Ready-to-fruit kit
Oyster mushrooms from a kit
Pleurotus ostreatus
- Difficulty
- Anyone
- First harvest
- 10 to 16 days
- Keeps producing
- Two or three flushes, then compost it
- Substrate
- A pre-colonised sawdust or straw block, sold ready to open
Conditions that actually matter
Indirect light, room temperature, and humidity. Humidity is the whole game and the only thing that fails.
The method
- 01Cut a single X in the plastic where you want the mushrooms to come out. One opening, not several: every extra hole is another place for the block to dry.
- 02Mist the cut twice a day, or stand the block inside a loosely tented clear bag with a few small holes in it.
- 03Pins appear as a cluster of tiny grey knots within about a week. From that point they double in size roughly every day.
- 04Harvest the whole cluster when the cap edges are still slightly curled under. A day later they flatten, turn up at the edges and start dropping spores everywhere.
- 05Soak the block overnight in cold water, drain it, and it will usually fruit a second and sometimes a third time.
What decides whether this works
Humidity, and nothing else. A block that dries out stops pinning and never restarts. If the young pins are shrivelling or aborting, you are misting too little, every time.
What you need for this method
What this step needsReady-to-fruit grow kit$24.99
What this step needsPressure mister$24.59
What this step needsHumidity tent or greenhouse$29.99Some links here are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through one we earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes what we recommend. Prices were read from Amazon when this page was built and will have moved since.
Somebody else did the difficult part. You cut the bag, mist it twice a day and harvest in two weeks. Nothing here can go badly wrong and it is the right first step.
The species, in the wild
Choice
Oyster mushroom
White decurrent gills on a stemless or side-stemmed fan growing from wood.
Other methods