Pasteurizing hay substrate for mushroom growing

You can grow mushrooms in many things, from brown rice, to bird seed, in poop and even in hay. The later is actually a really good form of substrate, as little competing fungi and bacteria will grow on it. Making it easier to work with as less sterile precautions are needed. And since I have lots of hay, this seemed to be the way to go in my next steps to grow mushrooms for their co2.. and maybe their fruiting bodies too.

Pink Oyster mushrooms are ideal for growing to collect carbon dioxide. From what I have read they off gas so much that you must purge the room of the co2 every few minutes otherwise it inhibits the fungi growth. Well for ones waste is another's food, in this case my cannabis plants LOVE carbon dioxide and cannot get enough of it. So I hope to turn fungi into little co2 factories for me... well for my cannabis plants, which are for me.

The hay I am collecting I believe is known as Red Fescue grass.... Its dried out stalks can be found my property where the bailer did not go. So I walk the line of hay and cut it and place the cut hay into a bucket.

I could collect it for hours, but honestly I only need enough for one stock pot. Which I will then pasteurize in water for four hours. This kills any bacteria or fungi that may compete, as little as there is its still a good idea to sterilize your substrate.

My farm hand helps out and we spend about 15 minutes cutting hay by hand.

A big ol bucket off of cut hay for my mushrooms.

We pull out the roots we may have pulled up while cutting, we just want the hay fibers.

Once we fill up my bucket, I take it back to the porch and start cutting up the hay.. Makes it easier to cook down and will go into bags better.

Another 30 minutes or an hour and I have a bag of cut up hay ready for sterilizing.

Made a little bit of a mess, but the wind will clean up the dropped hay.

I tried doing the pasteurization, outside, but the winds were too much and kept blowing out the cookers flame.

Bringing it inside I put it on our stove.. That must be the largest pot ever on the cooker.

Getting the temp up to 150F (65C) and holding it there for four hours it will remove the bacteria and fungus that may already be living inside the hay. Making it ideal for new fungus, my pink oyster mushrooms to move into.

While I waited the four hours, I made my mushroom growing buckets. By drilling holes in them the fruiting bodies will emerge from there.

Made a big ol mess...

The hole saw drill made quick work of them.

Once my hay is done, I lay it out on a tarp to cool down. It is too hot to add the mycelium blocks, so I must let it cool on the tarp for a few minutes.

Here is one of the two blocks I will use, the end of it is starting to go bad so I had to hurry up and use it up. I cut off that discolored part and only used the good pink parts. I had a second block as well, the one I made posts about previously. Nothing really happed after cutting off the dried up bodies so I figured I should break it down into bits and use it in the buckets.

Here's a close up of the hay now its been pasteurized. It has a sweet smell to it.. must be all the starches inside getting cooked.

While the hay lays out, it will drain of some of the water and go down into my basement drain. The color of the water has darkened with all that hay goodness inside. Probably would make a good compost tea.. maybe I should save it next time.

The next steps required me to put on clean clothes, gloves and keep really clean. So I had to stop taking pictures of the progress until I was finished.

Basically I took a glove full of hay and a glove full of crushed up mushroom block and adding them in each part into a trash bag inside the 5 gallon bucket. Doing this cycle until it was full I then tied off the top.

Double bagging it, now we wait. Just like with my jars and the wild bird seed, it took months to run throughout the substrate. Now it must do that again. But instead of in a little mason jar, it now has a 5 gallon paint bucket off of space. So this is where I hope the gas production starts and maybe some tasty fruit as well. I marked on my calendar and will check back on the bucket in a few weeks, but may take a month or longer due to cool basement tempatures.