Smart mushroom growing device for beginners
shrooly.com
shrooly.com
This one in particular is a good example of connected for the sake of it though lol
I'm curious to know how repeated use of the device will deal with sterilisation, which was always the tricky part.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
https://fatmoonmushrooms.com/pages/oyster-grow-kit-instructi...
It's pretty easy. I learned it at a workshop for local mushroom hunting group.
Also Jucero was even worse than you think. It squeezed juice out of little plastic packets.
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.
The pre colonized blocks they are offering could be placed in a Tupperware and would probably work as well.
This is a cool way to display that, though.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The amount of active time needed to successfully grow a few flushes of cubes is a few hours total (prep work, misting, harvesting).
The rest of the time you are just observing it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=32056302&goto=item%3Fi...
This is clearly intended as a set it and forgot it solution for growing magic mushrooms.
https://i.imgur.com/ttZZhwa.png
This hobbyist level of machining does not go very well with the slick design and marketing.
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/business/media/mit-closes...
...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").
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
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.
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.
Pressure cooker (modern teks use Instant Pot) will achieve the necessary thermal properties because they produce superheated steam.
[0] https://craftmetrics.ca/blog/2019/pasteurization-part-1-the-...
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.
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.
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...
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!
One in ten/fifteen buckets with straw may get moldy but it’s still an order of magnitude cheaper.
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.
With this device, all one needs is some grains (I have an uncle who has a relevant subreddit), and spores, which are legally obtainable!
Its pretty hard to fuck up as well.
- Pre sterilized
- Cost effective
- Easy to monitor
Such genius simplicity. I've grown once in mason jars with rice flour, and once in uncle Ben's. Ben was such an improvement
Are you saying that the fruiting body is useless, or am I misunderstanding you?
The eating of the fruiting body has a very long history and some literature.
Do you have any more information.?
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.
Which company?
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.
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.
If there’s a market for that, why not this?
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).
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).
The utility of this device is extremely questionable, but I can't deny that it's really pretty and a good conversation starter.
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.
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.
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.
Teaspoons of sugar versus the entire bowl makes for a very different coffee experience.
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.
Okay, is this one better? It still only calls for 16oz of mushrooms to make 4-6 cakes.
I can't find a single recipe that calls for anywhere near 10lbs of fungus. Could you link one?
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
To be honest I don't like the come up. I no longer like being "scolded" by it.
I've never been to a dispensary in the US that takes credit cards, and MC and Visa specifically don't allow cannabis businesses.
https://www.cato.org/blog/cannabis-banking-clash-between-fed...
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cannabis/21/12/24405152/its...
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.
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.
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.
Credit cards are no-go. No airline miles from picking up psychoactives.
Many sad stories here. Vet thought it was legal, and it helped their PTSD, but they lost their housing over it.
They will literally cancel your visa and send you back home for admitting smoking weed in the US.
If you're not from the US, beware weed is very much ILLEGAL, and you should treat it as such.
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.
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.
The feds very much so care. Don't get complacent.
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.
From https://healingmaps.com/mushroom-spores-psilocybin-legality/
Just FYI.
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!
Just need to see if the elevated temp over a period of a couple of hours negatively impacts potency I guess.
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.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109671761...
"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
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.
Not defence of the product, definitely not for me, removes the fun part of mushroom growing.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220711140012/https://shrooly.c...