Your picture of oyster mushroom spores growing after 3 days is fascinating. It explains all the layman ways to have more fun with fungi. He does have the sterile lab books as well, but they didn't speak to me as much. 'Mycelium Running' by Paul Stamets is one of the best books that I've read about mushroom propagation in non-sterile conditions. Like chantrelles and matsutakes - those have a relationship with surrounding trees that take 10+ year to create before popping up a mushroom. Not all mushrooms work with this, nor with stem butts. You put the mushroom gills down on the paper, fold the end, put it somewhere high (for heat to dry, and so that it doesn't get disturbed) The bag has enough air to dry it, but you have to make sure that no mushrooms are touching each other, or else it's be black, slimy and stinky.Īnother way to propagate mushrooms (done conservatively) would be to simply scoop up the surrounding soil/substrate that the mushroom popped up on, and transfer it to another location.

I've used a paper bag to do spore prints - it works really well.

You could still do spore prints with them though. The dirt parts include mycelium strands, the mushroom 'roots', which would be required for using stem butts - the chop this off for display in the grocery store. Is this needed, or would grocery store purchased stem ends also work? Might the particles/dirt inhibit proper inoculation? Before permies, I'd thought it all had to be sterile lab conditions for people to succeed with mushrooms. Joylynn Hardesty wrote:He used the stem butts in the video to propagate the mushrooms which still had dirt/particles attached to the ends.

Oyster mushroom spore print