In article ,
Steve wrote:

In article ,
Philip Semanchuk wrote:
Personal, although maybe I should consider commercial. Oyster mushrooms
(which is what I'll be growing) cost $10/pound in Harris Teeter!

Are you going to be growing indoors or outdoors? I've been growing some
oyster mushrooms outdoors on cut logs, but have had lots of beetle
damage. Shouldn't be in issue in a controlled environment, though.

I'm going to try outdoors on wood chips. I've been trying an
indoor/outdoor combination where I instigate pinning indoors and then
set them on my screened-in porch for fruiting. I don't want them to
fruit indoors because they release so many spores and because it's too
hard to keep the humidity up. However, my indoor/porch method has only
been marginally successful. It's easy to get either enough air exchange
or enough humidity, but difficult to get both unless we get a few rainy
days in a row.

Not only that, but I've had beetle problems too. When the oysters fruit
the beetles (some sort of Triplax I think) cluster on the porch screens
and inevitably find their way inside. I solved this problem by building
a frame around my block of fruiting oysters and screening that, so the
oysters live in a porch inside a porch. Lotta work!

Since this cultivation method has only been so-so for me, I figured I'd
try outdoor since it the materials are free. (Free wood chips + spawn I
have in the fridge.) My alternative is to build an oyster fruiting box
that's got some sort of built-in humidifier, air exchanger and spore
filter. This also sounds like a lot of work but I think it will be
fairly reliable once I get the kinks worked out.

Are you growing your oysters shiitake style? By that I mean logs left
whole, cut to 3' length and then inoculated with dowel spawn?
--
Philip Semanchuk
email: first name @ last name.com