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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] pline|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergenty|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iancmceachern|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unicornporn|3 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/ttZZhwa.png
This hobbyist level of machining does not go very well with the slick design and marketing.
[+] [-] 0_____0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itslennysfault|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bemmu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anewpersonality|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ge96|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_dev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krrrh|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.aerogarden.com
[+] [-] TheBlerch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grogenaut|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NERD_ALERT|3 years ago|reply
https://boomershroomer.com/monotub/
[+] [-] collyw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Gustomaximus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anewpersonality|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PartiallyTyped|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwatrip|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] idiotsecant|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DrinkWater|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citruscomputing|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] jayphen|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] xeddit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hinkley|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eterpstra|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dymk|3 years ago|reply
"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
[+] [-] hellohowareu|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] buzzwords|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weego|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
https://i.postimg.cc/qBtCZJPR/20220502-161435.jpg
[+] [-] yboris|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] herdymerzbow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlie0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] basch|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alangibson|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jmlucjav|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hesdeadjim|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] loriverkutya|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] N-Krause|3 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20220711140012/https://shrooly.c...