Frequently asked questions about medicinal mushrooms

Here you can watch video content on mushroom cultivation: https://goba.eu/knjiznica/video-vsebine/gojenje-gob/

One cubic metre of wood can yield up to 64 kg of fresh mushrooms over a growing season of a couple of years.

Trunks inoculated with mycelium from shiitakes, oystercatchers, winter parakeets, white oystercatchers and honeysuckles can be kept outdoors all the time, as these species are frost-tolerant. Ganoderma lucidum is sensitive to frost and it is advisable to protect the trunks inoculated with it from frost.

There can be about 2/3 of the stalls in a room, because we need space to walk between them. This means that in a room of dimensions 8m x 2m = 16m x 2/3 = 10.7 square metres of standing room. The racks usually have four shelves (the shelf spacing should be about half a metre), which means 10.7 x 4 = 43 square metres of functional space. Approximately 9 growing sets can be placed per square metre of shelving, which means that in a space of 8 m x 2 m, 9 x 10.7 x 4 = 385 growing sets can be placed on the shelving. One kit will grow about 0.7 kg of mushrooms over the entire growing season (which can last up to six months), which means that you can produce 385 x 0.7 kg = 269 kg of fresh mushrooms in half a year in such a space.

Natural light can be successfully replaced by artificial light. However, mushrooms exposed to UV light have a much higher vitamin D content.

The rate of emergence depends in principle on the “maturity” of the substrate. In principle, however, the mushrooms emerge at room temperature within 14 days of opening the kit and reach their final size within a few days.

The substrate should rest at the same temperature at which the harvest took place. During the resting phase, it is recommended to lower the relative humidity to prevent mould. You can also reduce the ventilation of the room. In our experience, light does not have an excessive effect.

Če je substrat na eni strani plesniv, to stran pokrijte na tak način, da se spore plesni ne bodo mogle širiti po zraku na substrat v drugih vrečah.

You can safely mix small mycelium sponges into pasteurized straw, as mycelium will sprout from them again.

In principle, wheat straw is more suitable because it is more airy, but you can also use other types of straw; oyster mushrooms even grow on hay.

Conventional lamps are sufficient for lighting and additional lighting with a UV lamp is not necessary.

It is normal for some of the small mushrooms (mushroom germs) to dry up, as the mycelium does not generate enough energy for all the mushrooms to grow to their final size. You can see a similar phenomenon in fruit trees, when some of the fruit thins out and simply falls off the tree, because the tree does not have enough energy for all the fruits to ripen. We suggest that you manually spray the small mushrooms once a day and if they continue to grow, it means that the air humidity is too low, although I doubt it, as your relative air humidity in the room is only slightly too low.

You can protect the ends of the trunks with foil only, but in this case you need to protect the trunk from sunlight, as the trunk gets very hot under the foil.

Mycelium needs very little oxygen to grow, so the film does not hinder its respiration and does not need to be removed from the stems. Over time, it will fall off on its own.

In the beginning, when the trunks are in the overgrowing stage, they can be kept in living spaces. Later on, when the fungi have taken over, it is better to keep them outdoors because of the spores they release into the environment. Large amounts of inhaled spores can cause allergies in humans.

It is best not to push the plugs deeper into the trunk, but to keep the end of the plug flush with the surface of the bark. Alternatively, the holes in the trunk can be much longer than the plug itself – this allows the mycelium to penetrate even faster. In our case, even with paraffin, the holes are not greased and the mycelium outgrows them well.

Those “strange” fungi were probably already in the trunk before you introduced the mycelium. This sometimes happens with trunks taken from trees that are damaged, have cracked side branches or are old (trunk diameter greater than 30 cm). In such trees, many fungi are already present in the centre of the trunk, waiting for the day when the tree falls down and they start to sprout from it. It is very difficult to believe that the mycelium we have sold you is dead, because we grow it from cultures of known and regularly checked quality, we keep it at a low temperature all the time to prevent it from ageing and dying, we renew it, and it is always grown in completely sterile conditions to prevent contamination by bacteria or mould.

With 300 plugs, you can make about a quarter of a cubic metre of wood.

In our experience, beech trunks 40cm in diameter and 80cm long will produce mushrooms twice a year for up to eight years. However, this depends mainly on the type of mushroom you want to grow and the type of wood used.

Hardwood chips are a suitable substrate, especially for oysters. However, the regrowth will be slower and the crop will take longer to establish, so care should be taken to ensure that the substrate does not dry out too much during the regrowth process.

One cubic metre of trunks produces a mass of fresh mushrooms equivalent to up to 20% of the dry weight of the wood over the entire growing season (which lasts several years). That is to say, one cubic metre of average wood (850 kg dry weight, which must be reduced by a third because there is so much space between the trunks) can yield 112 kg of fresh mushrooms (applies to beech oyster mushrooms).

We do not have good experience with the use of fruit tree stumps for mushroom cultivation, as they are often already cracked inside or resinous. If you do decide to grow mushrooms, we recommend you try beech oyster mushrooms, which have aggressive growth and will cope best with the situation.

The cultivated mushrooms whose spawn we produce and sell here are rot fungi, not parasites. So there is no need to worry about them attacking healthy trees in the vicinity.

No. A cracked trunk means that another fungus species has already overgrown it and will most likely prevent the fungus you are about to plant from growing on the trunk.

In principle, wood harvested during the dormant season is preferable. It will yield a few percent more mushrooms. If you do not grow mushrooms on a large scale, the difference in yield will not be so great that you will have to choose and wait for the right time to cut the trees. We just graft the trunks when we have the wood to do so.

You can apply mycelium to wood at any time. If you use mycelium on cereal grains and apply it to wood before winter, you need to protect it well from rodents and birds, as they are very keen to eat it. When applying mycelium to wood in the run-up to winter, bear in mind that mycelium growth will stop during the winter months and resume in the spring. The overgrowth period will increase proportionately.

If you store fruit or potatoes in a cellar and the room is not sufficiently ventilated, the gases emitted by the fruit can have an undesirable effect on the fungi, resulting in deformation of the hats.

The spores released by the fungi during growth may accumulate on the crops themselves, but in our experience they will not germinate or cause other damage.

Protect the trunks only at the cut ends, not over the whole trunk. This is because you only need to prevent pests from gaining access and drying out the part of the trunk where you have ‘damaged’ it by applying mycelium to it.