Oyster Mushroom Growing Kit - Premium Edition

Description

Product description A wonderful gift for curious naturalists and adventurous cooks Here at The Imaginary Farmer we set out to create a mushroom-growing kit that provides a rich educational and culinary experience, taking you from raw materials to an awe-inspiring harvest, and demonstrating how these amazing organisms live and grow. Our premium kit does just that, in a package perfect for gift-giving: It looks great, and has essentially unlimited shelf-life, so you don't have to worry about when your gift recipient will use it. The kit contains a package of dry growing material and a complete, color-illustrated instruction booklet with a unique spawn code . When ready, you (or the recipient) redeem the spawn code through our web site, email, or by phone for a fast, free shipment of fresh, live mushroom spawn. You get the best results by starting with fresh, rapidly-growing spawn, and that's what you get! You mix the spawn with the other ingredients and watch growth begin. It makes an experience that will not disappoint. Start from raw ingredients We ship the live spawn in a special growing bag. When it arrives you combine the dry growing material, water, hydrogen peroxide, and some coffee grounds with the spawn in the bag, seal it, and watch; you will see growth begin in as little as one day! Over the next 10 days or so the mushroom's fibers - the mycelium - will continue to colonize the substrate. Soon the mycelium will start to form solid masses where mushrooms will form . Once these appear, it's time to make an opening in the bag so that tiny mushroom pinheads can form and expand out of the bag. See how mushrooms really live and grow Once exposed to fresh air, light, and moisture, pinheads usually form within a matter of days. expanding into the open air. Healthy Phoenix oyster mushroom pinheads produce a pretty profusion of protective pink fluid during this crucial period. As pinheads grow, they differentiate more clearly into caps and stems, swelling into increasingly impressive fruiting bodies. Once pinheads have formed, it takes from a few days to a week or more to reach full maturity, depending on the temperature. The instruction booklet guides you through the incubation, pinning, and fruiting process and how to get it to repeat. It also points you to our instructional videos on the web. For best growth pinheads need humidity and good ventilation. This can be a challenge depending on the season and where you live. For instance, if you live in the northern US, during the winter heating season, unless you maintain a plant-growing area in your house, or you have a greenhouse, the air can be stuffy and quite dry. In that case you can either set up a little humidity tent with a plastic bag, or keep it on your kitchen counter and moisten it frequently, or you can just wait until closer to springtime, and redeem your spawn code when the weather is better for growing things. Enjoy a delicious mushroom harvest The Phoenix oyster has a complex, earthy flavor and delicate, slightly chewy texture that suit almost any style of cooking. The entire fruiting body, cap and stem, is good to eat. It has more delicate flesh than the closely-related Pearl or Blue oyster mushrooms, one reason why you won't see them as often in grocery stores. That makes growing, harvesting, and cooking them at home at their peak such a special experience. The Phoenix oyster mushroom grows so fast, even though you start it from scratch, it can produce a crop of mushrooms almost as fast as a pre-colonized kit, especially one that has sat on a shelf for weeks. The amount of edible mushroom a kit can produce depends, in part, on how massive it is. Our kit makes a full, industry-standard 6 pound substrate block, which can produce as much as 1.5 pounds over several flushes. A kit weighing half as much can only produce about half as much. Starting the process from scratch yourself and providing the heavy stuff - water and coffee grounds - saves over three pounds of shipping weight. Over thousands of units shipped, that saves a lot of fuel. We think about that kind of thing a lot, because we strive to produce only environmentally-sustainable products that enhance life and learning. Join us for a great mushroom-growing adventure! Review: Very fun project with great results! - This kit was fairly simple to put together and alot of fun. I bought a similar kit from a farmers market and it spurred me to buy this one. The instructions are very specific, so it would be a high school level of comprehension to prepare the kit by yourself I would estimate. Younger kids can certainly do it with parental guidance. Once my spawn run was complete, I had a huge mushroom growing in less than a week. It grew so fast you could almost see it growing. I would suggest this to anybody interested in growing your own mushrooms. Review: Mushrooms ordered separately!! - Extremely disappointed with this buy, not because of quality but because of timing! I ordered this to arrive in time for Mother's Day only to find out that the actual mycelium (the mushroom spawn) has to be ordered separately through their company. For free, of course, because they provide the code in the box, but what is the point of me rush shipping this to be a gift when I have to order the most important part by itself? Also doesn't come with the actual plastic bag to grow the mushrooms in. I'm a reasonable person who hardly gets upset in reviews, but this was beyond warranted. I'm so disappointed I won't be able to give this to my grandma for Mother's Day. Honestly. Sad.