Get Started Growing Your Own Mushrooms Part 2

Hey community! Today I'm here with mycologist Jessica Wolfe from Grow Mushrooms Canada and she's taken her passion for wild food and food sovereignty and turned it into a really interesting and unique business in helping people cultivate mushrooms. So one thing I love that you're doing is growing all kinds of different types of mushrooms. So I know that all of these are medicinal but a lot of them are edible too. We've got many different varieties of oyster here. I see the turkey tail, the wine caps, the shiitakes, but also reishi and chicken of the woods and other really cool types. Tell us a little bit about that. Like what got you into such diversity? Diversity is fun. Right? So experimentation? Yeah and every mushroom has a different texture and taste and I think I'm really into texture. I like the really firm mouthfeel. I like the firm king oyster. Those are good. Yeah so and they are so different. You know the pom-pom of a lion's mane and people making vegan crab cakes from it. There's just so much diversity. The colors. The yellow oyster is so beautiful. They're beautiful. And then we're starting up the pink oyster. They're tropical species so we don't sell them through the winter time because we don't think they can manage through Canada's winter being shipped. But we're starting up the pink oyster which is really glorious. Beautiful yeah. Yeah all the oysters are really cool. Wine caps are neat because they're just they grow so big and they're so easy. Like they're just yeah they're one of my favorites. Yeah wine caps are very easy and you know it's it's really easy to grow mushrooms. You can take it to the far level where you need a lot of equipment and stuff if you want to get right into it. But for the average person you really don't need much at all to get started in growing mushrooms. I think that's what was exciting to me when I saw that you were starting up Grow Mushrooms Canada is like you're taking all the hard work out of the equation. Making it easy for us to just like oh wow okay here's what I do and now I've got food. And really empowering us to like start to then take that even the leftover substrate and put it into new stuff. So I really want to make sure that people understand that when this is done fruiting it's not the end of the life cycle. So give us a couple of like what do we do with it then? Yeah so I would take this this bag and I could start by fruiting it. You could do a second run of fruit too. I could get maybe three or four flushes of mushrooms out of this bag. Then I could take this and instead of just composting it if I had a tree fall down in the winter storm I could cut the tree up into rounds and crumble up this mycelium and sawdust and put it in between layers. Like a sandwich? Like a sandwich. A log sandwich I call it. I could also. I like the sound of that. Yeah. Oh yes I like making shiitake. So you take the mycelium you put them between rounds and sort of stack it up. Stack it up and then you just let it sit outside and let nature do its thing. What else can you do with wood? Well we can use the log in other ways. It just involves a bit of tools like a drill. All you need is a drill. You drill holes into like a three or four foot long section of a log and then you can either insert some of the sawdust bomb with a special tool or you can use our plug spawn which is really easy. You just need a hammer and you just tap the plug spawn in. That's well how I got into growing mushrooms the first time was was using plugs and dowels and I found it super intuitive and super easy to grow. Plus you're creating these little time capsules right by plugging them and covering them in wax and it's just they grow for a number of years. At least we had 10 years of good growth. Yeah seasonally they'll it takes a while it takes patience and I used to go down and stare at my shiitake logs night after night waiting for the very first mushroom to ever grow. What am I doing wrong? Yeah right because that first year can be a bit defeatist because you put all this work in making these logs and then they don't do anything for a year and a half. Once they're ready and they fruit for the first time then you have many years of mushroom production from the log. So how long does it usually take do you find? A year and a half. Yeah that's that's and that depends on if you do them in the fall or the spring right? Yeah and and see now that's that's something where I was um wanting to learn more about Canadian specifically because a lot of in all my reading it was from the the United States. Yeah it's all American. States and and so it's we've got totally different climate here and they would say oh you're gonna get a mushroom in six months. Well after six months you know going down and looking at my logs every day took a long time. You're just like come on logs. Another another year what am I doing wrong? Uh so yeah here in our climate on the red alder that I was growing on it took a year and a half for the first fruiting. Yeah and I noticed you had a few different types of logs so you had like red alder which is the one I've always grown shiitakes on and I think is just a great medium but also notice maples you had you had some grown on maple. Yeah we have um the big leaf maple here on Vancouver Island um if you can get your hands on some oak that's great too across Canada there's other trees the beech, birch, maple. So what are so maybe just at a high level what are some of the best is it all deciduous trees that are best for growing mushrooms on? Most of the commonly cultivated mushrooms are grown on hardwoods so deciduous trees that lose their leaves for the winter time. Okay. But I'm really interested because we have a lot of coniferous trees in Canada. I'm really interested in expanding our repertoire of species that can grow on conifer trees and um there is uh well like chicken of the woods I see in nature right and there's also a one like the lion's mane the bear's head right that grows here on Douglas fir and and uh the the true fir trees so I'm interested in expanding our knowledge and our culture base around. Awesome I love that you're always it's like this continual improvement um educating I saw that on the website you actually had bear's head and I was like wow yeah not a very commonly sold mushroom but it's you know with lion's mane having such a buzz around I can't remember what it's good for again oh yeah memory memory right right right the bear's head really offers an opportunity to get something more locally hybridized and then also as you're saying yeah growing on different substrates yeah they're pretty exciting cool cool yeah you you look excited about them so we've talked about growing grain spawn and soda spawn and pellets but what do you do with some of these other substrates I see you've got straw here I see there's some coffee grounds and I also see these wood pellets can you tell us a little bit about that yeah absolutely there's all sorts of uh waste organic materials you can grow on and some things that you can pick up from your local farm and feed store like straw is really great for growing oyster mushrooms um not all species will grow on straw but oyster mushrooms if you're a beginner grower they're the they're your starting they're the easiest one yeah they're a super aggressive uh colonizer of the medium they're gonna take over before any mold gets a hold and what about wine caps do they grow on straw too wine caps grow on straw also um so you could plant the straw into a bucket with mixing it just with the the soda spawn and do you sterilize the straw or do you just well that's up to you it's always a an option to um sterilize it so that there's no mold spores and if you have the means to do it in the patients but if it's just boiling it down like double double boiling trouble the the real easy way is to just actually put it in into a container and pour hot water on it really hot water on it and let it sit for an hour and a half and then drain it really well and then plant it right but you don't have to do that it just increases your success right because it it knocks back any mold contamination in there so oysters and um wine caps anything else are great on the straw you could also grow yellow oysters we have a number of different varieties of oysters that you can grow on straw and they also both like to grow on the wood chips as well and oysters will grow on coffee grounds which is great because yeah so it's really a great use of your leftover waste and you can grow them on hardwood chips or these pellets are pure compressed sawdust so if i hydrate that it turns into sawdust right and you can just get those from the animal feed store or from the bucker fields or from your local hardware store as well right and so lots more things will grow on the sawdust yeah species and we can make wood chips ourselves easily you could if you've got uh you've got some uh branches that you want to chip up and so you can grow this in a garden bed on the ground and or in a bucket and the bucket's just a container to hold it all together really right it is and um you'll need a place for the mushrooms to emerge from so you drill holes in the bucket and the mushrooms will pop out do you do you moisten that is there any kind of upkeep for those buckets um you would want it well you would want drainage in the bottom if you're allowing any rain to fall on there you don't you don't want it to collect and be a puddle of water because right kill it yeah so you you would have to have drainage in the bottom of the bucket and um holes in the side and you can um put a lid on it you could even do that indoors people do that indoors but then the moisture when it's time when it's all white with mycelium it then it's the time to keep it moist outside so if if nature's cooperating and you've got a nice rainy week you're going to get mushrooms fruiting on their own without much work but if it's dry then you're going to have to do rig something up to keep it humid and i've done things as simple as having a shelf unit yeah draping the plastic over and taking my hose and spraying the inside of the plastic to keep it humid and you get quite um ingenuitive to really like just come up with different custom settings to like yeah to get them growing yeah you just really you just gotta think like a mushroom right think like a mushroom act like a mushroom be one with the mushrooms and you will fruit yeah and fun gal so lastly i want to ask you about growing reishi now i have a special place in my heart for reishi this is a one of my favorite mushrooms and i see that you're growing in here and that you have some experience with that so maybe for those of us who want to produce our own medicinal reishi give us a few tips and ways to get started on that there's another one too the turkey tail is another one and both of them are uh very slow growing so the mushrooms themselves are slow to form and it's a trick because it's hard to hand mist every day for months right right so one thing i've done with the reishi is just leave them in the bag now this is not something i do with the other species because they would just not form right proper mushrooms but the reishi is it's kind of deformed but it's a huge fruit body yeah there's a lot of fruit in there it just kept the moisture inside the bag and i didn't do anything i just left it and they look more like reishi antlers too which i understand is a little higher potency in some of the active compounds oh but also more co2 environment right that's right that's right so that's the the thing is that we did not give this any air exchange well i was looking at this one right here and i just like wow what a cool isn't it and people are interested in fungal sculpting and things too what a what a fascinating thing to do yeah and very easy yeah and you can see it really did digest a lot of that substrate it did like a big sponge yeah cool um if you harvested this it's now that's like going to get one harvest off this though right yeah yeah but there's still life in this fungal mycelium so i could be planting that into a maple log right so yeah so maples that's what i've heard too maple is one of the best ones for growing or harder woods for growing reishi um what else if we have other access to other wood would be oh well people are often asking about cherry trees yeah and fruit trees are reportedly not the best mushroom growing trees however i have seen turkey tail growing on wild cherry maybe for sure me too yeah that's that's yeah so that's something i'm wanting to experiment more with is uh success and i've got so would you plug them with sawdust or or pellets or with some of the uh some of the the plugs and you do turkey tail but would you try cherry and reishi or would you try cherry you gotta try everything yeah i gotta try i guess that's how we learned all that we know because we have that bitter cherry here and it's it definitely um i've got some in my house and i'm thinking about plugging it up okay well i'll let you know what i find out too please do that that's our whole goal is to collect as much information about specific to growing mushrooms across canada yeah that we can share that knowledge with everybody i love that yeah so if you are in canada if you are watching this video make sure to leave a comment around some of your experience with growing mushrooms let's keep that conversation going and make sure of course you like the video because we've got lots more to share on this all in all i'm seeing that there are so many different ways we can grow mushrooms this is a health empowering thing a lifestyle exchange something to get us a little closer connected to ourselves and to our food any last tips you would give to any would-be mycologists or mushroom growers who are just starting out absolutely i would say you want to start with something that's going to give you a success and that would be an oyster mushroom kit where all you have to do is cut it open and put a humidity tent over it and spray inside and mushrooms will grow out of it easy right yeah the second uh next thing i would suggest is uh maybe an outdoor bed with the wine caps yeah in your garden like they're kind of garden giants garden giants is another name for them they're such an impressive mushroom and you just got to spread the spread the spawn around at the base of your raspberry bed with in in some straw it's that simple yeah and and then if you have access to some wood some freshly fallen logs then planting shiitake or oyster in them would be my next suggestion love that so start with success and these are three really easy ways to get going as well as any of the kits you do come with like instructions and ways to like get them to fruit and stuff like that yeah and we we will be developing a greater resource on our website as well with lots of educational videos well thank you so much that's at growmushroomscanada.ca right that's right awesome all right my friends may you live long and prosper we'll see you next time