Grow your own gourmet mushrooms on your kitchen counter or a shelf in your home! Simply cut a slit in the plastic bag, mist daily and harvest your fresh gourmet mushrooms within two weeks!
This kit contains a block of live oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) mycelium. The mycelium is living inside a special filter bag that keeps it healthy and dormant. To activate the block simply give it fresh air by cutting a slit in the bag. The slit is where the mushrooms will grow from. Daily care for the kit includes misting frequently with water and keeping it out of direct sunlight. The kit can give you 2 - 4 harvests of mushrooms. Between harvest simply soak in water for a few hours and let it grow again.
Oyster Kit Instructions:
Step 1: Open
Open the paper bag and remove the plastic bag containing your mushroom block. Cut a long slit on one side of the plastic bag from corner to corner. KEEP THE BLOCK INSIDE OF THE PLASTIC BAG.
Step 2: Place
Find a good spot for your block to live for the next few weeks. An ideal spot would be in the most humid part of your house on a counter top or shelf. Keep out of direct sunlight and away from drafts or heaters. Stand the bag up and the mushrooms will grow from the slit.
Step 3: Care
Use a spray bottle to mist around the slit of your block and prevent it from drying out. Misting daily should be plenty while you wait for mushrooms to appear. Mist a few times a day once mushrooms start to appear. If the environment around the block is extremely dry (winter) use the provided humidity tent. Set the tent over the block and mist inside the tent to create a humid environment.
* Ideal humidity is 90% when the block is getting ready to pin and 70% as the mushrooms are growing. Try to maintain light condensation inside the grow tent. Remove the tent once the mushrooms are almost full size.
* Do not put the block inside of an enclosure that will restrict fresh air. Oyster mushrooms require a fair amount of fresh air exchange to develop large caps. Limiting fresh air will cause long stems and small caps.
Step 4: Harvest
Now the exciting part! Typically between 1 - 3 weeks you should start to see little mushroom pins starting to poke out of the slit in your bag. Mist multiple times a day and make sure the mushrooms are not drying out. Thing move fast from here and in about 4 days you will have full sized mushrooms ready to pick and eat! Pick when the caps are big and open and before the caps fully flatten out and the edges of the caps start to crack.
Step 5: Rehydrate
After you have harvested the mushrooms simply continue misting daily and within 3 weeks you should get an additional flush of mushrooms. If at any point the block seems really dry you can soak it in a large pot of cold tap water overnight to rehydrate it. You can get 2 - 4 flushes of mushrooms from this block.
* You may not need to soak between the first and second flush. Try not to exceed 8 hours when soaking.
