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Straw is quite a hassle, it contaminates with mold super easily, and is and about 20 years out-of-date to current practice.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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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