How To Grow Mushrooms in a Bucket

I reckon mushrooms are the most  exciting thing you can grow. Quick, fun and always tasty. Now mushroom growing kits offer  an easy way to get started but they can be on the pricey side.

So in this video I'm going to show you a deliciously simple way to  grow mushrooms like these and once you've got the hang of it  you will be hooked I just know it. Because you can never have  enough mushrooms, right? I'm opting for a system that should prove  both very cost effective and time saving so I can grow more mushrooms repeatedly.

With this in mind I've opted for these 1  gallon or 5 L lided plastic containers. These can be found very cheaply indeed, or you may even be able to find them for free by asking a local restaurant. They may have contained for example pickles.

We'll need something for the  mushrooms to grow on, our substrate, and for this I'm using straw  which is very cheap indeed. Then of course there's the mushroom spawn itself and for this I am using grain spawn which  is really easy to crumble apart and handle. And today we're going to be  growing oyster mushrooms, specifically blue oysters which are  amongst the very easiest to grow at home and the most delicious in my humble opinion.

The mushroom world's your oyster. And then we've got some surgical  tape here and this netting sack and if you're wondering what on  Earth these are for don't worry, all will become clear in a bit. Let's start by preparing the buckets.

Now I don't have a suitable size  drill bit but I know a man who does. Cheers Trevor, really appreciate that. No problem.

Thanks a lot. I'm just drilling a series of  holes across the wall of the bucket and finally I'm just going to drill some  holes across the bottom for drainage. This will stop water pooling at the bottom  and creating kind of unpleasant conditions.

Okay that's the drainage holes done. And then to finish finish off I'm  just going to pick off these kind of bits of sticking out plastic here  and give it a bit of a sand as well, just to give nice smooth edges. Now you can use special mushroom growing bags, but by drilling our own buckets like this we can reuse these time and time  again and get our costs down.

If you want to use something a bit bigger then you could go for something like  this 5 gallon or say 25 L bucket and for something this size I  would suggest around 20 holes. And they would be spaced about 6 in or 15 cm apart and probably have up to four rows  of holes in something this size. Let me show you the straw I'm using today.

I'm using this straw from a pet store. It's clean, but crucially it comes  chopped up into these smaller pieces, and that's important because  it means the mycelium, that's like the roots of  the mushrooms if you like, can get in and colonize it a little bit quicker so we'll get our mushrooms that much sooner. You you could use straw from a bale  but it will need chopping up into smaller pieces first, so do bear that in mind.

To ensure trouble-free growth free  of any contaminants or weed fungi I'm going to pasteurize my straw and I'm just going to plunge it in  here in a bucket full of hot water. Now this is where the sack comes in of course, but if you don't have one of these you  could use for example an old pillowcase or kind of hessian sack, something  like that just to hold our straw. now we are looking for a temperature of 140  to 175 Farenheit, that is 60 to 80° Celsius.

This hot water will pasteurize  our straw by killing off most of the microorganisms but not all of them. It will leave some of the good guys that  will actually help our mushrooms to grow. If I was to sterilize the straw by boiling  it up and killing absolutely everything, perversely our straw is  more open to contamination.

This offers us that sweet spot  hot water but not boiling. Now I've already got some hot water  in here from the faucet or tap and I've just topped it up with the boiling water to give us that kind of perfect  temperature range we're after. That should be enough I reckon.

Now let's just get our straw in there. We want all of the straw to be in contact with the  water so just weigh it down with something heavy, just so it's completely underwater and now this will stay in here for about 1 hour. Kind of feels like a witch's cauldron doesn't it?

Double double, toil and trouble,  fire burn and cauldron bubble. . .

Great stuff, this has had its allotted  time, let's drain it all off now and it should take about half an hour to drip dry. So this is now cool to the  touch and it's drained off and if I give it a squeeze you can see there's there's no more drips coming  from it so this is good to go. The wet straw will be quite heavy,  about three times its original weight.

And now for the real magic, inoculation time. But before we do anything else we need to make sure everything is squeaky clean because we don't want any contaminants spoiling  our whole efforts here and turning things sour. Now you could use something  like this isopropyl alcohol here with gloved hands, but I'm just going to use this kind of sterilizing  powder which I use for my home brewing, that's another story.

Now this is quite safe and I'm just going to rub  the surfaces clean with it, obviously the buckets and the lids, anything that's going to come  into contact with that spawn and my hands as well. So give it a stir and then  just wipe everything down. Don't forget to wipe down the actual  surfaces of wherever you're working as well and even the outside of the spawn bag itself, so every single surface is super squeaky clean.

Time to fill. And I'm going to start with a  good handful or two of our straw and just push it right down, don't be  afraid to squeeze it down like that. That'll do.

And then in with our first layer of our spawn. Just break it up as best as you can like this and sprinkle over the top and we'll be working in layers like this  till we get to the top of our bucket. Now as a rule we're aiming for between  5 and 10% by volume of our grain spawn to 90 to 95% of volume of our straw.

You can get away with a little less of the spawn but that opens us up to the risk  of weed mushrooms getting in there so this gives it a bit of a head start and  ensures that we get our mushrooms quicker. And and that's us right up to the top now  so, let's get those last stragglers in and it's on with the top which I  have of course sterilized first. 'And what about that surgical  tape?

' I hear you ask. Well good question. What we're going to do now is simply cover up  each of our holes with a little bit of tape.

Now this serves two purposes: Firstly it's going to keep  the straw and our spawn nice and protected from contaminants kind of blowing in and because it's breathable it's going to keep  everything nice and airy while it does that, but it will also help to retain some of the  moisture in the straw and keep the humidity up, which of course we know mushrooms absolutely love. There we go, that's the last one. Now these are going to be kept at room temperature  away from wild fluctuations in temperature.

Now over the next 2 weeks or so the mycelium  and will spread out from the grain spawn and throughout the straw completely  colonizing it, ready for our next stage. Look at this one. Now this is one I started  two weeks and two days ago only and you can see it's completely turned white, the mycelium has fully colonized our straw so we're on to the next stage of the  actual mushrooms being produced.

So I'm going to remove the surgical  tape from this one and you can see here we've got the white of the  mycelium right up to the holes here and obviously the holes are where  the mushrooms going to come from. Just pop the lid back on to keep  it nice and clean and protected. As our mushrooms grow it's really  important to offer them somewhere that's really humid and also get some light.

Now in the summer that could be  underneath the shade of a tree, but as it's winter I'm going to put  them near this window here but it's out of direct sunshine and that's important. To keep the the humidity up I'm  simply misting my shrooms twice a day, once in the morning and once again in the evening. If I can remember, at lunchtime as well.

Just give them a good mist like that. And I've got them on a plate  there to keep everything tidy. It's another few days on and  look, we've already got pinning.

That's just the tiny embryonic  fruiting bodies that are ready to kind of pop out and explode into growth  now mushrooms don't grow like plants. These guys, believe it or not will  pretty much double in size every day. It's the speed with which these mushrooms  grow that is the most exciting part.

I get giddy with excitement coming down the stairs in the morning and seeing how much  they've grown, it's just incredible. Imagine getting the kids involved  with this, how much they'd love it. Never mind Xbox or Playstation, this is where it's at!

These guys are now ready to harvest  I reckon, or at least some of them. Let me bring them over. Now the the best time to harvest is when the caps haven't quite fully opened out  and they're not flattened out.

Harvest them while they're still  curled over a bit otherwise the spores which they produce when they're  fully open will go absolutely everywhere. And to harvest, very simple just reach behind  and pull and twist your clump free like that. Now all of these holes are growing at different  rates so they won't all be ready at the same time, so just take them when they are  ready and leave the others to grow on and of course during that time keep the humidity  up by spraying again morning and evening.

Now once you've harvested all of the holes just leave it a few more  weeks keeping the humidity up and you may well find that you get a  second flush or harvest of mushrooms and perhaps even a third flush. Once your bucket is completely done cropping  you can try using the mycelium-laid straw as seed for a new batch of mushrooms. I'd suggest breaking it down into thirds to inoculate three new buckets.

And I'd do it exactly the same as before. Layer your pasturized straw with  some of the mycelium-laden straw and then more pasturized straw and so on in layers until  you've populated a new bucket and then grow it on in exactly the same way. Now it's a couple of weeks on from using the  old straw to inoculate the new pasteurized straw and I'm really pleased to see there is some mycelium colonizing the new  straw pushing through to the top and it's all layered up, so I'm pretty  confident that another kind of 2, 3 weeks this lot will be bearing mushrooms as well so we can keep the cycle going.

If you'd like to try growing mushrooms from  kits before launching into buckets like this, then do check out this video next. In the meantime these guys are  destined for deeply delicious things. If you have any recipes for using them by the way please do share them in the comments below.

I'll catch you next time.