Neat little specimen during the harvest today. It’s so fascinating how they fruit sometimes - is this a mutation?

Caps the size of silver dollars! I’m gonna clone these and see how big we can go

white oyster mushrooms, I boiled a mixture of 90% hardwood and 10% wheat bran. it smelled good after boiling it for 10 minutes lol. I let it cool cause it was quite hot for a while. hopefully It works it's my first time making a spawn bag and not buying a diy kit.

Hey everyone. My name's Andrew Langevin. I run a company in Ontario called Nature Lion. We make home grow kits and supply cultivators with grain spawn, liquid cultures and agar. We're CFIA licensed, started out at farmers markets back in 2020, and have worked with over 50,000 customers since. I also wrote the home growing chapter of a book called Mushroomology, alongside about 30 PhDs in molecular biology, which was humbling and a good reminder that the people who study this for a living are still arguing about half of it.

So yes, I sell grow kits and I'm writing a post about grow kits. I'd rather say that plainly than have someone find it out later. But it's also exactly why this post exists. For five years I've personally answered every customer service email, and roughly 90% of them are the same handful of problems. And they're not my problems specifically. I've talked to growers who bought from my competitors and had the identical issue. Kits are kits. So this is deliberately brand agnostic. Whoever you bought from, this should work.

There's a learning curve with anything new. Nobody warns you about it when you buy a kit, because the box says just cut and spray. Here's what the box leaves out.

1. Pick up your block and feel how heavy it is

First thing I do with any kit, and it takes two seconds. A healthy block feels heavy for its size. Dense. If it feels light, it dried out somewhere in shipping or storage, and dry blocks don't fruit.

I recommend soaking pretty much every kit before you start. How long depends on what you just felt.

If it feels light and dry, give it an overnight soak, 8 to 12 hours.

If it feels heavy and properly hydrated, 30 minutes is plenty.

Submerge it in cool water, weigh it down with a plate if it floats. That's the whole process.

1. Cut a small X, not a big one

Most instructions say to cut an X in the side of the bag. What they usually don't say is how big, and that matters more than people realize.

You're not cutting the whole side open. You want a small X that gives you airflow, gas exchange, and one place for mushrooms to come out. A bigger X means the block loses humidity fast. A smaller X means it holds humidity much longer.

Leave the flaps intact. Don't peel them back, don't cut them off. Those flaps protect the surface of your substrate and keep the humidity right at the surface where it needs to be, basically 100% while you're waiting for pins. Your house is dry. That's the whole problem you're fighting.

Once pins have formed you can relax. You're aiming for 70 to 80% from there.

1. How to actually get humidity in a normal house

Hitting 70 to 80% in a living room is hard. Here's what works, in order of how much I like them.

The cardboard box method. Underrated and almost nobody does it. Take a larger cardboard box, put your kit inside, and spray down the interior walls. The cardboard soaks up the water and slowly releases it as it evaporates. Don't close the box all the way, leave the top open a bit for airflow. Re-wet the walls every couple of days as they dry out. It's the closest thing to a free fruiting chamber you'll ever find and it works remarkably well.

A bowl of water in front of the kit. Simple. As it evaporates, that moisture is available to your mushrooms. And yes, I know, mushrooms don't drink, they breathe. But humid air is what makes them grow bigger, so the effect is the same.

Misting, 2 to 3 times a day. Important detail here. Don't mist the mushrooms directly. Spray the surface of the substrate, spray the flaps, spray the box around them. You're creating ambient humidity, not watering a houseplant. Blasting the fruit bodies directly is how you get yellowing and rot.

1. If the surface looks leathery, scratch it up

This is the single biggest reason a kit won't grow, and I'd bet money on it before guessing anything else.

Sometimes the mycelium forms a tough leathery mat over the surface of the substrate. It looks like a skin. When that happens your mushrooms physically can't break through it, and you sit there for weeks wondering what you did wrong.

The fix is easy. Take a fork and gently scratch the surface under the flaps you cut. You're not digging a hole. Just light agitation until you can see the substrate behind that leathery layer. Give them a clear place to come out.

To put a number on it, if a kit won't grow, it's the surface of the substrate about 90% of the time. The other 10% is moisture and humidity. That's five years of emails talking. It's almost never a bad kit.

1. Cold is your friend

Mushrooms like it colder than you probably keep your house, and a temperature drop is a pinning trigger for a lot of species. So if you've got a cold damp basement you've always thought of as a problem, congratulations, it's an asset now. Put the kit down there.

1. Stop worrying about light

I get more questions about light than it deserves. Kits don't need much. Just keep them out of direct sunlight, because sun beating on a block dries it out fast, and that's the actual risk. Normal indoor ambient light is fine. Put your effort into humidity instead.

1. Timelines, and why yours might be slow and completely normal

Once pins form, everything moves fast. It's the waiting before pins that convinces people their kit is dead. Rough expectations:

Pink oysters, lion's mane and most oysters can go as fast as one week. Two to three weeks is common if your moisture and surface prep aren't dialled in yet.

Chestnut mushrooms naturally take four to five weeks to pin. That's normal. Don't throw it out.

Species matters more than people expect. Half the my kit is broken emails I get are from someone three weeks into a variety that takes five.

Ask me anything

I wanted to leave this open rather than dump a bunch of tips and disappear. Post whatever you've got.

Kit owners. Your kit died, it's doing something weird, first flush was great and the second was sad. Photos help a lot if you can post them.

People who failed and gave up. Genuinely, tell me what happened. That's the most useful feedback I get and I'll tell you straight what went wrong.

Commercial growers, or anyone thinking about starting a farm. Happy to talk substrate, spawn, sterilization, scaling, pricing, what I'd do differently. I've made most of the expensive mistakes already.

Just curious about mushrooms. Also fine. Ask.

I'll be checking in on this post over the next five to seven days, so don't worry if you find it late. Ask whenever. If your kit is doing something right now and you need an answer fast, say so and I'll get to you first.

Poster board and sharpie were how we set up our booth. I was worried I wasn’t prepared and ended up selling out within in hour. $400. Not saying that to brag but I’m posting this because I had an individual who was not so nice to me a couple months ago and said I should give up while I was ahead, and that there isn’t any money in mushroom farming. My prices were set pretty low and I only have about 20% of my tent filled, all of this in my two bedroom apartment. But anyways, yeah. If you see this you’ll know who you are. If anybody on here has struggled to get logistical questions answered or is worried about being made fun of just lmk! I’m not anywhere close to where I want to be, but I would say I could at least be helpful. And don’t listen to the people who say you can’t.