DIY Mushroom Grain Spawn: Easy Home Method Without Laminar Flow Hood

if you can make your own grain spawn you can grow basically any kind of cultivatable mushroom that you want

and it doesn't actually have to be that complicated in this video i wanted to show you a method for how to make your

own grain spawn at home without needing to take up a bunch of space or investing a bunch of money into building

out your own mushroom lab now you still will need to use some equipment like a pressure cooker or a

pressure canner but you won't need a laminar flow hood which is typically the biggest barrier

to entry for most new growers so here is a fully colonized jar of pink oyster grain spawn and i

made this grain spawn without the use of a laminar flow hood in fact i inoculated this in open air

without having to take too many special precautions the trick to being able to do that has to do with this specially

constructed lid that contains something called a self-healing injection port it's super

easy to make and it makes the process of making your own grain spawn really easy so the basic process for making your

spawn is to take a cereal grain like rye or wheat berries soak them overnight and then simmer them on a

stove before filling them up into these jars with these specially constructed lids

and then pressure sterilizing them for about 90 minutes at 15 psi you can then inoculate them with a

liquid culture syringe directly through this self-healing injection port wait a

couple of weeks and before you know it you'll have some grain spawn that you can use for your next

awesome mushroom project so let's get started the first step to making grain spawn is

simply take some cereal grain i like to use rye berries but you can easily use another type of grain

wheat berries work really good you can even use brown rice but i like to use rye berries just because they're so

excellent for growing mushrooms and then all you're going to do is take your your cereal

grain and soak it in a bucket for about 12 to 24 hours so just cover the grain in water and allow it to sit

there and soak and what's going to happen is the grain is going to absorb all that moisture

that the mycelium can eventually use to grow on now you don't want to soak it for too much

longer than 12 or 24 hours because eventually the grains will sprout and you want to get your grains fully

hydrated but you don't want them to sprout now in previous videos i showed you to

add some coffee and some gypsum and some other stuff into this bucket as it's soaking

you really don't need to do that especially if you're just growing on a small scale it works perfectly fine just

add water and allow the grains to soak now again remember as your grains are soaking they're going to absorb

a lot of water so the volume of hydrated grain is going to be a lot more than the volume of

dry grain and typically that's about three times or maybe three and a half times so for example if you want to make

10 of these quart jars of grain spawn you want to use about three to three and a third

quart jars of dried grain so i'm just going to measure out about three and a third or about three and a half quart

jars of dry grain put it into the bucket and let it soak and that should give us about 10

jars of grain spawn when everything is fully hydrated while your grain is soaking is the

perfect opportunity to make your specialized lids and these lids will allow you to inoculate your sterilized

grain without having to open the jar which is why you can do it without requiring a

laminar flow hood and they're pretty simple to make all you do is you take a normal jar lid

and you drill two holes one hole is a bigger quarter inch hole and that's for pulling in your wad of pillow stuffing

to create a filter that will allow your mycelium to breathe as it's growing through

the sterilized grain the other hole is quite a bit smaller about an eighth of an inch

and what you'll do with that one is you'll cover it in a small dab of high temperature

silicone so all you'll do is put a small dab of high temperature silicone on there and then leave it to set

overnight and this will create what is called a self-healing injection port and it basically allows you to inoculate

your liquid culture directly through that dab of silicone without opening up your jar so you just

stick the needle in you can inject your liquid culture and you can pull it out and as you pull the needle out it closes

up that hole right away aka being self-healing and doesn't allow any contaminants to enter and that's why

you can inoculate your jars in an open air environment without requiring a laminar flow hood so

they're super simple to make all you need is your jar lids some pillow stuffing and of course the

high temperature silicone now you don't want to use a regular silicone sealant because

that will melt when you put it in the pressure cooker so the reason you need high temperature silicone

is because obviously it's super resistant to high temperatures so you can no problem put it in a

pressure counter sterilize your grain without worrying about the silicon melting back into your jar

now that you have your jars ready to go and you have your grain that's been soaking for 12 to 24 hours it's time to

simmer the grain on the stove and what this does is just completes the process of allowing

the grains to fully become hydrated and just kind of soak up all of that water and it also softens

them a little bit to make it easier for the mycelium to grow on them so

basically all you're going to do is take your grain that you've been soaking put it on the stove and simmer it for

about 15 minutes or so now you don't want to bring it to a hard boil or boil it for too long because if that

happens a lot of the times your grains will crack open and when you make your spawn it will be

all kind of mushy and just won't be all that great so just simmer it kind of at a low you know

temperature so it's not a rolling boil but just a nice simmer and do that for about 15 minutes once

you've simmered it you're going to want to drain the grains and make them dry on the outside but obviously make them stay

hydrated on the inside in the previous video i showed you to kind of lay them out on a screen which is still

a great method it works really well but you again you don't need to do that you don't need to build a screen and

have all this fancy stuff really all you need to do is once a grain simmer just kind of dump it in your sink

and make sure that you have the plug in there of course but dump it in the sink and just leave it there

for an hour or so and what that's going to do is it's going to drain off your grains perfectly and then

after an hour you can just go ahead and fill your jars now this won't make absolutely perfect grain spawn every

time but it will make a really really good grain spawn that's just as reasonable and especially

if you're growing at home on a small scale it doesn't matter that much how you

drain your grains because if you just dump them in the sink and allow them to dry

they will be 99 of the way there and they'll be really good and it's just a way easier method so again once you've

soaked your grain simmer it on the stove for about 15 minutes and then just dump them in the sink

to dry them off so after about an hour or so once your grains are reasonably dry on the outside you can go ahead and

fill your jars now you don't want to fill the jars all the way to the top because sometimes

while they're colonizing you might want to shake them and if they're not all the way full it

makes them a lot easier to shake them and kind of speed up that colonization process so

i like to fill the jars between two thirds and three quarters of the way full but simply just take a spoon and

fill up your jars close the lid and then wrap a piece of tin foil on top and that tin foil is

just going to make sure that you don't have water dripping back in through the polyfill as

you're sterilizing your grain so once your jars are filled up cover the lids in tin

foil and then it's time to sterilize them so once the grain jars are filled they need to be sterilized

and what this does is it kills off any kind of contaminants or mold spores or all the other stuff that's going to be

on the grain that will out compete your mushrooms and if you don't sterilize it you really don't have much of a chance

of having a success making a grain spawn i know this is the point where a lot of new growers kind of

get turned off because they think oh i need a pressure canner that gets expensive it seems too

complicated but really it's actually not that bad this is a 23 quart presto pressure canner and this can

sterilize up to 10 jars of grain but it can also be used to sterilize fruiting blocks or

agar and all sorts of stuff so once you have one of these pressure cookers

it really opens up a whole world of possibilities in terms of growing mushrooms at home

and they're really not that expensive this one can be had for about 100 bucks of course you can get you know more

advanced ones like the all-american autoclaves that are you know electric stereoclaves or whatever and those can

be between 800 and a thousand dollars they work amazingly if you can get one i highly recommend it

they're super sweet but you really don't need one this is just a stove top pressure canner

that can sterilize at 15 psi quite easily it can fit a lot of stuff and just goes on your stove the only

thing that's kind of annoying is it's really loud so when it's on your stove it's going to be rocking

and it's kind of annoying but other than that it's it's great they work great and they will last a long time

if you take care of them so you're just going to load this thing up with your grain jars put it on the stove and

sterilize it for 90 minutes at 15 psi so that's not 90 minutes once you put it on the stove that's 90

minutes once it hits that 15 psi so put on the stove wait till it gets up to pressure bring it back down to

a low temperature and allow it to sterilize for 90 minutes after that's done you just turn it off

and you'll have perfectly sterilized grain to inoculate your mycelium into so the final step is to inoculate the

sterilized grain with a liquid mushroom culture so this is just a simple liquid culture syringe there's

lots of different places that you can get these online i might put a link in the description

from some that i recommend but um the one that i did for this particular batch of grain spawn was pink

oyster mushroom so when you get these needles they're already sterilized

so all you got to do is take the needle out of the package put it on there and then inject about one to two cc's

directly through that self-healing injection port so here is the liquid culture syringe and

if you don't know what liquid culture is it's basically just mycelium that's growing throughout a

nutritious broth and it's a great way to inoculate your grain spawn

so it'll come with a needle that's totally sterile already so let's just go ahead and open that up

and then you need to remove this plug which can be kind of a pain in the butt but i got this nice little twist off

tool so all i'm going to do is twist that off and we're going to put that needle tip

in there and now we can go ahead and inoculate our jar so again this is totally sterile

but once i take this off it will be exposed to you know the ambient air around me

but it should be totally fine if you're doing lots of inoculations in a row it might make sense to flame sterilize

this so just take a lighter and sterilize it until it's red hot but really you don't even need to do that

because again you're just injecting the culture from the inside right into this grain

jar and it should be totally fine so let's go ahead and open that up and then you

can just inject it directly through and then just inject about one cc of liquid culture into your jar

and you can see as i pull this needle out it closes right up with that silicone so

no contaminants will find their way through there once you pull the needle out

so again you only need about one cc per jar so if you don't use the whole thing you can just put the cap back on put it

in a ziplock bag and just leave it even at room temperature on a shelf but it'll probably last longer if you put it

in the fridge although this is pink oyster so with pink oyster i usually find the best results

to just put them on a shelf somewhere out of direct light and kind of in a cool area like your basement or

something or maybe even in the garage and it should last you quite a while and once that's done

all you got to do is put your jars somewhere kind of out of the way and allow them to kind of do their thing of

course you want to check on your jars every couple of days just to make sure that the mycelium is

growing and then no contaminants have taken over the most common contaminants would be

like a bacteria and you'd see that by you know kind of a wet look on the outside of the grains

or trichoderma mold which would be kind of a green mold that would be pretty obvious right away

the pink oyster grain that i made it looks like it's contaminated because it's a little bit pink

but that's just what pink oyster mycelium looks like sometime actually if you take a closer look you can see

there's even tiny little fruit bodies already showing up on there now if you want to speed up the

colonization process once the jar is about one-third or so colonized you can shake it up real good

and break up all those grains and what that's going to do is just create more inoculation points

throughout the grain jar and then start to colonize again and it usually colonizes a lot faster now you

don't have to do that it should colonize pretty fast anyway in about like i said one to two weeks

but shaking up that jar and increasing those colonization points will increase the speed just a little

bit and if you're worried about contamination or if it's taking too long or something

like that sometimes shaking the jar will help quite a bit but if you've done everything and follow all the steps

there's a really low chance that you have any sort of contamination if you do have contamination issues

it's usually because either your liquid culture syringe was contaminated or because you had an incomplete

sterilization process when you were sterilizing your grains but either way you just take your

inoculated grain jars you put them on a shelf keep them out of the way and in about one to

two weeks you should have perfectly colonized grain spawn

that you can use to make fruiting blocks to add to aspen wood chips if you want to do the

bucket method or to even make more grain spawn if you want to do like a grain to grain

transfer there's lots of different things that you can do with grain spawn and and once you have your own

you can you know use all different types of species and have a lot of really fun different mushroom projects so i hope

this was an easier way to make grain spawn if you have any questions feel free to drop

them in the comments below and yeah as always if you like mushroom content and you want to see more of it

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell we like to do weekly videos one to two

videos every week just kind of sharing the magic of mushrooms so again thanks so much for watching

i'm tony from fresh cat mushrooms and we'll see you in the next video