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
