills. It's then left to cool to room temperature which takes 12 hours or so. For nutrient-rich substrates like grains, sawdust, and oatwater liquid cultures I put them in mason jars with the lids slightly loosened and stick them in my instantpot for 1.5 hours before cooling overnight.
Awesome, thank you for the resources, this will give me something to work on over holidays. My biggest constraint is indoor floor space.
Fungiculture is a great hobby. It really expanded my horizons as a gardener.
I've grown Oysters on straw and Shiitake, Lion's Mane and Reishii on wood substrate bags and I did not know this, thanks for the tip. I am planning in the future to tissue culture from store bought mushrooms in the manner you've described.
Button mushrooms seem like too much trouble to grow yourself because
they're secondary decomposersSpecifically it's mushroom grower's lung: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9841544/
In commercial fungi farms, usually they'll use respirators if not clean suits when working around oysters. I always just take them outside when harvesting and open them with a KN95 mask on.
I don't think you come out ahead with mushroom growing kits but if you it yourself, the materials are very cheap.
I produced some mycelium cultures from cell samples I took from store bought mushrooms. But never went ahead growing any because I didn't have a suitable space.
Just a small piece of the mushroom in a sterile mixture of water, agave sirup and molasses. Prepared the container by cutting a hole in the top of the lid and sealed it with high temperature silicone to be able to transfer some with a syringe without contamination.
Based
Saw a short by her a few days ago very cool.