Hey everyone, today I'm going to show you how I grow mushrooms in a bucket. This is what you will need to grow your own mushrooms at home. You will need 2 buckets, 1 with holes and 1 with no holes, more on that later. You also need substrate, this can be straw, wood chips or something else. If you are not sure what to use, you can ask in a firm or in the comments down below. And the most important part, you need some sort of mushroom spawn. The most common choice is to use grain spawn. Now the problem is that it is not the easiest thing to do at home. So for most people the only way to get spawn is to buy from a supplier. But if you don't want to buy or make your own spawn, you can use the mushrooms themselves. And that is what I am going to do here. I am going to use mushroom stems as my spawn. So the first thing you need is a bucket with some holes. You want your little holes in the sides. Mine are about 8mm wide. You also want some holes at the bottom. This is so the excess moisture can drain out of the bucket. Next, you will need another bucket or a tote or something that has a lid. This is what we are going to use to pasteurize the substrate. For the substrate I am using straw. I have a bunch of straw that fell from bells that used to be here, so I am going to use it. Keep in mind that if you are using straw it is recommended to use chopped straw. This is because you will get a more even substrate and that is going to help with colonization. Mine is not perfect but as these are pieces that fell from bells, they are already way smaller than if I was using straw from the belly itself. So I am going to use them like this. Now that my bucket has the straw, I will put boiling water in it. You don't need to fill it completely with water, as the hot steam is going to pasteurize the straw. Now we just need to put the lid back in the bucket. I like to add some way on top of the lid. This is because if the water is really hot the lid can pop out. You can also add a blanket around the bucket to keep it from cooling too fast. This is really useful in colder weather. Now we just leave it overnight and in the next day we are going to do the inoculation process. So now that the substrate has cooled down, we are going to inoculate the bucket. First, you want to drain the water from your substrate. After you drain the water, it is time to prepare the mushroom stems. To do this, I will cut my stem pieces from my mushrooms. First, I clean my surface in my blade with 70% isle. You don't want to cut them too big. Remember, this is our spawn and the more inoculation points we can add, the faster the colonization and faster colonization means less chance for contamination. I am using blue oyster stems that I had in the fridge for over a month. As you can see they have started to grow my sillium around them. And that is going to help for faster colonization too, as there is already my sillium ready to go on the stems. After you cut all the stems into pieces, it is time to inoculate. So we are going to work with layers. First we are going to put straw and bottom of the bucket. And then we add mushroom stems on top. And we keep going like this, making sure that when you reach the top of the bucket, you want the last layer to be strong. So just keep layering until you don't have more straw or mushroom stems. You may want to squeeze the straw that is closer to the bottom of the bucket, as it is more moist than the one at the top. You will always have excess moisture, but if you remove some, it will help the bucket training faster. Now we just need to close the lid and get our bucket into incubation. Now you need to pay attention to where you put your bucket into incubation. If you remember we have a couple holes at the bottom of our bucket, so the excess moisture can get out. Now pay attention to that because you don't want your floor to get covered in this. So put something underneath your bucket. The other thing you want to pay attention is to temperatures. You want the temperature between 20 and 25. It's okay if it's a little less, you don't want to go really over 25 degrees Celsius. The other problem you may have is as you have all of these exposed holes around your bucket. If you have a lot of insects in your house that you know you generally have a lot of fruit flies like I do because I have tons of fruit trees around, you may want to cover these holes. Now there are multiple ways you can do this. You can cover your holes with micro-power tape or you can try to put your bucket inside a garbage bag and just do a couple holes and maybe put some micro-power tape or just do some really small holes with a needle because my ceiling needs to be. Now the other thing you have to do is if you put your bucket in a tray like I do, you definitely want to clean this liquid out and clean the bottom of your bucket. Now don't forget that my ceiling still needs to be. So you need to give it some oxygen. Now you can try to do something from the top of the bag or you can just do some really, really small holes with a needle so you can make sure that those insects will not get inside your bucket or you can do some bigger holes and just tape them with like micro-power tape or something like it. Now let's check how the my ceiling is doing. You generally don't want to open your bucket first to check if it is fully colonized or not. What you want to look for is if your hole, as you can see here, here, here, here, no, just check if all the holes are around the bucket. If you can see in my ceiling mandem, that's what I saw through the bag. As the bag is not fully opaque, I could see that there was some my ceiling growing around the holes and that's one of the reasons why I decided to open the bucket. After you check that the holes around the bucket have my ceiling mandem, you will crack the lid open and take a look inside and see if everything looks okay. If everything is fully colonized and there is no mold or bad smells, it is time to fruit. Now we need to provide the right conditions for our mushrooms to grow. The best way to grow oyster mushrooms would be outdoors, but it's summertime and is to warm and dry. So what I will do is grow them indoors. You just need to place the bucket in a cool place with no direct sunlight. You still want some light, but mushrooms don't really need light to grow. You also need to pay attention to airflow. Mushrooms are like us, they breed oxygen so you don't want to put them in very close space, but you also don't want to put the fey on top of them as that will dry them. In the most important part, you need to miss them and no, mushrooms don't need water. They have all the water they need in the substrate. The reason we missed is to keep the air around the bucket you meet so our mushrooms won't dry. To the amount of times you will need to mist will depend on your specific case. If your bucket dries really fast, you may have to mist more times a day. If it keeps wet for a long time, you will need to decrease the amount of times you mist. I personally mist twice a day. And now that you know how to take care of your bucket, you just need to wait for mushrooms to grow. So, these mushrooms are now ready to harvest. I would actually pick them a little bit earlier. Before the caps start to flat like they are here. But you want to pick them before they start to curl up. I like to pick them earlier as they last longer in the fridge and I think they taste better. So I would recommend to pick them before they start to flat. You harvest them I am going to take a knife and cut the clusters. You can also just twist them as the holes on the bucket are very small so it should come out easy. After you harvest, for a second flush you just need to keep misting the bucket until you get more mushrooms. Or you can also just empty the straw of the bucket and lay it out in a garden bed and get some more mushrooms. And that's it. It's a very simple method of cultivation that is easy to do at home. And you will be able to grow your own fresh mushrooms with just a bucket, straw and mushroom stems. I hope you liked it and give this a try. Thanks for watching and keep those mushrooms growing.