There are so many terms, parts, and pieces when you're just starting out.
Here are some loosely defined substrate terms you might come across on your mushroom journey.
Grain- millet, sunflower seeds, corn, rye really any type of grain. Grain can be used as a food source for your mycelium. We use rye when making our grain spawn.
Compost- Left over or spent manure and/or compost. Usually a "special blend" from the grower, someone with a garden, or someone with a farm guaranteed to make your crop 10x the size! (you know everyone knows someone who says it!)
Nutritional Yeast- Found somewhere as simple as the health food store, this nutrient rich mixture of vitamins and minerals can be added to any agar or substrate medium as a valuable source of proteins.
Calcium Hydroxide- Hydrated Lime- This pasteurizes your substrate by raising the PH of the water with which you are hydrating your mushroom substrate. The PH becomes inhabitable for the contaminants that compete with mycelium while the mycelium can survive. If this is the process you choose. Make sure you do it when you are ready to inoculate.
Brown Rice Flour/Soy- Commonly used as the starch mix-in for hard wood bags. Making BRF cakes is a beginner’s cheapest, most accessible method of growing mushrooms. It doesn't often yield the best results in weight, but is great for small scale experiments.
Hardwood Pellets: Oak, Apple, Pecan pellets are all relatively easy to find. Pellets area common choice because the wood is compacted into something easily usable until you add water, then it becomes something soft enough for the mycelium to take over and be grown through the substrate.
Mulch: This is on every seasoned mushroom grower's wish list! If you have a mulcher you can have fresh wood chips anytime!! Growers cultivating symbiotic relationships between the ground and the mushroom are most likely to use mulching, But, if you have an regenerative supply, use it everywhere!
Logs: The easiest and hardest of the hardwood substrates to find. A Log. Oak, Maple, Cherry, Apple, Ash, there's 16 types of hardwood. I'm not sure how many wood piles I drive by freshly cut that say "Free Wood" on a sign. Can you find available a live/freshly cut log to match your Fungi's preferences?
Straw- Is a widely known and used substrate. It's used to speedily grow wood loving mushrooms. It can be tied into bails, logs, or cut up like mulch. Straw has been used for bags and buckets. Some mushroom species can grow on hay bales, shredded paper, egg cartons, phone books, fabric or many other media inoculated with spawn. These methods generally begin production more quickly but don’t last nearly as long as mushrooms grown on logs.
Agar- The word "agar" comes from agar-agar, the Malay name for red algae. It's a jelly like substance that can be combined with proteins mediums and hosts the growth of different micro organisms.
Nutrient Broth- sterile liquid created with the purpose of expanding biological samples. The ingredients for this are malt extract and dextrose with amount set to how much volume you're producing. Ultimately, we are creating our Liquid Cultures with organic products to give you the cleanest and closest to earth fungi samples.