Oyster mushrooms

We got a batch of oyster mushroom spawns from BIOSCI 102 labs which I were teaching. Hannah and I each planted one of the mushroom logs. It consisted of recycled ground coffee (from the shops in school), mushroom spawns packed nicely together.

We actually had a nice harvest this year!... Yay.. It was delicious.

Growing oyster mushrooms

During the last BIOSCI 102 lab, we had the students perform an experiment on the growth of oyster mushrooms with recycled grounded coffee. After the semester, there were still a lot of mushroom spawns left. Thus, I took some home, and conducted my own experiment. I cultivated the mushrooms spawns in 3 different substrates - grounded coffee, grounded coffee with pumice, and grounded coffee with dried grass. The result is that mushrooms in the grounded coffee mixed with pumice substrate grew the fastest, followed closely by the mushrooms growing in the grounded coffee mixed with dried grass substrate. Mushrooms in the grounded coffee substrates only started to grow pin-heads after 3 weeks. Besides helping with the syllabus (this is a new lab in BIOSCI 102... never conducted before!), the good thing is also we now have mushrooms for dinner! Yay for Science.

(left) grounded coffee only (middle) grounded coffee with pumice
(right) grounded coffee with dried grass

Adult oyster mushrooms ready to be picked
in a couple of days!

Pin-heads

Adult oyster mushrooms