About ShroomCraft Lab

The first thing I ever grew was a bag of blue oysters from a kit my roommate gave me as a gag gift. I was twenty-four, living in a studio apartment in Portland, and the bag sat on top of my fridge for three weeks before anything happened. Then one morning there were these alien-looking clusters pushing through the slit in the plastic, and I stood there eating cereal, staring at them, thinking: how does that work?

That question cost me a lot of money.

Within six months I had a still air box made from a storage tub, a pressure cooker that barely fit on my stove, and a closet full of grain jars that my girlfriend politely referred to as “the situation.” Half of them contaminated. I lost an entire batch to Trichoderma because I didn’t know what the green spots meant until it was everywhere.

What You’ll Find Here

ShroomCraft Lab is the resource I needed during that first year. Every article here comes from bench time — sterilization cycles, failed transfers, contaminated grain, and the occasional flush so perfect it makes all the wasted substrate worth it.

We cover the full path: how fungi actually work, substrate preparation from CVG to Master’s Mix, cultivation techniques from bucket tek to automated monotubs, species guides for everything from oysters to cordyceps, and lab gear reviews where I tell you what’s actually worth buying.

When I recommend a product, it’s because I’ve used it through multiple grows. When I say something doesn’t work, I learned that the hard way.

About Me

I’m Daniel. Environmental science degree, day job in data analytics, mushroom grower since 2019. What started as a curiosity about blue oysters turned into lion’s mane on sawdust blocks, shiitake on logs in the backyard, and a brief obsession with getting cordyceps to fruit under LEDs that my electric bill still hasn’t recovered from.

I work out of a spare bedroom that I’ve slowly converted into a functioning lab — laminar flow hood I built from a YouTube tutorial, two pressure cookers, a wire shelf rack from Home Depot that holds about forty blocks, and a humidity controller that my cat has learned to ignore. The apartment smells like sterilized grain most weekends.

Why This Site

Most mushroom growing knowledge lives in Reddit threads, Shroomery forums, and YouTube comments from 2017. Some of it’s great. A lot of it’s contradictory. I wanted one place where the information is organized, tested against actual grows, and honest about the failure rate — because in this hobby, things go wrong regularly, and knowing why is more valuable than any tek.

Get in Touch

Questions, contamination photos you need identified, or just want to show off a flush: daniel@shroomcraftlab.com