Sometime in February, I picked up a mushroom kit from a big box store. As soon as I opened it, I realized two things:
1. It looked nothing like the other two kits I've bought in my life.
2. The store had left it outside so that it had frozen and thawed most days of the past two months.
It did say on the box that the mushrooms were guaranteed to grow, so I shot them an email. To my surprise, after getting the information about the box, they simply sent me a new kit, completely free!
And boy, did it grow!
One reason I wanted the kit was that the last time we had grown mushrooms, they convinced Choclo that he didn't hate mushrooms - he hated button mushrooms, but oyster mushrooms are delicious!
I was reading the information that came with the kit, and they said they grew the mushrooms in used coffee grounds.
I decided to experiment with our spent kit by burying the mycelium in some of our own spent coffee grounds (in a large plastic container.
To our delight, over the course of a a few weeks, we saw the mycelium grow to turn all of our coffee grounds white.
I popped the whole thing out of it's tight fitting container and started giving it extra water.
On the left is that mycelium, now budding new fruiting bodies (mushrooms).
On the right is the older plastic container. Some of the mycelium stuck to the sides, so I've started filling it with more coffee grounds, and you can see the white patches growing along the sides.
Where will it end? I have no idea!
But it's been a super fun experiment while it's still too cold to garden, and, the fact is, we all love oyster mushrooms!
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