Smart mushroom growing device for beginners

Indeed, the hardest part is inoculating without introducing contaminants that will out-compete the mycelium (typically trich).

However, this is relatively simple and cheap to do at home — especially using a technique called uncle Ben’s tek. As it happens, pre-packaged rice is the perfect sterile environment for mycelium growth.

Once successfully inoculated, it’s basically a matter of mixing the mycelium with substrate (wood chips or coir depending on the strain) in a container with a lid that allows minimal airflow (a plastic tub for example) and waiting.

The process is really quite simple, and I’ve harvested kilograms of mushrooms with an initial outlay of around $30. Once you have mushrooms, you have spores, and the recurring cost is only substrate (and uncle Ben’s bags or grains, jars, pressure cooker if you want to sterilise them yourself).

Yeah, 1000%. I've grown almost half the species they list. The hard (and fun) part is agar work to clean up the culture, sterilizing the grain, and keeping it sterile as you inoculate it, knowing when a bag has gone bad, etc. Fruiting it is easy in comparison. Like, cut some slits in the bag and mist it, with a trash bag over it if you want to be fancy. Mushroom stand at former local farmers market sold said blocks direct to consumer, and they'll give you a hell of a lot more than these ones.

I do have my own fruiting chamber, but it's not necessary.

The main advantage of this thing (which is no small feat!) is that it looks pretty, unlike a mottled plastic bag, potentially with another bag over it. I can absolutely see a place for it as a fun, living table piece that gives you food. Also once you buy this thing you have an incentive to keep buying their blocks. I have never been impressed with "smart" fruiting chambers -- they just play up how ~hard~ growing mushrooms is and then do the easy part for you and claim it's solved.

Call me when a chamber like this can detect mold better than my nose and eyes. THAT I'll shell out money for. It sucks to have mold sporulate, contaminating everything, before you know it's happened.

Mushrooms want to grow! And once you've gotten to the point where they're the only thing growing, you're golden.

Also, none of this is that hard if you read and learn! The mushrooms will tell you exactly where you went wrong, and there's TONS of info out there to get the hobby grower started. I highly suggest Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Paul Stamets, and reading up on The Shroomery (lot of good stuff in the gourmet forum, some stuff that's common between gourmet and magic, like agar or grain prep is in the other cultivation forum).

Only sensible.

Growing mushrooms is cool, and the idea of making it an ornamental object like and aquarium is good. It's kind if expensive though, and pretty small for culinary mushrooms.

Personally I kinda want one to try growing some flamboyantly ornamental fungus. But... a desire to pay $300 in order to grow a cool mushroom... these two "very specific" audiences overlap a lot. Exactly the kind of tolerant niche customers that makes for a good crowdfund.

$12 a block? The pod thing is only capable of what appears to be a portion, so yeah: It's a fungus juicero.