Do you want to make your own blocks to grow mushrooms at home?

Mushroom cultivation is a very fun way to explore this wonderful organism. It is a process that leads us to learn a lot about the role of mushrooms in nature.

Choosing the substrate

In order to grow mushrooms we must first answer a fundamental question. What do mushrooms eat?

Most of the easily cultivated mushrooms are seen growing in nature from trees or detached trunks and branches. These mushrooms are in fact primary decomposers; feeding on the now dead wood, they allow its decomposition.

The substrate on which we should then grow the mushrooms will be a wood-based substrate. Alternatively, you can also use straw. For this purpose, we can use sawdust or even wood pellets for stoves or straw pellets.

This will provide the raw material for our production substrate.

To obtain increasingly larger harvests, however, it is recommended to add a nutritional compound to the substrate, such as wheat bran. The only problem is that a supplemented substrate will have to be sterilized in a pressure cooker or sterilized in a steam sterilizer at atmospheric pressure for a long time. While a substrate without a supplement, therefore for example only composed of wood pellets, does not require sterilization. However, it is advisable to pasteurize the substrate with one of the techniques that we will list shortly.

Hydration

The last fundamental aspect to prepare an excellent substrate is its hydration. This must be precise because the mycelium has difficulty growing in an environment that is too humid or too dry. In addition, a substrate that is too humid where we have water deposits can favor the birth of competing organisms. The substrate should therefore be hydrated at 60%.

What does this mean? It means that 60% of the final weight of your block should be water.

If you are making a 2.5kg block with wood pellets for example,

• 1500g will be water and the remaining 1000g will be pellets.

Now all you need to do is put the water and your chosen material into a container. If you need to sterilize your substrate, we recommend using autoclavable mushroom growing bags . These bags are resistant to high temperatures and have a filter that will protect your substrate once inoculated and sealed from contaminants, while also promoting the exchange of oxygen necessary for the development of the mycelium. The presence of the filter justifies the use of these bags even for non-sterilized substrates.

Sterilization of the substrate

To sterilize your substrate, fold the bags well without sealing them and put them in a pressure cooker. If your pressure cooker reaches 1 bar, you can sterilize for at least 1.5 hours. Preferably if the volume of water in your cooker allows it, even up to 2 hours.

If you want to grow on a highly nutritious substrate but do not have the tools to sterilize it, you can buy it already prepared and sterilized ready to be inoculated. Take a look at our most productive substrate.

If you do not have a way to sterilize the substrate. We recommend simply hydrating your unsupplemented pellet with the right amount of boiling water. Pour the boiling water over the pellet already in the mushroom growing bag, try to close the bag by folding it on the pleats and wait for it to cool completely before inoculating.

Inoculation

The last step is inoculation. For this you will need Grain Spawn / Fresh Mycelium , of the species you wish to grow.

Your bag of grain spawn will most likely arrive very compact. Before using it, you will need to separate all the grains well without opening the bag. Only open it when you are ready to inoculate!

Make sure your substrate is not hot and pour the grain spawn into the bag. Try to use at least 10% spawn for the total weight of the block. In the example above, for a 2.5kg block we would want to use at least 250g of grain spawn. For unsupplemented substrates it is recommended to use more spawn. This will provide more nutrition to your mushrooms and will give you bigger harvests! Seal the bag, either with a heat sealer, or simply fold the top edge over itself a couple of times and secure with paper clips. Make sure to mix the substrate and grain spawn well so that it is distributed as evenly as possible throughout the substrate.

Keep the block at a temperature above 20C and begin fruiting once it is fully colonised.

Happy Growing!