as a home mushroom cultivator I can tell you that this device is pretty much the Juicero of the mushroom world. from what i'm reading this device accomplishes nothing that one can't do with a homemade monotub composed of a 32 quart storage tote, a spray bottle and some polyfill. if you are interested in growing edible gourmet mushrooms look up a local mushroom farm in your area, most of them sell blocks that you can fruit at home.
There is a lot of effort in those simple words though. Based on my experience—
1) Sterilize the substrate/polyfill. This is not trivial. I personally use a bag set in a hot water bath with a sous vide heater.
2) Use food grade buckets and make evenly spaced holes in them. Sterilize those buckets.
3) Prepare the buckets by layering substrate and then a layer of the inoculated material. This is not easy, everything needs to be sterile.
4) Manually spray them down every other day.
5) Control the light. Needs to be dark initially during propagation and then some light so the mushrooms know to grow out.
That’s a lot of work. It’s like saying anyone can just set up rsync, what’s the big deal with Dropbox.
That being said, it’s silly to buy these preseeded boxes. It’s going to be super expensive and your harvest is going to be tiny. Much cheaper to just buy the mushrooms at the store.
The only thing this makes sense for is super rare strains of mushrooms (if they can grow morels I’m sold) and of course psilocybin.
Yes but I was using straw and if the temperature is too high it cooks the straw and then it’s useless. I guess it’s a crap shoot hoping there wasn't anaerobic conditions to grow botulism in the straw bale. For all other spores, the mycelium grows fast enough to make sure nothing else can gain a foothold.
you do realise that you aren't sterilising anything though right? It's not a crap shoot - it's a unnecessary step since you aren't actually achieving anything. You might as well not do that step
You do NOT want to sterilize straw, or indeed most substrates. You typically only want to pasteurize your substrate, sterilization is what you want for for your grain spawn. There are all kinds of beneficial microorganisms you are killing off if you do, which help to prevent contamimation/re-colonization from wild micro-organisms. Pasteurization of the substrate is intended to kill off competitive fungus and mold spores while leaving these helpful organisms alive.
You can get away with sterilizing your grain spawn because you keep it isolated in a sealed jar, away from environmental contaminants, until it is completely colonized by mycelium. But since substrate is exposed to wild molds and other ambient contaminants, it needs it's microbial defense team.
Straw is quite a hassle, it contaminates with mold super easily, and is and about 20 years out-of-date to current practice. Yes, the Stamets book calls for it. The Stamets book is old. Any advise older than about ~5 years in this field is questionable at best.
Most folk these days use coconut coir (shredded husk) as a substrate. It's cheap, convenient to ship and store, and it is more resistant to contaminant growth. Coir comes in compressed bricks, you rehydrate it in water just off boil, it expands about 10:1, then you psuedo-"pasteurize" by letting it sit in an insulated cooler for 2 or 3 hours until it is below 170F.
Nice info, I have used coconut coir for growing vegetables in hydroponics, but it's nice to see that it's usable as a medium for mushrooms. I think I know what my next project is gonna be.
Do you add anything to the substrate besides npk? Which I assume you would use, but I don't know enough about mushrooms yet. And if you do, do you control the mushroom stages by different ratios of npk as well? Besides of course, inspecting them as well.
Not even NPK. The nutrition comes from the grain spawn, not the substrate. Our acronym for the substrate mix is CVG - Coir/Verm/Gypsum. Vermiculite is a common additive, for additional water retention. Some but not all people do use gypsum, which has the added benefit of PH buffering in case the coir was not rinsed well by the manufacturer, however some recently A/B experiments have shown it to not be of particular benefit.
Mushroom cultivation is really remarkably simple, and the worst thing to do is overcomplicate it, like with this gadget. The hardest part for most people to learn is the sterilization/sanitation steps that are required in the early parts of the grow, but it's not much worse than home beer brewing. Fruiting is mostly regulated by CO2 levels / fresh air exchange, and the microclimate (humidity and still air) within the first few millimeters of the surface. Everyone thinks they can electronically monitor and regulate this, but it rarely works well, and the community has developed passive methods that work just fine and cost nearly nothing.
The minimum equipment list for practical growing is a large pressure cooker/canner (Instapot will do in a pinch), some mason jars, some plastic shoeboxes for fruiting chambers, and a big plastic storage box to make a "Still Air Box" (a poor man's laminar flow hood)
Ingredients for food/spawn can be as as simple as cakes made from brown rice flour and vermiculite. Some use wild birdseed, I prefer whole oats. Woodlovers get the cheapest wood mulch they sell at Home Depot.
Whether you are interested in psychoactives or just gourmets like oysters, I recommend people skip reddit/youtube and "Uncle Bens" pre-cooked rice junk, and head over to shroomery.org, an old-school web 1.0 messageboard that has been active since 1999. One of the moderators there has a list of up-to-date threads for getting started. https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/2414402...
Awesome recommendations, now I have something to guide my intuition about what resources to focus on.
I will check out shroomery, and see what the simplest and minimum amount of control feedback loops I can get away with using. If any, preferable passive as you say. Thanks!
Coconut coir is not cheap though. I can get a bale of wheat straw for $5. The same amount of coconut coir is around $60 which makes growing the mushrooms not worth the cost and effort.
One in ten/fifteen buckets with straw may get moldy but it’s still an order of magnitude cheaper.
When I make alcohol, I usually use a pasteurization equation to figure out what temp and time will kill pathogens [0]. Depending on what you do, and what you want to kill, your needs might differ, but this is usually good enough. But it is not, as you say, complete sterilization if that is what you meant. As you will notice, temperature can be lower, if you increase the time.
I was about to make the rsync/Dropbox comparison. As someone who has little real interest in mushroom cultivation but a love for charming desk objects, if someone bought me this as a gift I’d love it.
I always recommend the "uncle bens tek" to people who are starting out. The tl;dr is that you use pre-sterilized uncle bens rice packets that are a buck a pop from the store. Innoculate, forget about them, and then fruit them. Fruiting requires some work for sure, but it's pretty minimal with this tek and you can really neglect it and still see results.
I got caught up in a similar thing years ago but for plants (MiT open ag initiative). It was all nonsense. An educational tool at best. I don't know about this particular product, but I do know that growing mushrooms is like growing plants, with a few less steps (no light), and a few other sensitivities (moisture control).
The products that are valuable to make in this space have been made and are already commercially available to growers. Grow chambers, climate control stuff, etc.
Ultimately we don't need Linux and Microcontrollers to do this, it's using the wrong hammer. Agriculture needs to be dead simple, simple as possible, reliable as possible. These things are not that.
...and several other NY Times articles covering the mess. It never worked. Period. Which is amazing, considering that several friends have built DIY systems using open-source equivalents, for growing vegetables (and "vegetables").
This thing looks extremely rough when examining pictures and video at highest resolution available. Take a look at the left edge of the display cut out, as an example:
Wow I recognize this! That stuttered uneven spot is what happens when I try to flatten the edges with a dremel with the cylinder bit on and the speed up too high. It catches and digs in and makes the little dip.
It's a prototype, so not necessarily indicative of the final finish. That looks like it's been cut by a craft knife, which is unlikely to be the final manufacturing process.
Good call out. I respect the effort put into the aesthetics of the prototype, but the display cut out could definitely have been flush-mounted in a way to disguise the cut out with something as simple as household white quarter inch trim.
Slick design comes in time, and the device itself looks quite nice IMO. I just think it reeks of the Juicero "hammering a screw" approach. Monotubs are dead simple and cheap, but do require a bit of research/knowledge/trial and error to get started producing fruiting bodies. Without knowing the cost of Shrooly's replacement boxes, it really comes down to convenience and personal value of having fresh mushrooms on hand. I'd rather have something like this on my bookshelf than a Rubbermaid shoe tote full of dirt and pinheads, though.
also looks like it's using a dht (probably 22) sensor which is not accurate. In high humidity environments should look for a sensor with a ptfe membrane.
What I would pay money for is a simple panel -mount device with an ultrasonic mister and a fan, basically a simple humidistat that can sense and flush CO2. I actually bought components to do this but never quite got around to it.
It does look nice enough to use it as a conversation piece when you throw parties, so there's that, over juicero. I think that must appeal to a certain type of person.
Yea if I was cooking for someone I would feel better about harvesting food from this device than "hold on a second while I get this bucket out of my cupboard."
I agree. Mushroom growing needs to be hygienic but depends on conditions that are not normally considered hygienic. Having some help in terms of the inputs and conditions would provide reassurance. There are lots of products like that in the kitchen that take something relatively easy and make it more consistent.
You got me curious about the growing process (didn't even know it's something you can do at home), and came across this fascinating tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm1FgFFzQd4
I found sterilizing the jars (in a hot bath), innoculating the (brown rice) and getting the mycelium to take over took the most effort and time (takes like 2 months in the dark for the mycelium to take over the entire jar).
Getting it to fruit was easy and all I needed was some vermeculite to place the mycelium block on top of and a plastic container to act as a terrarium so it will trap the humidity from the spray bottle.
HN does love to dump on anybody doing anything but I don't think that home mushroom growing tools are in the same boat as easy to use cloud file access.
Perfectly fair, it's obviously not really a good comparison. I'd however rather pay a bit more to have something a bit prettier than a spray painted monotub sitting on my shelf, when possible. Function over form, but I don't totally discount form either, I like pretty things.
This one in particular is a good example of connected for the sake of it though lol
I don't think these smart boxes are for mushroom growers (agriculture) but for magic mushroom growers (recreational drug use). Where a "Click&Grow" equivalent is needed. With a hydrometer and water sprayer instead of a timed light.
i fear coming off as a hostile know it all, but i think this company is simply parting a fool from their money (see Juicero). i don't think that a click and grow equivalent is needed in the cubensis cultivation space. with the advent of uncle bens tek around 2019 and pf tek years before that the flood gates for at home cultivation psilocybe cubensis have already been opened.
Yet there's still no begginer-friendly way of doing any of that without diving head-first into the DIY home growing literature. Your comments are coming off as gatekeeping for no other reason than speculation and the fact you're already familiar with the space.
This product seems to simplify the entire process of home growing, which is a bit more involved than squeezing juice out of fruit. As long as it's priced and marketed appropriately, I don't see a reason why it shouldn't exist. Whether there's a market for it is another question, though.
This product simplifies nothing, honestly. The ‘hardest’ part of growing mushrooms is keeping things sterile for the inoculation and colonization phases. This does nothing to address that besides offering it pre-made. Which you can already buy at tons of places for reasonable prices.
This device only actually involves the easiest part of the entire process - fruiting. And you’ll get the same results by just throwing your colonized media in a $2 shoebox as other people have already stated.
I like the comparison to juicero others are making, that’s essentially what this is.
And by the way, absolutely none of this is too complicated for your average person. There are tons of literally step-by-step guides online for free.
This device only addresses the final step of the process which is in fact the easiest step (when dealing with home scale cultivation).
There are already many companies which will sell you pre-inoculated bricks which are delivered to you in a cardboard box which you use as the fruiting chamber. The only difference here is that this company made the fruiting chamber out of plastic instead of cardboard.
In terms of complexity, IMO basic home cultivation is somewhere between baking a simple loaf of bread and assembling an IKEA shelf unit and installing it on the wall. It takes basic web search skills to find info on front-to-back DIY technique, and one can find colonized media online or at the farmers market.
That being said, every level of simplification grants a hobby a new audience. I think the objection here is the attempt to create a Juicero model, where you get a fancy machine that requires (maybe DRM'd? not sure) media pods in perpetuity if you want to keep using it.
(edit: doesn't appear to be vendor locked media, but the machine is $299... I spent less on that for my pressure canner, mason jars, fruiting chamber, and food dehydrator put together. sort of puts into question who this is for.)
> basic home cultivation is somewhere between baking a simple loaf of bread and assembling an IKEA shelf unit
It's a bit more involved than that, no? I'm not familiar myself, but don't you need to take into account things like temperature and humidity as well? If their mushroom blocks can tell the box the ideal conditions for each particular strain, and those can be maintained to produce a better end product, that already seems like a win over doing all of that manually.
> the machine is $299
Yeah, that's a bit much. They have to factor in mobile app development somewhere, right? :)
Again, I'm not saying that this particular product will succeed. But I think there might be a segment of the market that wants to get into home growing, but doesn't want to mess around with the DIY aspects of it.
If you can clean your kitchen/bathroom properly, and you can follow the instructions to bake a loaf of bread, you can almost certainly follow some of the simpler procedures.
During the fruiting phase, things are pretty easy. Once the substrate is colonized you sort of just take the lid off of your fruiting chamber, mist it with a sprayer, and wave the lid at it to blow the excess CO2 out. Once a day. That's what this $299 box does for you.
The part that's akin to baking bread is the initial media preparation and inoculation. You need to measure your media, hydrate it, put it in a hot thing (bread:oven::mycoculture media:pressure canner) for the requisite number of minutes. My first mycoculture attempts were far more successful than my first attempts at breadmaking.
The comparison with Jucero was unfair. This device does automate temperature control, misting and light. Which I understand is necessary for mushroom fruiting. I’m not sure what they do for the colonization phase which I understand is a necessary prep step. Although I bought a colonized Lions Mane log for $20 at the farmers market so it can’t be too complex. That being said the instructions I received for fruiting are pretty simple too so I’m not sure I’d buy this device unless I wanted a kitchen counter conversation piece. Or a science fair type toy.
Also Jucero was even worse than you think. It squeezed juice out of little plastic packets.
You are over estimating the complexity of fruiting commercial strains of edible mushrooms at this scale. You really only need to worry about automation when working at scale. For a single brick you just need to put the bag in a mostly clean area, slash it open on the sides, and mist it with a spray bottle.
>Your comments are coming off as gatekeeping for no other reason than speculation and the fact you're already familiar with the space.
On hacker news it is considered gate keeping to invent ever simpler ways of doing things that are more accessible and are proven to work. In a parallel world someone figures out how to just throw spores in a bucket with rice with no thinking, no preparation and someone on HN will call that person out for gatekeeping because it is not using a fancy shaped box that uses microcontrollers and internet of things and all sorts of other pointless extras that have nothing to do with mushrooms but detract from learning how to grow them.
for edible gourmet mushrooms (lions main, oyster, king trumpet) its as simple as buying a fully colonized block, slashing open the package and letting it grow with some occasional misting. its a great activity for kids. mushrooms are incredibly resilient and want to grow. below is a good video on how easy it is.
"This product seems to simplify the entire process of home growing,"
Eh, it can be difficult. The most difficult part is sterilization and inoculations/transfers. This doesn't help with that. You can literally hook up a mister to a timer to get the same effect (I know, I've done it as a newbie).
But I agree that people will buy it, as they do many things that aren't truly necessary (doesn't bother me).
I agree with you to an extent, but what has held me back in the past is that uncle bens tek seems a little sketchy (I want to watch it grow) and pf tek requires a lot of space (and oh my god what happens if it goes bad and then you just have a massive tub of rotting filth in your apartment).
I would not pay $200 for this, but if you can make it look nice and make the process idiot-proof, I think there's a market for it.
And the guy in Baja hoodie winking every time he says Mushroom? The other guy going on about "Uncle Ben tek" for growing mushrooms? You gotta read between the lines -- obviously this product will not be explicitly marketed for drug use.
I thought you might be exaggerating, then I actually watched the video and noticed that the big wink was timed to the phrase "see the magic happen". XD
This looks more like a fun thing to do with your kids if you have a lot of disposable income and either no time or no ambition. It's more comparable to the aerogarden [1], because it's in no serious way going to provide you with food that you can't get with less trouble and expense at the grocery store.
Could you recommend any types of mushrooms you'd recommend for home cultivation and online sources for blocks? Already grow vegetables and it would be great to add mushrooms to the mix. Also are there any communities you'd recommend that share good advice?
I have found that pink oysters are absolutely impossible to fail to grow in a wide variety of conditions, very robust to storage and handling, and very good to eat. They are very hearty little mushrooms (or big mushrooms sometimes!) I honestly have no idea why pink oysters are not sold in grocery stores or used in more dishes, they are very cheap to grow and add interesting color.
lions mane and oyster are both great for home cultivation. if you look for a local mushroom farm in your area you can likely buy blocks from them. I've purchased blocks from Fat Moon Farms and had good success with them growing several pounds of mushrooms from a single block. https://fatmoonmushrooms.com/
there are a variety of mushroom/mycology related subreddits and Southwest Mushrooms on youtube has alot of informative well produced video content https://www.youtube.com/c/SouthwestMushrooms
Usually when you grow mushrooms you do it in two steps. First you grow out the mycelium on a growth medium such as grains, then you spread out the mycelium and cover it with some casing material, say peat moss, and fruit it under different environmental conditions. A typical mushroom lab has two areas built out (say with plastic sheets) to maintain the conditions for these two phases.
Looks like their machine creates conditions to fruit mycelium blocks that they send to you in the mail.
It's a big plus that it works with mycelium blocks you make yourself.
No no no.. for Lion's Mane, you want only the mycelium. How do you grow it in liquid such that 100% of the mycelium is available? Growing on grain ruins the cost-efficiency of the product.
The fruiting body of hericium mushrooms like lion's mane do not contain Erinacine A, which is generally recognized to be the most beneficial component of lions mane. That compound is present only in the mycelium. The fruiting body does contain Hericenones, which are also thought to have some health benefits, just not the nervous system repair benefits that Erinacine A provides.
No problem - the post you were replying to also left out some information, though- almost all hericium liquid culture mycelium also fail to produce the compound in question. It can be produced with certain specific liquid cultures, but for the home grower the highest erinacine A yields can be achieved by growing on small-ground corn kernel ( <2 mm ).
you could be forgiven for thinking consumption of the fruiting body is what provides benefits - almost all lions mane 'supplement' companies are selling dried, ground fruit bodies because that also 'supplements' their income stream - sell the fruiting bodies for a premium, grind up the trim pieces and leftovers for a secondary income stream. They fail to mention that the product they are selling is essentially worthless, outside of what could be better achieved by eating fruiting bodies anyhow.
There are a few reputable companies out there that validate the amount of erinacine A in a typical batch, those are the ones you want to buy from.
The thing that confuses me about this is that Hericium has a long history of medicinal use. My understanding is the peoples and cultures that ate it consumed the frit body, not the mycelium.
I had been considering setting up my own small lab to grow and do experiments for ... reasons. I think that this is a great way to get started and should greatly simplify the process.
I don't think it makes sense to spend $300 on a tiny tub given how easy it is to do this stuff with jars or Ikea tubs. You'll probably want a lot of tubs anyway.
This is a fruiting chamber, not a mushroom growing device. Fruiting is by far the most trivial part of mushroom growing. You still need to sterilize a growth media, innoculate it with spores or mycelium, grow it out without contamination, and mix into a substrate long before it enters this device. Or buy their overpriced pre-packaged, pre-grown substrates.
As a fruiting chamber, it does nothing that a $2 plastic Sterilite shoebox cannot do. They already self-regulate humidity and CO2 when set up correctly. Use your favorite search engine and look for Shoebox Tek.
I've seen a few mentions of Uncle Ben's pre-cooked rice Tek on here. Using UB for mushroom cultivation is the mycological equivalent of programming in Visual Basic or writing a database in Excel. It's a technique for uneducated new users which is technically inferior, and in the long run way more expensive, than learning to do it the correct way. But it uses components that users have easy access to, so it is irrationally popular.
I've tried my own hand at automating fruiting chambers, using a RasPi with CO2/humidity/temperature sensors (Sensiron SCD30), misters, and fans. Nothing but a pain, didn't increase yields, too much data leads to too much tinkering and tweaking. The best thing you can do for a mushroom grow is to leave it alone.
>This is a fruiting chamber, not a mushroom growing device. Fruiting is by far the most trivial part of mushroom growing.
You've hit on exactly the value being provided here - they are handling the culture, inoculation, spawning, and colonization stages and selling you an expensive box to put the result in. Sometimes people just want a quick fun activity and they don't want to research it beforehand. This product fills that need - send them money, they send you a mushroom growing experience.
I never tried to grow my own mushrooms, but the hardest part seems to be the actual growing of the mycelium with all the involved cleanliness, usage of needles, autoclaves and so on, right? The actual "container", which keeps the right amount of light and humidity and air circulation, can be build and maintained fairly easily. At least that's why i got from reading a little bit about this.
Yeah, 1000%. I've grown almost half the species they list. The hard (and fun) part is agar work to clean up the culture, sterilizing the grain, and keeping it sterile as you inoculate it, knowing when a bag has gone bad, etc. Fruiting it is easy in comparison. Like, cut some slits in the bag and mist it, with a trash bag over it if you want to be fancy. Mushroom stand at former local farmers market sold said blocks direct to consumer, and they'll give you a hell of a lot more than these ones.
I do have my own fruiting chamber, but it's not necessary.
The main advantage of this thing (which is no small feat!) is that it looks pretty, unlike a mottled plastic bag, potentially with another bag over it. I can absolutely see a place for it as a fun, living table piece that gives you food. Also once you buy this thing you have an incentive to keep buying their blocks. I have never been impressed with "smart" fruiting chambers -- they just play up how ~hard~ growing mushrooms is and then do the easy part for you and claim it's solved.
Call me when a chamber like this can detect mold better than my nose and eyes. THAT I'll shell out money for. It sucks to have mold sporulate, contaminating everything, before you know it's happened.
Mushrooms want to grow! And once you've gotten to the point where they're the only thing growing, you're golden.
Also, none of this is that hard if you read and learn! The mushrooms will tell you exactly where you went wrong, and there's TONS of info out there to get the hobby grower started. I highly suggest Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Paul Stamets, and reading up on The Shroomery (lot of good stuff in the gourmet forum, some stuff that's common between gourmet and magic, like agar or grain prep is in the other cultivation forum).
Growing Gourmet and Medicinal by PS is an amazing resource and it’s stunning to me that such a valuable book is only $40 or so. Even if you aren’t growing at the moment, if you’re interested in mushrooms it’s such a great buy.
There are even mail order services which will send you a pretty box with a pre inoculated block in it. Open the packaging, keep it under your table and check it so often, and you get tons of mushrooms. It's really fun.
The utility of this device is extremely questionable, but I can't deny that it's really pretty and a good conversation starter.
Indeed, the hardest part is inoculating without introducing contaminants that will out-compete the mycelium (typically trich).
However, this is relatively simple and cheap to do at home — especially using a technique called uncle Ben’s tek. As it happens, pre-packaged rice is the perfect sterile environment for mycelium growth.
Once successfully inoculated, it’s basically a matter of mixing the mycelium with substrate (wood chips or coir depending on the strain) in a container with a lid that allows minimal airflow (a plastic tub for example) and waiting.
The process is really quite simple, and I’ve harvested kilograms of mushrooms with an initial outlay of around $30. Once you have mushrooms, you have spores, and the recurring cost is only substrate (and uncle Ben’s bags or grains, jars, pressure cooker if you want to sterilise them yourself).
If you think of mushrooms as a cycle, you can "buy in" right before they produce the mushroom bodies from pre-colonised blocks of grain. You're correct, at this point all the hard work has been done and the purpose of the 'container' is to build up humidity and co2, it can even be as simple as a plastic bin bag. This is the quick, easy and expensive way in my understanding, you make it cheap and time consuming by creating, sterilizing and inoculating those containers of grain yourself. It's worth doing if you plan on growing more, but if you just want to get started then buy the pre-sterilised or pre-colonised grain.
>involved cleanliness, usage of needles, autoclaves and so on, right?
Most of the cleanliness is overblown. It makes sense if you are running a commercial operation, selling a starter, but less important if you can tolerate some failures.
I had a friend who grew 20x 5 gallon buckets at a time and this was is process:
1) Boil grain and and put it in mason jars in the kitchen
2) Cut a piece from the inside of a mushroom and add it to the grain in the kitchen
3) wait until it grows
4) Fill a 50 gallon trash can with wood chips
5) Pour boiling water into the trashcan outside
6) Transfer woodchips and grain to 5 gallon bucket in a dirty greenhouse
As you can imagine, this wasn't a very sterile process, but it worked fine for hundreds of pounds of Oysters.
It's worth noting that this works for oysters almost exclusively, because they are voracious fast-growers. Most other species do not grow as quickly and cannot outcompete contaminants and must have a sterile environment to have any kind of decent end result.
If you have a pressure cooker it's not very difficult.You buy the spores in syringes and inject them into the sterilized jars. Sterilize the needle before each injection and generally keep the space clean. I have done several batches and haven't had problems with contamination so far. You just go through a few weeks of self doubt until the mycelium gets visible.
Yeah, it sounds like you order "blocks" to place in the box, and then you harvest the mushrooms once they grow - much like other commercial mushroom kits, it sounds like large parts of it are single-use.
Which is fine, I guess, but I thought this was going to be something that would let me order one thing, and continually and easily grow-and-harvest mushrooms in perpetuity.
As someone who watch too much This Old House as a child, and lives in the PNW, if you live in a particularly humid part of the world I would strongly suggest you keep your mushroom experiments outside.
There are some non-zero risks around having saprophytic mushrooms producing spores inside or immediately outside of your house. I need to replace the framing around my back door and add a roof over it due to water damage, which I can tell because there's baby turkey tail about 4 inches up from the sill.
When identifying a mushroom you collect a spore print, which generally involves finding a young mushroom and sitting it on a piece of paper. The color of the spores can often distinguish between lookalikes. Doing a spore print, it can be a bit of a surprise how much a single mushroom can produce.
Teaspoons of sugar versus the entire bowl makes for a very different coffee experience.
For the section on growing your own "special" mushrooms, they have a young guy in a baja hoodie watching the "magic" happen and winking at the camera. Pretty sure they're targeting a very specific audience here. Solid marketing.
> For the section on growing your own "special" mushrooms
The county where I'm from in California has decriminalized growing psilocybin mushrooms for personal use so I can just come right out and say that I plan on growing hallucinogenic mushrooms
Unless you are a vet receiving federal benefits or living in federal sponsored housing. They might not want to cut your benefits, but the law says they have to.
Many sad stories here. Vet thought it was legal, and it helped their PTSD, but they lost their housing over it.
If you admit to smoking weed in the ER, or to any benefits program, your benefits will end or not begin, with a big red stamp on your file. If you have weed on a federally funded college campus, they by law have to cut your loans.
Nobody cares until the rolling coup finishes up in the next few years. Then it'll be a problem for everyone, just as it is now for folks in the US on foreign visas, US citizens on various welfare programs, and US citizens who want certain jobs.
The banks do. Payment providers do. Advertisers do. There's plenty of reasons for a business to be low-key about providing accessories to break Federal laws.
No they don’t. They just want plausible deniability. They’re a bank, they want to make money. Every dispensary has CC processing and a bank account. If they cared about federal law, they would stop obvious money laundering.
EDIT: Just read the company is issuing and processing their own 'credit cards'. I'm positive I've only used cards when buying from our dispensaries. Come to think of it, it's just debit cards but it's a card and it will buy weed if you want it to.
Point being, the large credit card networks, and more importantly, any FDIC insured bank, will not deal with cannabis funds.
There are a number of workarounds (Colorado credit unions being a notable one), and fintechs like the ones described in the article you linked trying to provide card solutions, but they're still all locked out of the "normal" US banking system.
"and more importantly, any FDIC insured bank, will not deal with cannabis funds."
This is patently false. My close friend runs a $75M/yr wholesale distribution op out of Carpinteria, Ca, called Headwaters. He has multiple FDIC banking relationships for his business.
> They will literally cancel your visa and send you back home for admitting smoking weed in the US.
No they don't. They explicitly state, "we do not care what you do on your travels, only that you do not bring any forbidden substances with you across the border."
If you BRING something measurable (beyond a trace sample they wipe from you or your stuff) then they can take action like what you suggest. Admitting to them you do take substances on your travels is irrelevant to them.
Yes they do, if they have reason to believe you will break US law (I.e. smoking weed) they will not hesitate to cancel your visa and put you straight back on the plane.
They've shown that multiple times in their border control TV show.
The episodes I saw:
There was an Australian girl (admitted to smoking weed on a previous trip) - put straight back on the plane, visa cancelled, and a German guy- on his way out got found with a speck of weed, admitted to smoking weed - got his visa cancelled and told he'd be refused entry if he tried to return.
They basically say "we are federal officers and we enforce federal law". In terms of visas if you provide reason to believe you will break the law, then they have the right to refuse you entry.
I get people selling psilocybin mushrooms following me on Twitter all the time since I follow MAPS and other research groups. I've been afraid to order because I have to give a real address to mail to and it's still illegal at the federal level
If you don't like the come up being too slow, then I suggest mushroom tea with citrus. Makes it hit all at once. One moment you're normal and the next moment you're tripping.
Apropos of nothing you can easily buy Psilocybe cubensis spores by mail as they do not contain any psilocybin. Of course they’re only intended for you to look at under a microscope ;)
"There is an exception to magic mushroom spores being legal though, and it’s in California, Georgia, and Idaho. In these states, magic mushroom spores are illegal as the legislators are trying to prevent the purposeful cultivation of magic mushrooms."
As someone who’s been encapsulating magic mushrooms for 10+ years, what I’d really love to see is an easy way to extract psilocybin for a more accurate measurement of the compound. Encapsulated mushrooms work ok but sometimes it can be orders of magnitude different in potency. Like you think you’re drinking a beer and accidentally drank 3 margaritas. I’ve read that people are working on deriving psilocybin from yeast but haven’t heard much as of late.
Fwiw, I think mushrooms at low quantities might be the best drug of all time, even better than caffeine. Happy pills, I tell ya!
> I’ve read that people are working on deriving psilocybin from yeast but haven’t heard much as of late.
They were successful. A team at the Technical University of Denmark inserted the genes to synthesize psilocybin into Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) [1] and they had excellent yields:
> a final production strain producing 627 ± 140 mg/L of psilocybin and 580 ± 276 mg/L of the dephosphorylated degradation product psilocin in triplicate controlled fed-batch fermentations
It's likely the means it will be produced commercially if it becomes a widely-approved drug. Not sure the average person will be able to get their hands on that strain easily anytime soon though. I imagine it'll be guarded as a trade secret as strictly as those modified E. coli that pump out human insulin.
The best I can think of for consistency short of measurement is homogenization to make an average. This goes for many products. Blend the individual items, batches, ect. The larger the quantity, the more consistent the output.
:)
The three-picture sequence on the front page, under the heading "Easier than You think; 3 easy steps", the last picture shows the grown mushrooms in a round container, while the device is cuboid throughout the other pictures.
> Pretty sure they're targeting a very specific audience here.
Probably accurate. Growing edible mushrooms on such a small scale doesn't make any sense given that they are 90% water, and so shrink ~90% when you cook them. This would be like buying an AeroGarden that can grow only a single leaf of parsley.
E.g. it takes at least 10 lbs of lions mane to make crab cakes for two people, whereas I doubt this thing is going to produce more than half a pound.
Because that's a fake recipe that was written just to rack up page views, that wouldn't actually work at all if you tried it. Making crab cakes isn't going to work at all unless you sweat the mushrooms to get the water out -- you cook them for 20+ min on low with a lot of sea salt, and then you rinse off the salt and squeeze out as much water as you can before forming them into crab cakes and pan frying.
If you look at the different photos in that recipe, you can see that the one on the tree has several times more water than the one purchased from the store. So which '16 oz' is it even referring to?
I'm just going from memory. The last time I found them I harvested an entire tree worth, and that was enough to feed two people for two nights. I think I filled up a Baggu and a half worth, and each of those holds at least 15 lbs of mushrooms.
10lb of lions mane would make an absolutely enormous amount of crab cake meat. Even if you figure you can sweat 60% of the moisture out of your mushrooms (which you probably won't, but let's assume that) that's still 4lb of 'crab' for 2 people. Most crab cake recipes call for 1 lb of crab for about 6-8 patties. Mushrooms might be a little bit less dense, but not that much less dense.
As the top comment says, this seems like the Juicero of mushroom growing. There are already much simpler, cheaper, and more straightforward ways to grow your own mushrooms:
Growing mushrooms is cool, and the idea of making it an ornamental object like and aquarium is good. It's kind if expensive though, and pretty small for culinary mushrooms.
Personally I kinda want one to try growing some flamboyantly ornamental fungus. But... a desire to pay $300 in order to grow a cool mushroom... these two "very specific" audiences overlap a lot. Exactly the kind of tolerant niche customers that makes for a good crowdfund.
I know close to nothing about growing mushrooms, aside from doing those kits once or twice where they grow out of the sides of the bag. I couldn't stand the marketing vid. Looks like a scam.
"Harvest at home with zero effort" I highly doubt it's _zero_ effort
"Gives you the highest quality food without GMO, chemicals, or waste..." the _biggest_ eyeroll ever
"Just order our ready to go blocks" so much for no waste
I'll stick with the $10 bag you cut holes in the side of
This is a super cool device. Kudos to the founders & company. It's a very cute little mushroom box setup. And it's inspiring that products like this exist, simply because they look great and make me think "Hey, with enough sweat, marketing, and capital I can create a product too!"
To get started, low tech: All ya need is: Pressure cooker, wheat grains, jar, mycelium, a sterile plastic bag or bin, and the right mix of fresh sterile air & humidity.
Typically, a block (made by the methods outlined elsewhere ITT) will give you 3-4 flushes before it's spent. I can only assume these blocks are similar.
Not defence of the product, definitely not for me, removes the fun part of mushroom growing.
This thing looks way too small. If you grow edible mushrooms this probably won't even be enough for one meal and if you grow magic mushrooms the yield will be pretty low too.
Or build this for yourself - bins to help contain humidity, a pump with irrigation tube, old gallon jug as a reservoir, and a timer to spray them a couple times a day.
r/unclebens is a beginner-friendly community to share the "Ready Rice" technique, a simple and beginner-friendly method for cultivating mushrooms without a pressure cooker
Seems that the value this device provides is creating a clearing house for more experienced mushroomers to share info with interested noobs on how to bypas it and do it in a cardboard box. Perhaps it's not what the founders of the company intended, but it's a value add nonetheless.
Growing mushrooms is stupid easy, the only challenging part is keeping things sterile during inoculation and before the mycelium is established. Moisture content of the substrate is important as well but that's pretty easy to get right.
You can set up a monotub using a storage bin, just line it with a trash bag, toss in some damp hot water sterilized coco coir and mix your fully colonized grain spawn, then cover the bin loosely so there is some airflow and keep it in a closet that you've cleaned thoroughly. Once set up they require almost no maintenance until they start to flush.
Once you've got pins showing you can improve your flushes by spraying and fanning, but even without that you will probably get 1-2 flushes of decent size.
I agree, but this reads as "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
The keurigification/dropboxification and the ability of companies like instantpot/ninja to clone and resell old ideas but slightly better cant be understated. People like easy pods and start buttons.
I produced some very fine, eh, shiitake mushrooms in a closet from a mycelium bought over the internet from, eh, Hamsterdam using only a desk lamp and a spray bottle.
I just harvested my first mushrooms ever yesterday. This was not some fancy lab stuff, just put the mycelium in some got a couple of sq meters in my garden (dried leaves and such), keep it moist, and got a nice harvest. Like this guy does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TERv85b9krI
Clever device. I was wondering how they’d sterilize between harvests, but with the presence of a UV light I assume they run a sterilization cycle of some kind.
While I don’t partake, a quick and clean path growing magic mushrooms would be nice for the community. The existing teks out there still have plenty of room for contamination.
Contamination mostly happening in the inoculation phase and this is just a fruiting chamber, does not help with that. You can also do the whole fruiting phase in a plastic bag with the help of a water spray.
the fact that the frontpage animation is a cartoon (computer graphics rendering) of what they intend to do, and not a well produced timelapse makes me doubt their entire project.
As with all indiegogo/kickstarters, a healthy amount of skepticism is warranted. However, the video does showcase what seems to be a working devices growing various mushrooms.
If you want to eat anything other than agaricus it's hard to buy them fresh because most mushrooms don't ship and handle well. You can get them from farmer's markets in medium and largeish cities but if you don't have those your options are sad broken and dried out grocery store stock, if that. Consider also that for things like stroganoff, wellington, or other duxelle-ish dishes it takes quite a lot of mushroom to make the end product, since mushrooms are mostly water and will be 'sweated' of that water.
None. However, it is generally legal to acquire cube[ensis] spores. From there all you need is sterile grains to setup a block, which should be easy if you enjoy rice.
