EASY STEPS TO GROW OYSTER MUSHROOM

Greetings to y'all, hope we are all doing great. Today i will like to outline to us all the different steps involve in growing a spacie of mushrooms known as oyster. These steps are quite easy and anyone can do it.
Alot of people believe that mushroom can only be consume at particular periods in a year, but that is no longer the case, with the help of modern technology mushroom can be cultivated and consumed all year-round. This process involves the use of organic products, most of which are agricultural waste and can easily be gotten around.
To make a little quantity for home consumption, one will need the following: a bottle of a mother culture ( this can be gotten from mushroom farmers around and the prices will depend on the farmer), a bag of corn cobs, a bag of sawdust or straws, chalk calcium carbonate or what is commonly known as whitewash, kernel cake, groundnut cake, rice brown, glass bottles or jars with good covers and water. Once all of the listed materials are present, then we are good to start.
Pour the corn cobs into a big container preferably an oil drum, pour in 40 grams of whitewash and then add half kilogram each of kernel cake, groundnut cake, add 15 liters of water and mixe properly to have a homogeneous mixture.

Put small quantities of the mixture into a glass bottle and press.
once this is done, we carry out a process known as pasteurization ( heating at 75 to 125°c). All the bottles are placed in a larger oil drum and cooked for about 6 to 7 hour, this is to ensure that the mixture is well sterilized and free from other competitive fungi. After the heating process allow the containers to get cool and transfer it in to an inoculator which is free from bacteria. Transfer small quantity of the mother culture into the the mixture that was previously pasteurized, usually the ratio is 1:20, that is one bottle of the mother culture will be used to multiply 20 other.

Above is an image of me carrying out the inoculation process (seed multiplication process).
The bottles are then placed in a cool room and allowed to colonise. The mother culture which was added to the mixture usually takes about 2 to 3 weeks to spread and colonise the bottle, once this is done we move on to the next step

PLANTING PROCESS (
This step is a little bit similar to step one, the only difference here is the raw materials used. First of all pour the sawdust on a clean surface and bore a hole at the center forming a well. Pour in 1 kilogram each of kernel and groundnut cake, you can add fertilizer( 20 10 10) but the fertilizer is optional, it just helps to boost the nutritional content of the substrat. Add in 80 grams of whitewash and then pour in 30 liters of water and mixe thoroughly.

Put about 1kg of the substrat into plastic nylons and force out all the air in it and tie up the plastic tightly.
Put the substrate into the oil drum and repeat the pasteurization process. Once this process is completed allow the substrate to get cool to about 25°c and then transfer the spawns into the plastic nylon and tie it up place the substrate on shelves in a room with low temperature ranging from 18 to 22°c and humidity or the water content of the room should be kept high. If these two condition are okay then fruiting should be expected in about 3 to 4 weeks.