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With the major boom of homesteading and home gardening, mushroom growing has significantly grown in popularity. Eating mushrooms that you cultivated by yourself gives a different level of satisfaction than those bought from the grocery store. The best part is, you can easily grow mushrooms from coffee grounds.
Mushrooms are easy to cultivate and they grow within days. Just store your leftover grounds from your morning coffee and combine them with a lot of moisture. Read more on the detailed steps below.
Why Use Coffee Grounds to Grow Mushrooms?
Coffee can be a great ingredient for gardening compost. It is a carbon-producing compound that is perfect for balancing the soil and compost piles. When growing mushrooms, you always need to pasteurize the soil in order to prevent competing fungi, bacteria, and insects from growing inside. You can grow mushrooms from coffee grounds easily, as it is already pasteurized when brewed.
While the coffee grounds are already pasteurized, there are fewer steps to grow mushrooms successfully with this method. A critical thing to remember is not to use old coffee grounds, they will probably be too dry and may even have mold spores forming inside without you knowing. For doing everything properly use same-day coffee grounds, which means that you will have to use whatever is left in your coffee maker from today. Coffee grounds shouldn’t be piping hot, as it will kill the mushroom spores. Before using them, let them cool down a little.
How To Effectively Grow Mushrooms From Coffee Grounds
There are a few methods of cultivating mushrooms from coffee grounds, but in all of these methods, the base idea is consistent. Same-day brewed coffee grounds combined with a substance that will make the coffee grounds breathable and have quite a lot of moisture. In order to do this method correctly, you will have to use a lot of coffee grounds. Visit your local coffee shop and politely ask them for their used coffee grounds. Since they usually throw them away, they will probably give the coffee grounds to you without hesitation.
If you are using sawdust or straw to help the coffee grounds breathe, you will have to pasteurize them to prevent bacterial and fungal growth. Also, you can use aerated cardboard, usually, it doesn’t have to be pasteurized. Finally, make sure that you have enough spores or spawns for cultivating mushrooms.
Benefits Of Growing Mushrooms From Coffee Grounds
In addition to utilizing a large waste stream, there are numerous other benefits of cultivating mushrooms on coffee grounds.
Substrate is Already Sterilized
When growing mushrooms the classic way, before you start you will have to pasteurize or sterilize the sawdust or straw.
The most common way of pasteurization is using steam or hot water, which naturally is a messy process on a small scale and costly on a larger scale.
The beauty of growing mushrooms from coffee grounds is that the substrate is already pasteurized by the brewing process, therefore you can completely skip this energy-consuming and costly step.
Simple Method To Get Started
Skipping the sterilization process also means that it will be relatively simple to get started even if you are a complete beginner.
Once you start to better understand what you’re doing it will be so easy to grow big and tasty mushrooms. Just go to your local cafe, collect some grounds, mix them with spawn, bag them up and watch the magic happens. It’s not much different from planting tomato or chili pepper seeds.
Tip: Learn more about growing mushrooms more on Gardener’s World.
The substrate is easy to source and it’s FREE!
Used grounds most of the time find their way to the garbage bin, and in the majority of cafes, you will find them very happy to give you their used grounds if you just provide them with a bucket in which they can place the grounds.
Read more about mushroom substrates here.
This will make it a great and free source of the substrate, it will be especially easy if you’re living in a large town or a city where there are a lot of coffee shops.
How To Successfully Grow Mushrooms From Coffee Grounds
For you to successfully cultivate mushrooms with the coffee ground technique, we have outlined some growing tips which are specific to using coffee grounds as your mushroom growing substrate.
Step No.1 Collect Coffee Grounds for Your Mushrooms
Simply leave a bucket or a bin with your local cafe and collect it the next day. Use the coffee grounds while they’re still fresh, it’s best to use them within 24 hours of brewing.
Filtered coffee will probably be too wet, therefore collect espresso grounds as they perform the best.
Step No.2 Inoculate Coffee Grounds Substrate
Before you take the next step, weigh your coffee grounds so that you can mix everything up in good proportion. Mushroom spawn should be 10% of the coffee weight, and pasteurized straw or sawdust should be 20% of the coffee weight. Mix everything together and place it into growing bags.
Step No.3 Incubate Growing Bags with Prepared Coffee Grounds
Leave your growing bags in a dark and warm place, the temperature should be around 68 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Check every few days to see that the mycelium is starting to develop properly across the coffee. After two to three weeks your bags should be fully colonized by white mycelium.
Step No.4 Fruiting Conditions
First of all cut a 1 – 1.5-inch hole in your grow bag. Place the bag in a shaded spot with indirect sunlight (Some mushroom species such as oyster mushrooms need light in order to grow properly). Mist with water every day. Mushrooms will start to develop in around 5 to 10 days. Keep misting them regularly for another 5 to 7 days as they will double in size each day.
Step No.5 Harvest
When the top of the caps starts to flatten out it’s time to harvest. You can harvest your mushrooms by twisting them off or cutting the stem with a knife. After 2 days, submerge your bag in the bucket of water and leave it overnight so that the substrate can rehydrate.
Spray it with water daily to encourage the 2nd flush.
Read more about the mushroom fruiting process here.
Step No.6 Enjoy Your Product
You have successfully grown your mushrooms from the coffee ground, now it’s time to make a tasty dish out of them and enjoy. Although, they were grown out of coffee grounds, don’t worry about them tasting like coffee, they will be meaty and delicious!
Conclusion
Growing mushrooms from coffee grounds is an easy and eco-friendly way of cultivating your favorite food, as you are using everything to the max.
Instead of throwing away an abundant nutrient-rich resource, you will use it to create tasty and healthy mushrooms.
At the end of the cultivating cycle, you can enrich your soil by returning the composted grounds to the earth completing the circle.
