MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

 So this is Chris Imler, he is with us for backyard mushroom culture. Thank you for joining us today. And again, I remind you to please mute yourself while our speaker is presenting so that the only person we hear is speaker. But before we get started, I'd like to take a quick moment to thank our sponsors. Greenstone Farm Credit Services and the USDA, NIFA, north central region of the SARE or sare program. Due to their generous support, we are able to offer this event at no charge to our participants. Now let's jump into today's presentation. If you have any questions during the presentation, please type them into the question chat. Please type them into the chat box. We will run through questions at the end of the presentation. Chris, you're on. Great. Thank you for the warm welcome Beth. Let me just make sure that I've got my little chat screen open here. Can everybody see? And you can give me a thumbs up or thumbs down if presentation is coming through Okay. Thumbs up, thumbs up. Excellent. All right. Perfect. All right. I've got my chat screen open. so I can try to keep an eye on questions here. If I don't have any time during the presentation, we should, to answer your questions. I'll have my contact information available at the end here and you can shoot me whatever lingering thoughts you have; otherwise, So let's go ahead and get started. The title of today's presentation is a little bit of a misnomer, really, this is just a, this is a conversation that we're going to have about basic mushroom cultivation, the techniques that we'll talk about are really more specific to growing mushrooms inside. But for your backyard, I would say that the lifecycle of fungi, the growing considerations, are pretty much the same, the process is the same. Oops, we're going to go ahead and mute a couple of people here. I got it. Okay, but really, when we're talking about mushroom cultivation in the context of beginners, you're doing yourself by trying out this practice indoors at first, and maybe leaning on some of the products that are available to you as a consumer, before maybe trying to do this outside. And I'll show you at the very end here kind of what principles we talk about that are useful inside of that are also useful outside. Okay. So without further ado, again, just a reminder that MSU is an Affirmative Action, equal opportunity employer, please be on your best behavior in the chat. And remember that we are creating a educational space here that's open, just some context here. Everybody here has their own motivations for why they want to grow mushrooms. We know from an evidentiary standpoint that it is a fantastic food, really low in calories, unless you're like me and you insist on sauteing them in butter, great source of fiber, low in fat, low in sodium, good source of protein. I care for my mother who is a vegan and vegetarian. And as a meat alternative, it's a really good stand in, its that texture and its got that chewiness that can replace some unhealthier options. Great source of vitamins and minerals. If we think specifically about vitamin D, for example, we're thinking about the vitamin that we're all interested in getting when we go out in the sun, besides certain fortified dairy products and certain fish, mushrooms are one of the best ways to get your vitamin D supplement in your body. It's an incredibly sustainable food. As we'll see, the impact on the environment is, I wouldn't even say minimal because the act of growing mushrooms can be a restorative process, can be a regenerative process to the environment. As a species, it's been around for hundreds of millions of years. One more, one more person to mute here. As a species, It's been around for hundreds of millions of years. Some estimates put it at even older than the plants that we consume. And it's got, it's very closely tied. It said there's a co-evolution that happens between certain species of fungi and certain species of plant with some of them forming these parasitic relationships. So fungi feeding off plants to their gut and others forming a beneficial symbiotic relationship where the association between these two species actually allows them both to grow and to survive their environments more rapidly. So we, we know a lot about mushrooms as a society from a scientific perspective. But what do we not know about mushrooms? This is where it gets really hairy. And when you're doing your own reading and you're doing your own kind of background research, it's very clear that mushrooms are definitely having a moment right now. They're really prominent as an ingredient in health foods. And in some cases, they are marketed as a sole product that sellers have termed, coined no, no tropics, no tropics And the idea here is that by consuming certain types, they'll act as a mental stimulant and this will be good for your overall health. But we're going to talk today about really the evidentiary basis behind what we're doing. And this is an evidence-based class that we're having. And when we try to analyze the evidence that is being proffered, right for the cognitive health benefits, the other health benefits we need to be really critical. And the easiest way to do this is by actually reading the research. So if we go into pop culture articles or pop culture texts, textbooks, what we'll find is that the research that is being cited for things like anti-aging claims or it boosts your intelligence, or even anti carcinogenic claims. A lot of the evidentiary basis is formed in mice and in cultured cells. And so what we find is that the human side of that, the human data is actually really limited. And the data that we do have about humans and how mushrooms can impact aging, your ability to survive cancer, boosts your immune system, support for your immune system. All of that evidence is really limited to what's called observational studies. Okay? And in science we have this adage that correlation does not equal causation, right? The human data that we have is not clinical so much as it is observative. So we have studied people and we have pulled them, what are their eating habits? And we've made this minor connection between people eating lots of mushrooms and people having these beneficial health outcomes. Okay, So there's a logical step that has to get filled in. And that's how do these things do what we're claiming them to do? What's the mechanism? What are the gears that are connected? Okay, so right now we're at the correlative state. We're not at establishing causation. Okay. And one of the things that we'll have to suss out as a, as an institution, as scientists, is all these beneficial health outcomes, we need to separate out certain things like income, gender, and access to health care. Because when we don't include those things in the equation, it's really easy to confound those factors because income, gender, and access to health care have a huge impact on the human lifespan and on the health outcomes that we're interested in. If you're looking for a really good primer on how to manage your expectations. Nicholas money put out fantastic critical review called Are Mushrooms Medicinal? I've got an image right here. Textbook I will cut off the name and I've cut off other things, to be polite. And it's a pop culture text on purported medicinal qualities of mushrooms. And the idea is this author is interpreting certain pieces of information from traditional Chinese medicine. That's his words, not mine. And he wants you to think, Okay, so there's Chinese writing on the side here, and it must come from the horse's mouth, so to speak. And just, just as immediate way to be critical of this, right? This author is claiming that he's representing a traditional Chinese medicine information. This is not Chinese language writing. This is a mixture of Japanese hiragana and Japanese kanji. All right, but to a trained eye, it gets easier and easier to suss out poor sources of information, such as when somebody's talking about Chinese traditional medicine and they are including gibberish Japanese texts. Okay, so let's switch gears. Let's start talking about fungus as a organ. And fungi make up an enormous constituents of the mass of life on earth. It of course, is probably impossible right now and it will be impossible for a long time to estimate just how much of that mass that fungus make up. But it's staggering. Most of the organism that we referred to as the fungus lives out most of its life beneath the soil. Okay. The mushroom that we call, that we referred to in the culinary sense, it's actually the fruiting body. So it's only one part of the life stage of this mushroom, okay, so it's the reproductive, so we can break this down into its constituent parts. This is the cap of the mushroom, the underside, these are the gills and the stem. The stem, that's a misnomer because, one more person to mute there Beth, the stem is not articulated the same way that a stem on a plant is. So many of these cells are generalists cells and they don't have the specific water and they don't have the specific nutrient moving capacity. So they're not relegated to one particular task. They're generalists, okay. Underneath the soil, so if we follow the life cycle, this mushroom here, this fruiting body, has matured, okay, and it's putting out its spores, right, through the air. We can see a graphic of that here. It can be quite dramatic or it can be quite subtle, and we can not notice it until the next day. When spores land though, they act very similar to how seeds do, right? And even their methods of dispersal can be very similar to seeds. So they follow their trajectory on the wind or even on water. And when they land, they undergo a process that's, that's similar to germination, but not germination right. They're, they begin to mobilize their stored energy and they begin to form these structures called hyphae. Okay? And all the hyphae together form the mycelium branching network of the tissues and filaments that do two very, two very distinct things, they draw carbohydrates into themselves, okay? And carbohydrates and mineral ions, so these are the building blocks of what are later going to become more tissues and eventually the fruiting body. Okay, and then they are also absorbing water, these hyphae, they're incredibly thin, they're incredibly fine fibers. And one of the reason that we have these persisting relationships between fungi and between plants is because the fibers, the hyphae of the fungus are so fine and they can create so much surface area per cubic foot of soil that it can access certain nutrients that the plant through the plant might not. And so that symbiotic relationship forms when the fungus right through its hyphae that eventually penetrate and associate with the roots of the plant. The plant is exchanging carbohydrates into the fungus, and the fungus is exchanging mineral ions that it can more readily take up from the soil. So to complete that lifecycle, scores go down. They germinate, form hyphae and grow, feed into the soil until they, they are initiated by an environmental cue to form young mushrooms. These are called pins, okay? And they're just, they're primordial fruiting bodies. When we see pins and mushroom culture, that's a signal that, okay, we're going to start moving on to the next phase. All right. Oh, just another fun fact here. The biggest fungus in the world, right? Which again, primarily this hyphen of mycelium. Just to give you some scale, four square miles. It's an Armillaria  ostoyae. It's an Oregon, it's called the Honey fungus. It's massive. Four miles, right? So let's get into some more applied things. What do you need to get started? Again, we're talking about the indoor culture of mushrooms. If you're doing outdoor culture, a lot of these steps are also relevant because they are the steps that you'll need to undertake to create the starting material to, and you gotta forgive the term here, to to seed, right, your mushroom beds. But, so starting off, you're going to need your dishwashing or latex gloves, a spray mist bottle, alcohol, and then either you're starting inoculant if you're going to make an outdoor bed or your inoculant and a kit and a container that you're gonna grow these mushrooms out of. For a substrate container, the sky really is the limit. You can use just about anything. You can use a bucket that you've cut holes out of that you can use plastic bags. I wouldn't use grocery bags because they're too thin, they won't stand up to the processing. You can use Ziploc bags, work fantastic, especially because you can open and close the top. You can use what else? Oh, food Saver bags are fantastic because you can cut and size them according to how you need them. So the options are really are limitless, but I think the best thing that you can use, whatever you already have on. Okay. The reason behind these dishwashing gloves or latex gloves and the the alcohol is that this process, your success is really going to be supported by how clean you can maintain your immediate working environment. And so by having gloves, you're not protecting yourself so much as you're protecting what you're working on. So by having the gloves on, you can spray isopropyl alcohol on your gloves and you can sanitize your hands while you're working. Okay. Because some things that you can also pick up that are not entirely necessary, a pressure cooker or an instant pot. And we'll see why in a second. The overall process is deceptively simple, three-step process. We're going to prepare our substrate, which we'll learn about in a second. We're going to take the sub- the inoculated substrate through colonization. After the colonization has reached kind of its maximal point, we're going to initiate fruiting, right? This three-step process, we can generalize and we can say it's a grain spawn technique. Let me type that in the chat, right? Grain Spawn Technique. Very straightforward. If you want to look up more information about this three-step process, that's the name of the process. Basically what we're doing is we're taking a, where's my laser pointer? Here? We're taking a pasteurized carbohydrate rich matter. Okay, There's a lot of different things it can be made of, straw, sawdust. The point here is that it's got to have a lot of carbohydrates. We may not consider straw or sawdust or wood chips to be carbohydrate rich. But to a mushroom, It's a perfectly suitable source of food, right? Mushrooms don't photosynthesize, so we don't really need a whole lot. So they don't need light. They are converting the carbohydrates that are in this mass into a source that they can use. Okay, so some important tips about our growing substrate, right? So we said, okay, this can be hay, this can be cracked corn, it can be anything that used to be living that we know has like carbohydrates and you can look up different types of- you can look up different types of substrates. But if you go onto a mushroom cultivation website, almost always they are going to be selling you this straw material because it's got such great success right? Now as we're preparing this substrate to be used. All right, step one is that we're going to get our area ready. we can do this in the kitchen, try to move as much stuff out of the way, sanitize the surface. But that first step is going to be pasteurizing and cleaning the substrate itself. The reason that we're doing this is that even though this is supposed to be from a relatively clean provider, if you have a reputable provider, there's all kinds of nasty grossies that are going to be in that substrate material still-viruses, bacteria, and other fungi. Okay, that's weird, right? And so if we don't sterilize or pasteurize it rather, all of these things can persist in there, right, viruses can persist up to weeks. Bacteria spores. Bacterial spores can survive decades and centuries And then fungi from competing fungus can also live for a really long time. Okay, we want to prepare it this way because A, we don't want to get sick from anything that is pathogenic to humans or pathogenic to mammals. But B, we are creating a scenario. The goal here is to create a scenario where there's no competition between the fungus that we want to grow and anything else that might be living inside. Pasteurization, higher temp 160 to 180. Yeah, this does, This does seem a little low. I think that was a transcription. So 160 to 180, I believe 140 is okay. But you have to do it at a much longer time. Alana that was a great, that, thank you. Thank you for correcting me. It does occur at a higher temp if you're going to do it for a shorter period of time. No. Thank you. No, thank you for clarifying because that's important because there really is a quite a big difference between the temperatures and the times that we use to pasteurization. Remember Louis Pasteur, lower temperature and it's designed to kill off a lot of things that we know to be pathogenic. And for our purposes, for preparing the mushroom substrate. Perfectly fine. Sterilization, on the other hand, right, much higher temperature. We're trying to essentially kill anything that is living in here. This is a process that it's not necessary. But if you are trying to grow, trying to cultivate a species of mushroom that is not particularly competitive. Or you've had issues with contamination in the past. This is where we want to start considering sterilization. Sterilization is really quite difficult to do without the added element of pressure. So I mentioned earlier, that okay if you want to, you can purchase something like a pressure cooker or an insta-pot, and that's where we get the pressure and the temperature that we need to achieve sterilization. Again, mostly not necessarily. Okay. And just to give you some idea about the prevalence of fungal spores, right? So when we think of a fungal contamination, we might be thinking, oh, it's on the surface, says it's on my hands and clothes and things like that. But really, the contamination comes from the air that we breathe. Let's look at a Cladosporium exploring the different species. That's what SPP stands for. All these different species. These are the concentrations that we have in the air that we breathe. look at that. That's crazy, right? I think these are CFUs colony forming units. And so this is to show that even right now, particularly for this species, these subspecies, not a big threat, but there are others species of fungi that are getting really prevalent in the air. So even if you have a really clean working surface and you think you're being very clean, working in an area that has low air movement, right? You don't have a fan on you, is going to be ideal, okay? Because you don't want to get any of these contaminants in your substrate. Okay, I mentioned earlier that mushroom cultivation is a really sustainable practice. One of the things that makes it seem sustainable is that so many of the materials that we use for substrates are actually agricultural by-products, right So we don't need to use brand fresh cracked corn, right? We don't need to use wheat or hay, that would have otherwise gone to an animal. We can use things that are going to get basically thrown away, corn byproducts. So if we look at this diagram, we can see that ok our farmland is producing our crop of interest, okay And then we have our byproduct is stubble that go on to support a crop of mushrooms. And then not only are we using material that otherwise would have had to get tilled under or thrown away. Or we're just not getting value out of, we're getting that crop of mushrooms out of, the spent substrate, right? That comes from a crop of mushrooms can be immediately returned to the environment. Or better yet, we can convert it into useful products such as biofuel or even the packaging materials. If you have some time and you're curious about it, I highly encourage you to take a look at some of the fungus based packaging materials that are coming out. Okay, so suffice to say, very sustainable process. Okay, so we made it passed step one, it was preparing the substrate. Again, remember, we want to make sure that it is very sterile. That its sterile that it's very clean, it's pasteurized, okay. If you're storing it in-between these steps, you want to store it in something that's clean, that you have done a surface sanitization, right? So bleach, dilute bleach solution. So the colonization of the substrate, this is when we're going to be mixing in the inoculant. Okay, so we have our pasteurized clean substrate. We're going to inoculate it. The inoculant is usually some kind of grain, or some kind of wood dust with which spores and maybe even a little bit of hyphae of our species of interest. They've already started to grow and they're sitting a little bit dormant maybe. So we're mixing all that material together. Okay, inoculating In this instance, this person is using Agaricus bisporus its a regular button mushroom. Okay. All right, so what are the important things to know about the colonization stage, okay? In colonization, what we're looking for is the development of hyphae. Okay, let's go back to our recent Our previous slide just to review, right? This is our hyphae, the threads that form the bulk of the mushroom, the fungus, body. Alright. So we're looking for that development. If you're using a clear bag, you can actually see through and see the threads starting to spread away from the inoculant. As far as how to promote this process, most species of fungus have some kind of optimal temperature range. But if we're doing this indoors, right? And you're trying to do this as a beginner and you really don't need to try to engineer an environment to do this because room temperature is perfectly sufficient. That's all you need. Room temperature, okay? If you really have to do it, you want to keep the temperature between 50 and 80 degrees if you're doing an artificial environment, okay, 75 degrees, right? Splitting the difference maybe is ideal on the whole as temperatures increase, most organisms reproduce and grow faster, right, up to a kind of an optimal good spot to do this if you want to compromise between just leaving these colonizing mushroom bags, right, or saw dust or our straw that's been inoculated. A good compromise is putting these things on top of the fridge, okay? It's warm, but more importantly, it's stable. Okay? That's huge. Mushroom cultivation really favors a stable environment. And the top of the fridge is great because it's warm. But when the compressor is on or when it's off, there's a pretty consistent amount of heat that's coming off of there because the fridge is trying to keep the inside a consistent temperature. Okay. All right. so during colonization, right. Whether or not you're using a bag. Let's take a look at this example here where we're using a bag or a bucket or something. Similar. Fungi right, the hyphae mycelium below, they still need oxygen. These threads here are still undergoing respiration. Respiration requires oxygen. Anything that's alive is respiring right, its converting oxygen, using oxygen to convert its stored carbohydrates, right? So to support the growth of these fibers, you want to make sure that the container that you're using is sealed, but it's not hermetically sealed. There's still the ability for some slight airflow to move in and out. Okay, let's go back. So we have prepared our substrate, right? We have found an appropriate container for it. We have pasteurized it. We've begun to inoculate it to form the colonies. And step two, right Now, when our little hyphae, when our threads have fully and completely, they've made the array, they colonized throughout the entire container, you can see the threads are hitting the walls. It's circling back on themselves. That is the cue for you as a grower to begin fruiting and growing on. Okay, the fruiting process is when the reproductive bodies of the fungi begin to develop. Remember the slide that we saw for stuff, right? spores hit the ground, formed the hyphae. Hyphae form the fruiting bodies which then produce the spores, so on and so forth. Excuse me, you can do fruiting in the container. Excuse me, you can do fruiting in the container that you have done the colonization. So if you did your mushroom substrate bag, okay. And you position that in a box and the box is on the fridge. You can take it down. You can hydrate it to initiate the fruiting process and then you can put it right back. Okay, Easy-peasy. That's as simple as it has to be, fruiting to initiate it. We're going to take the mushrooms. Okay. We're going to take it down. We're going to rehydrate the bag by either soaking it in water. But importantly, we're going to put it back into that environment. We're going to let it sit. Okay? If you do want to use what's called the fruiting, they can be really simple, they're not required. But the idea here is that by enclosing that growing bag with the substrate or the bucket or whatever we're using. And this kind of enclosure will keep the humidity really high. I've done this with a garden style, the gardeners 1020 tray and a humidity dome that you might use to grow seeds from, right? Easy-peasy. Or you can put your bucket of substrate in a larger bucket, cover that over the Saran wrap. Okay? Again, the goal here is to increase the humidity of that environment. I'm going to pop into the chat. Some of the materials that I've used before. You can take one inch PVC pipe. Okay. And then you can, if you cut that to size, all the sizes are two two-foot pieces, you can connect it to what's called a PVC Side Outlet Elbow, and then you wrap it in two millimeter plastic drop cloth. Okay, super easy to do. The great benefit of using PVC and I believe thin plastic drop cloth is you can still see into it. And you don't want to set this and forget this. A, it's a really cool process. You've already invested your time and your money in this, watching mushroom grow is really cool. They grow so much faster. And there's just a lot going on the way that the fruiting bodies emerge and unfold. So if you're going to use a material, use a transparent material so that you can observe both for your own entertainment and for the health of the fungus. Okay, fruiting across the board. but don't get the...  Cedar? Am I saying that right?  Well Cedar, Yeah, you can you can use really any materials that you have on hand. PVC is cheap And also it's non porous so you can sanitize the surface. That's why I use it. The environment that you want to do, the fruiting and the growing on a couple degrees cooler, right? So maybe we don't put it on top of the fridge. Maybe we put it in a closet, right? Yeah. So Cedar when you're doing a box frame, right. So you're taking your one inch PVC, you're cutting it to let's see, 4, 8, 12 pieces. Okay. And then you're connecting it with the elbows. Okay? All right. So again, you're fruiting environments, two important things. It needs to be slightly cooler, right? Five degrees cooler, might be perfect and there needs to be a little bit of light. So we're looking for dim, slightly cooler, right? Humid environment. And the reason that we want a little bit of light, mushrooms don't photosynthesize. So why do we need light? That light is actually part of the cue that tells, tells the hyphae to start putting on fruiting bodies and not just keep growing high. So I've got two cues, you have two cues here. Three really, right slightly cooler temperatures, a little bit of light, okay? And then that very moist, humid environment that stays moist and stays humid All right. Okay. After about two to three weeks of this, you'll move the mushroom bag right from the fruiting chamber. You're going to want to start checking for those primordial pins, right? The very early young mushrooms. Okay, you're going to want to check their development that they're coming along though. If you don't see these pins after about two to three weeks. Okay. That is to me an indication that one of the things that you needed to get from this to these beautiful pink oyster mushrooms. This is my wife's hand here holding a cluster that we grow, right? Three cues, little bit of light, maintenance of that humidity, right? We've refreshed the spawn bag, and then that slightly cooler temperature. Those are the things that must be missing if you're not getting pin heads. So 2 to 3 weeks in, and you're not getting those things, reevaluate. Okay. All right. So when you're first starting out, it's tempting to want to do something like get this whole process going DIY. But what I mean by that is you're getting, maybe you're buying your substrate from a local farmer. You've gone online and you've found someone who sells the grain spawn only. And you're going to inoculate, you're going to do all these things on your own. And if you're a tenacious kind of person, that can work out well. But if, as I suspect, you are beginners, right because you're attending the session, you really want to get your feet wet and get that first, initial success under your belt by using something like an instant kit, and these instant kits are fantastic. I said earlier that you don't want to set and forget it. Well, with something like this, I've actually used this exact brand myself. You really can set and forget it as long as you position it in the right place in your home, right? So a dark part of the countertop. The way these kits work is, right? They come with a little substrate bag that's already inoculated. You dunk them in tap water. You set them out of direct sunlight and then you just watch them grow. One thing that you can do to get multiple flushes is that every time you harvest these instant kits, what you'll want to do is you you'll want to take off the entirety of the fruiting bodies, right? So all the fruiting bodies are gone, re-hydrate it, and then put it back. Okay. And you'll just you'll continue to get flushes over and over, maybe three or four at the max. And what's happened, what will happen? And what will be the sign for you that you can go ahead and throw it away or recycle it, is that the pin heads will take longer to form. Okay. So we go from two weeks, maybe two a month and beyond. And then also the actual size of the mature fruiting body will get smaller and smaller until you, you make the determination. Is it really worth it to keep doing it? And what's, what's happening at a biological level is the amount of carbohydrates in that given volume are being drawn down until there's just really not enough left to initiate a reproductive flush. Okay. So really fantastic, really rewarding. I grow these as well as mushroom beds outdoors and then just regular full kits. So if you're still nervous today, after today's presentation, about whether or not you can do this. I guarantee you, you absolutely can do this with one of these instant kits just get your feet wet. So other kits will take you through the entire life-cycle of cultivating a fungus. That can be really helpful if you want to take this hobby further and you want to conceptualize that whole developmental timeline that we talked about at the beginning, because this involves all of those preparatory steps that we've talked about for using these full kits. You really want to wait if you've done any gardening that day, right? Wait for the next day to start this process and maybe hold off until you have maybe a two to three days straight that you're not going to be in the garden so that you can minimize the amount of contamination. Wash your hands a bunch of times in between. If you choose one of these kits and you go through that three-step process of substrate preparation, colonization, and fruiting. You don't want to do any of this prep work and you don't want to do any of this growing in your bathroom or your bath. When we think about the environments that are conducive to fungal growth. Dark, dark and damp, right? That's your bathroom and a little bit warm too, dark and damp for the majority of the day. Okay. All right. If you get one of these kits, you want to make sure that it's complete, that it has all the parts. What are the parts? What are you looking for? You're looking for the inoculum, right? That's where we go all the way back, all the way back again. The inoculant, that's our spore, plus the hyphae that have colonized little pieces of grain or saw dust that the producer has used as a vehicle to transport them, to get them out. So you want the inoculant in there Double-check that the inoculants in there. Okay. Don't buy a kit that doesn't have inoculant because that's useless to you, okay. You can buy this, you can buy the inoculate you by the grain spawned by itself, but then you need to get all these other pieces, okay, make sure that it's got an appropriate substrate. And what I mean by appropriate is that it is, it's got it's got carbohydrates. Okay. It's made of some kind of some kind of living material. Sphagnum moss. Not great, for whatever reason, have not had great success. Okay. It should come at the substrate container, which is inside of this, the fruiting chamber inside of this will be some bags  that you can use. Okay. And then every once in a while they'll include a little fruiting light. This light is very low intensity, again, no photosynthesis here. It's just enough to produce the signal for the fruiting bodies to initiate from the hyphae All right, the instructions, again, they're going to be very similar to the process we just talked about. Prepare the inoculant, right? This is the inoculant right here. The grain spawn by crumbling it up before mixing it into the substrate. You don't just want to put it in there. Okay? Remember we said we want lots of, the benefit of the hyphae is that they produce lots of surface area. So if we break it up before mixing it into the substrate, that increases all the tiny little millions of starting points for the threads to expand out. Okay, so crumble it up, prepare the substrate, pasteurize it according to the instructions. If you're waiting in between steps for that substrate to dry down just a little bit so that it's moist but not sogging wet, put it in a sanitary container. Okay. Try to work in an area that has lower airflow so that we're not getting lots of contaminate and then mix in that grain spawn promptly. Okay. So that is the basic process for getting your feet dipped into the pool of growing mushrooms on your own, Annitta, So unfortunately, because I'm an employee of Michigan State University Extension, I cannot recommend a single product. However, I can say that if you use your favorite search engine there is no shortage of providers, there is one particular provider that is considered basically the Walmart, all mushroom, Mushroom growing supplies. I won't say the name, but it'll be very obvious. Get a kit based on what kind of mushroom you want to grow. Yeah. And so when you're looking at these different kits, oysters out there, shiitake, enoki a chicken of the forest, lion's mane, you're going to see those five are the, really the most common ones. If you want to hedge your bets and you want a really simple, straightforward, easy to grow mushroom. Highly encourage you to start out with oyster. And we're not thinking about this from a yield perspective, right? oyster is going to give me tons and tons of mushroom, really, it's a matter of vigor. And so if you make any mistakes in the process of the substrate prep, the colonization of the fruiting, If you make any mistakes, oyster mushrooms are really forgiving. and they'll grow in spite. That's what we're looking at over here. These pink oyster mushrooms, amazing flavor, amazing texture, and pretty satisfying yield, too. Okay. And then just as a bonus piece of information, I really love to incorporate any scientific studies where I can. Part of my job as a horticulture educator is taking kind of complex research and translating it to something useful, something that we know we can do. That is not true for science, is that after we have harvested our mushrooms. We have the ability to do something really cool. And that's to, enhance the vitamin D concentration of those mushrooms by exposing them to a little bit of sunlight or even artificial UVB light. The reason that we want to do this is that although mushrooms can be a really great source of vitamin D, the mushrooms that we're getting in the store, like our white button mushrooms, Okay, and our portabella's, they have significantly lower vitamin D concentrations, then there will say wild counterparts. Okay. And someone correctly postulated that this was due to a lack of exposure to ultraviolet radiation. And so what they did was they built upon that, that theory. They went ahead and they exposed button mushrooms, Agaricus bisporus, right? To UV light or to sunlight after they've been harvested. What they found was that there was an actual measurable increase in vitamin D. Okay. So that tells me is if you're really concerned about your vitamin D levels and you're not getting enough sun. Go ahead and throw those bad boys on a tray, let him sit out in the sun. That exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays initiates a chemical reaction that converts compounds inside the mushroom to vitamin D. Alright, Mark asked, can you discuss methods for inoculating mushrooms with a shaggy main, or garden giant in lawns and guard. That's a little bit outside the scope of today because we're just talking about basic mushroom cultivation. Mark, if you would like to e-mail me and my information will be up on here. We can talk a little bit about that more at length. I can point you towards some of the mycology specialists that I know that kind of know more about the cultivation side. Okay. All right. And and that is that's my time today folks. This is my e-mail here. imlerchr@msu.edu. Please take advantage of our Ask an expert system. This system is, it's used by Michigan State as a way for the public to directly, ask scientists, academics and other experts questions like, how do I grow mushrooms? So if there's anything that you want to learn more about or you're encountering any trouble, please use this system. The turnaround time is fantastic. We're talking 48 hours, average turnaround time for your questions. It's a great way to initiate a conversation with the source of expertise that you might not be able to access otherwise. Gardening in Michigan also has other fantastic resources that you can use that relate to fungus cultivation. We have some questions in the chat, so I'll try and go ahead and answer those. let's see. Is there a way to use  spores from your own mushrooms to grow a new crop? Yeah, that's correct. Although we didn't talk about it today, creating your own grains spawn is really not that difficult. And I'd say that if you purchase something like one of these kits and you go through the entire process, you get a successful flush, lets say pink oyster mushrooms, excuse me. And you have leftover substrate, what you can do is if you don't want to throw it away, you don't want to recycle it. You can save it, right? Save it, crumble it back up, reincorporated into new substrate. It's gotta be a lot, right? You can't do a one-to-one mix. I'd say you want to do maybe 10 to 1, right? Ten parts new substrate, one part old substrate. Okay, mix those together, make sure it's a pasteurized mix. And that's how you can reuse what you already have. if you're going to reuse substrate material like that. You don't want to draw it down with a third or fourth flush, maybe take it to two flushes of mushrooms. And then while there's still some carbohydrates in there to support the hyphae when you're essentially transplanting it. Do it that way. Any other questions? Please feel free to pop it in the chat or possibly get my email copied. Yes. Yes, that's correct, please. Melissa and anyone else who's interested if you want a copy of the oh and especially if you're a high school teacher. I love helping out high school teachers, middle school teachers, whoever. And you just want maybe something that you can use a half an hour portion of your lesson plan, please get a hold of me. I am so happy to share this information with you. Melissa. Yeah. If you could email me because it'll be hard for me to keep track of all these e-mails. E-mail me and I'll send you the slide deck and then if you have any, anything else that you want to add, we can add we can work together and have that together. Okay. Any other questions? All right. If not, thank you so much I so appreciate this getting to talk about plants and mushrooms. Oh my gosh, and getting paid to do it. It doesn't get better than that. Thank you Chris I appreciate that. And so we've answered almost all of your questions, but if you have a few more, Chris has a couple of minutes. He can he probably hang out. and answer as you would like. And I just want to remind everyone that this is to complete the session survey. I don't, do you have the link to the survey, Chris? I didn't. Oh, I'm sorry. It should be. so this session survey feedback link should be in the moderator instructions, it doesn't seem to have the actual link in my instructions, okay. All right. Okay. So what we'll what we'll end up doing is if you registered and attended this, I will be sending out a feedback survey, Yeah, we'll send a link out to you. And here's the thing. These feedback and these evaluations that we do. This is the life, this is our lifeblood. It may not seem like it, but every single time you fill out an evaluation for a public worker or a public educator, that is something that they can take to the bank. It's how we get funding for educational resources. It's how we get to put together cool events like this. And it's how I get to geek out about mushrooms or an hour. So please fill it out. let me know how I did. Let me know what you wanted me to talk about and I didn't get around to it. Let me know how I can improve this presentation. Always trying to create a better product for the public. Okay. Alrighty. Thank you so much everybody. I hope you're having a wonderful day finally warming up in Michigan. Let's do it. Thank you. Bye everyone. Bye everybody.