Cultures · spawn · fruiting blocks · a converted milk house
A mushroom is four days of a two-month organism. The rest is mycelium in the dark, eating wood — branching, colliding, turning away from itself. That is the thing growing behind this text right now, tip by tip, on a real clock.
Colonisation monitor
plate poured, waiting on inoculation
The bench list
Cultures are isolated here, plated here, and shipped in a cooler with one gel pack, Monday to Wednesday only, so nothing sits in a depot over a weekend. Every syringe is drawn from a plated isolate we keep on slant — no spore syringes, ever, because a spore syringe is a lottery ticket sold as a culture.
10 mL syringe · self-healing port
Sterile-drawn from an isolate, not from spores. One syringe inoculates two to three quart jars of grain. Shiitake and pink oyster isolates are $16.
3 lb bag · rye berries
Hydrated to 45% moisture, sterilised 2.5 hours at 15 psi, fully colonised before it leaves. One bag spawns 12 lb of supplemented sawdust at a 20% spawn rate.
5 lb · colonised and consolidated
Cut the bag, drop the temperature, give it air. First flush of 1 to 1.3 lb, and a second at roughly 60% of the first if you soak the block.
Plates, media, transfer tools
Pre-poured MEA plates $4 each or five for $16. Malt extract agar powder, 250 g, $26. Scalpel and inoculation loop, $9 the pair.
| Species | Ships as | Difficulty | Colonise | Fruit | Inoc → harvest | Culture |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blue oysterPleurotus ostreatus | LC · spawn · block | Beginner | 24 °C | 13–18 °C | 26–33 days | $14 |
| Pink oysterPleurotus djamor | LC · spawn | Beginner | 27 °C | 21–27 °C | 20–26 days | $16 |
| Lion's maneHericium erinaceus | LC · spawn · block | Intermediate | 22 °C | 18–21 °C | 30–40 days | $14 |
| ChestnutPholiota adiposa | LC · spawn · block | Intermediate | 24 °C | 16–21 °C | 32–42 days | $14 |
| ShiitakeLentinula edodes | LC · spawn · block | Advanced | 24 °C | 14–18 °C | 70–100 days | $16 |
| Wine capStropharia rugosoannulata | Spawn only · outdoor bed | Beginner, patient | Ambient | 15–21 °C soil | 60–100 days | — |
Difficulty here means how much your mistakes cost you, not how hard the organism tries. Pink oyster colonises faster than anything on this list and then spoils in three days on the counter. Shiitake asks for two months and forgives almost nothing. Wine cap is the easiest thing we sell and the only one that needs a garden bed and a season of waiting. Case pricing: five grain spawn bags for $99, which is $19.80 a bag, 10% under list.
The cultivation clock
Blue oyster on supplemented hardwood sawdust: a 5 lb block, 24 °C room, dated from the day the spawn goes in. Your block will not read exactly like this. Write yours down anyway — the log is the only way you learn which of your rooms is lying to you.
Spawn goes in at 20% of finished weight, through a filter patch, in front of a flow hood or inside a still-air box. The only variable that matters today is whether your air was clean. Everything downstream is just temperature and patience.
Warmth and darkness, and do not open the bag to look. High CO₂ is not a problem at this stage — it actively suppresses pinning, which is exactly what you want while the network is still spreading. Thirteen days is typical; a green or grey patch anywhere means the block goes out, not into the fruiting chamber.
The block turns from white and fluffy to leathery and dense while the mycelium builds reserves it will spend on fruit. Nothing visible happens for a week. Skipping this is the single most common reason a block pins thin and then quits after one poor flush.
Three changes at once: cut the bag, drop the temperature, and give it fresh air. Oysters need light to pin and will fruit toward it, so light the block from the side you want the stems pointing. Pins appear in three to five days as a bruise-coloured cluster; if you get long stems and tiny caps, your CO₂ is too high, not your humidity too low.
Cut the whole cluster at the base while the cap margins are still curled under. In the last 24 hours a cluster can nearly double, so check twice a day. A day late gives you flat caps and a room full of spores. Soak the block overnight and expect a second flush at about 60% of the first, two to three weeks on.
At 20 °C the same block takes 18 to 21 days to colonise rather than 13, and every date above moves right. Cold does not kill it, it just makes it slower and gives contaminants more time to find it. The one number worth buying an instrument for is CO₂ — a $60 meter will explain more failed fruitings than any book.
Foraging & identification
This is the part of the trade with no marketing in it. If you read one section of this page, read this one, and read it twice.
Not this page. Not an app, not a photograph in a group chat, not a machine-learning model, and not a chart of look-alikes. Identification is a hands-on process — habitat and substrate, the shape of the attachment, a spore print, the cut flesh and how it changes, smell, and sometimes a microscope — carried out in person by someone who knows the species that actually grow where you are standing.
Nothing on this site should be used to decide whether a wild mushroom is edible. We do not encourage eating anything you find, including anything you feel confident about. The fatal cases are not people who knew nothing; they are usually people who were sure.
Six to twenty-four hours of nothing at all, then violent gastrointestinal illness, then a day where the patient appears to recover. That false recovery is the liver failing quietly, and treatment started in that window is worth far more than treatment started after it.
If anyone may have eaten a wild mushroom, contact your regional poison centre or emergency service immediately — before symptoms, not after — and keep the uneaten remains, plus a photograph of what it was growing on.
A silver spoon turning black. Animals eating it. Growing on wood rather than soil. A cap that peels. No colour change when cut. Cooking it thoroughly. Tasting a small piece first.
None of these separate edible from lethal, and several of them appear in the case histories of people who died. There is no shortcut and there never was one. A species that is safe in one region can also be a different organism under the same name in another.
One character, drawn properly. Chanterelles carry blunt forked ridges; the jack-o'-lantern that grows in clusters on wood nearby carries true gills. That difference is real and it is also one character out of a dozen you would need — attachment, substrate, spore colour, flesh colour, smell, season, and what the thing is growing from. This figure is here to show you what examination looks like. It is not a key, and it is not permission.
What we will not do, however nicely you ask
If you want to learn this properly: join a local mycological society and stand next to someone who has been wrong before and still remembers exactly how it happened. That is the whole method. It takes years, it is genuinely enjoyable, and there is no faster version of it.
Workshops
Eight seats because that is how many people fit around one flow hood without somebody breathing into it. You do the work; we stand behind you and say "closer" a lot.
Saturdays · bench session
You pour six plates, transfer a wedge of lion's mane, and learn why two of your six will contaminate anyway and what each failure looked like. Leave with your plates and a slant of the culture you cut.
Sundays · bench session
Hydration by weight, supplementation ratios, and why "a handful of spawn" is not a spawn rate. You mix, bag and seal a 5 lb block, then take it home and fruit it under conditions we work out for your actual room.
Autumn only · outdoors
Two miles of mixed hardwood, spore prints taken in the field, sections cut and drawn. Nothing is collected for the pot. Bring a knife for cutting and a hand lens if you own one; we have spares.
Both bench workshops booked together are $160, saving $20. We reply the same week. If a session fills you go on the list for the next pour, which is never more than a month out.