Growing oyster mushrooms at home in Haiku Maui is easy

Links about mushrooms in Hawaii:

• Honolulu Mushroom Company
• Health benefits of mushrooms
• Mushrooms of Hawaii – books

We tried a couple of ready made kits that came from Oahu.  Pink oyster and brown oyster mushrooms can be grown at home with not much effort.  A cardboard box contains a plastic bag filled with sawdust/wood fiber innoculated with mushroom spores.  Just follow the directions and in a few days or weeks you’ll be harvesting mature mushrooms.  If you’re patient, you’ll get another flush of these delicious fungi when you’re not expecting it, so keep an eye on them.

For the first time, we started them in a corner of the living room, out of any direct sunshine or draft, because we were curious to see how things would transpire.  They grew so well, and it wasn’t long that the mushroom spores were all over the immediate surfaces.  This realization meant they needed their own space, so for the next generation we gave the mushrooms their own room, in an abandoned little shed that wasn’t being used.

In our case, after the original sawdust bricks were spent, we recycled them into some fresh chopped straw and made our own starter bags – 4 from each original bag.  It doesn’t hurt to try, right?  If you have a dark closet or shed, just tuck them away and check on them from time to time.  One day you’ll be surprised to find a new batch of little mushrooms poking out of the bags.  Check on them daily and mist them with some water and watch them grow.

It’s all pretty new and we’re experimenting some more with recycling the old substrates and also with the spores.  It’s all fun to see what works and what doesn’t, and each time a new flush of mushrooms appear, it’s still exciting!