Step 1: Cut a hole

On your Mushroom Box, there are several suggestions for where to cut a hole – look for the dotted lines. Some of our mushroom boxes have a cross, while others have a small “door”.

Use a clean knife to cut, and start by making just one hole. Cut through both the outer layer of cardboard and the milk carton itself.

Once you have cut the hole, you can “close” it again by pressing the door shut to keep moisture in the substrate.

Step 2: Placing your Mushroom Box

Place your Mushroom Box in a spot where it does NOT receive 1) direct sunlight, 2) drafts, or 3) high heat from a radiator or similar source. Place it somewhere you can keep an eye on it daily.

In nature, the oyster mushroom in your Mushroom Box grows best around 15–18°C, but it can easily tolerate being indoors at normal room temperature. However, it must not get too warm, as it will dry out — that is why it shouldn’t be in direct sunlight or close to a radiator or other heat source.

Even though the oyster mushroom’s mycelium (the fungus itself) grows inside tree trunks in nature, your Mushroom Box does not need to stay in the dark. The milk carton it grows in provides enough darkness on its own.

It is important that you can easily check how your mushrooms are doing – so place it somewhere you will see it daily. That way, you can also enjoy the beautiful design – especially if you have gotten your hands on one of our CPH Editions.

A good spot could be on your kitchen counter, in your utility room, or on a shelf in the living room. It could also be in your bathroom, where it is often more humid than in the rest of your home, if you feel like giving that a try.

Step 3: Wait and inspect – ensure moisture

Once you have cut your first hole, the mushroom will first spread through the straw inside the milk carton. Once it has taken proper root, it will form fruiting bodies that will one day peek out of the hole you have cut. This usually takes 10–14 days, but like anything in nature, it can be a bit unpredictable. When your Mushroom Box yields mushrooms depends on the air temperature, humidity, and levels of CO2/O2.

Create a humid environment: If necessary, add a little water by spraying or dripping it into the hole you have cut. If your indoor climate is dry, you can also make a “grow box” for your Mushroom Box to increase the humidity. This is an especially good idea if you are growing in the winter, as our indoor climate is usually quite dry when heating is turned on. Additionally, mushrooms need oxygen, so good ventilation in your grow box is important.

You can also wait to make the grow box until you see the first small mushrooms peeking out of the mushroom box.

How to do it: Place a plastic box or bag over the Mushroom Box and spray water inside the box/bag to increase humidity. Remember to ventilate it several times a day, otherwise there won’t be enough oxygen (and you will end up with some very strange-looking oyster mushrooms). You can also optimize this by drilling holes at the bottom and top of the box’s sides. This will ensure better air circulation. The number of holes depends on the size of your box.

Step 4: Mushrooms emerge from the hole

Keep a close eye on your Mushroom Box when the first fruiting bodies start peeking out of the hole – from here, things move fast, and you will clearly see a difference from day to day, almost from hour to hour.

In the picture above, you can see what the mushrooms look like when they are very small – here in one of our first mushroom boxes, where our holes were triangular.

Generally, the size of your harvest will correspond to the size of your substrate, which here is 1 liter of straw. The mushrooms here will grow into a good handful, and they are ready for harvest when the largest cap has fully unfolded and its edge becomes sharp.

If you are in doubt about whether they are ready, go ahead and harvest. The mushroom’s purpose in producing fruiting bodies is to release spores, which you will see as a white layer of “dust” around your mushroom box if you don’t manage to harvest beforehand. After the spore drop, the fruiting bodies have fulfilled their purpose and will dry up.

Step 5: Harvest your mushrooms

You harvest your oyster mushrooms by twisting the entire cluster off all at once.

If you didn’t manage to harvest your mushrooms in time and they have now dried out (like ours in the picture above), they aren’t wasted. You can either dry them completely and save them for later, fry them as “mushroom chips”, or soak them overnight so they become soft again.

Once you have harvested, tape the hole shut and give your Mushroom Box a break for about a week before opening the next hole.

Step 6: Enjoy your harvest and try again

Prepare your mushrooms the way you like them best. Our favorite is to pan-fry them in butter with a pinch of salt, and then enjoy them on a piece of toasted bread.

When your Mushroom Box has rested for about a week, you can cut open the next cross and get another harvest. You can usually get 1–3 harvests from a Mushroom Box, but we also have customers who have managed to harvest 5 times. If you run out of crosses, simply cut a hole yourself wherever you like.

USE THE MYCELIUM FOR MORE GROW KITS

When your Mushroom Box stops yielding, you can use the contents to start new grow kits (just like you can divide a sourdough starter, you can divide your mycelium) — for example, you can continue growing on coffee grounds in an old skyr or ice cream container. You’ll find a guide in our book “Grow Like Tomorrow” on page 138. Buy the physical book (In Danish) or download it for free as a PDF (In Danish).Or download our educational materials here (In Danish)

Learn more about your Mushroom Box

Your Mushroom Box contains moist organic straw mixed with organic mycelium from Blue Oyster Mushroom. The mycelium is the fungus itself. The part we eat is called fruiting bodies. If you compare it to a tomato plant, the fruiting bodies correspond to the tomatoes, and the mycelium is the plant itself.

Oyster mushroom mycelium is white, and when you open your Mushroom Box for the first time, it will look like the picture below. When you open hole no. 2, there will be much more white.

When we produce our mushroom boxes, we first mix the moist straw with mycelium inoculated on grain. This is filled into the milk cartons that we have collected from our local café Coffee Collective and cleaned. The milk cartons then stay open in a humidity chamber while the mycelium is allowed to spread through approximately 80% of the straw. After about 14 days, the milk cartons are fitted with one of our beautiful sleeves, after which they are sealed and refrigerated.

Your oyster mushroom needs oxygen to grow, so when we seal the milk carton and put it in the fridge, growth pauses – until you cut a hole open. After this, the mycelium grows a bit more, and then the mushroom produces fruiting bodies.

NO MUSHROOMS? A Mushroom Box is a small piece of living nature, and even though we do everything we can to create the right growing conditions, sometimes things don’t go as planned. If you don’t see signs of fruiting bodies after 4 weeks, or if it isn’t white but green when you open the door, contact us at [email protected] so we can help you with a replacement to ensure you have a great growing experience.

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