The Original Mushroom Science Kits
$15.00
This is a more economic version of 0ur mushroom growing kits to make it a bit more affordable for education. Oyster mushrooms are some of the most versatile and visually fascinating mushrooms on the planet. They are revered for their texture and flavor by chefs around the world, and their ability to consume things like crude oil spills, litter and plastic is being researched as a possible sustainable solution to restoring the health of our ecosystem.
I have a big collection of oyster mushroom varieties for you to choose from so that you can grow a bouquet of beautiful, edible mushrooms at home in your kitchen. I’ve included a set of written instructions that can be used for an individual project or as a lesson plan for the simplest way to grow them without any specialized equipment. They will stay fresh in the fridge for up to a year.
Currently, the oyster mushroom varieties available are:
Pink Oyster
Blue Oyster
Golden Oyster
Black Pearl Oyster
King Oyster
Lions Mane
And we’ve most recently added a Lions’ Mane mushroom kit to our selection – Lions’ Mane (Hericium erinaceus) is both fantastic to cook with and highly regarded as a neurotropic, meaning it has been shown to have an exceptional impact on brain health and cognitive function.
$15.00
Additional information
| Weight | N/A |
|---|---|
| Mushroom Variety | Black Pearl Oyster, Blue Oyster, Golden Oyster, Grey Dove Oyster, King Oyster, Pearl Oyster, Pink Oyster, White Oyster, Lions Mane |
Looking for a fun science project? Try growing mushrooms! These are the original mushroom science kits that we developed so that you can try growing your own mushrooms at home without any special equipment needed. Includes a liquid culture of your choice, instructions/lesson plan, a vocabulary list, and a word search based on the vocabulary list. It’s a great biology lesson and a fascinating way to dive into the world of mushrooms without it being too overwhelming. (we have a lions mane version of the kits now too!)
The Oyster varieties of mushroom are very forgiving and can be grown on many things, but a great way to start is by growing them in pre-cooked bags of plain brown rice – you can buy them at the grocery store for about $2 and just add the culture to the bag so that you don’t have to do any of the extra sterilization that you usually need to do for mushroom substrates. This is a very adaptable project for different age groups. Older students may enjoy the process of mixing/sterilizing their own substrate instead of using precooked rice (I can point you in the right direction if that’s something you’d prefer to try) In general, it’s a pretty low effort/high reward process that’s a really exciting way to learn about the world of fungi.
I have a fairly wide variety of oyster mushrooms to choose from, and you can choose to grow any kind that you’d like – use the dropdown menu to choose your varieties. It can be very interesting to grow several varieties side by side to observe the variations in timing and appearance as they grow.
For safety purposes, we’ve now adapted this to be a no-needles kit to make it accessible and fun for all ages:)
Here’s a 45-second speedthrough of the whole process:
Here’s a great how-to video that Della from The Beauty of Play recorded of their process using one of our kits a few years ago(we still used needles to inject the liquid culture when this was filmed, so that part of the process has changed, but the rest is still accurate!)
