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Woohoo! Finally, success!
All summer, I've been trying to get prints of my oyster mushroom culture. I won't be growing this variety again until next summer but growing them from spore prints is free vs $25 for a new spore syringe (which is also a limited quantity of culture)
I'd read that oysters were heavy sporers but time after time, I got no prints. The closest I got was milky-colored liquid (oysters have a white spore print) but it was really faint. Last week, I just left some on the counter and they produced a mild spore print with no moisture but I wasn't trying to capture the print in a sterile way. I'd given up.
I reasoned however that the trick was that unlike other mushrooms, trying to keep them moist was perhaps unhelpful. I'd tried not moistening them but had gotten the same result. So what I decided to try next was to give them more airspace within the container (a much larger container) that would let humidity out.
The other part of the puzzle was temperature. They apparently fruit at temps lower than they produce spores. Below a certain temperature and all your fruits are sterile. (Which could be useful harvesting information for better flavor) Yesterday I had the right spore collection chamber and the right temps and in a few hours I got very heavy spore prints from every fruit I was trying to collect from. Woot! ... Of course, this is the last batch of pleurotus pulmonarius I'll be growing for the season. I'll be switching to columbinus (blue oysters) in a week or so but... At least I have seeds for next year. (And I'll put the old cultures in the compost so these will live on)
I guess I'm going to go mushroom hunting this weekend. I know that chanterelles and chicken of the woods are up in the wild. Wild oysters should probably be out too and possibly some boletus and honey mushrooms. Exciting and delicious!
Maybe I should just give up on trying to grow plants here and grow only mushrooms instead. Even with the weather being cold, the oysters have provided more food than the rest of the garden combined and they take up almost no space at all. In a normal year, they'd produce many more pounds of food and keeping the raccoons and slugs out of the mushrooms seems easier than keeping the deer out of the garden. Or maybe I should do like our neighbors do and put the garden on the roof of the house in 5 gallon buckets.
All summer, I've been trying to get prints of my oyster mushroom culture. I won't be growing this variety again until next summer but growing them from spore prints is free vs $25 for a new spore syringe (which is also a limited quantity of culture)
I'd read that oysters were heavy sporers but time after time, I got no prints. The closest I got was milky-colored liquid (oysters have a white spore print) but it was really faint. Last week, I just left some on the counter and they produced a mild spore print with no moisture but I wasn't trying to capture the print in a sterile way. I'd given up.
I reasoned however that the trick was that unlike other mushrooms, trying to keep them moist was perhaps unhelpful. I'd tried not moistening them but had gotten the same result. So what I decided to try next was to give them more airspace within the container (a much larger container) that would let humidity out.
The other part of the puzzle was temperature. They apparently fruit at temps lower than they produce spores. Below a certain temperature and all your fruits are sterile. (Which could be useful harvesting information for better flavor) Yesterday I had the right spore collection chamber and the right temps and in a few hours I got very heavy spore prints from every fruit I was trying to collect from. Woot! ... Of course, this is the last batch of pleurotus pulmonarius I'll be growing for the season. I'll be switching to columbinus (blue oysters) in a week or so but... At least I have seeds for next year. (And I'll put the old cultures in the compost so these will live on)
I guess I'm going to go mushroom hunting this weekend. I know that chanterelles and chicken of the woods are up in the wild. Wild oysters should probably be out too and possibly some boletus and honey mushrooms. Exciting and delicious!
Maybe I should just give up on trying to grow plants here and grow only mushrooms instead. Even with the weather being cold, the oysters have provided more food than the rest of the garden combined and they take up almost no space at all. In a normal year, they'd produce many more pounds of food and keeping the raccoons and slugs out of the mushrooms seems easier than keeping the deer out of the garden. Or maybe I should do like our neighbors do and put the garden on the roof of the house in 5 gallon buckets.
