Used Coffee Grounds to Grow Oyster Mushrooms
As if being free fertilizer is not good enough, one can grow oyster mushrooms on used coffee grounds. As a starter, you can simply use the butt ends of fresh oyster mushrooms that you can buy from the market to start the mycelium while dumping more coffee grounds to feed it. The best thing about using used coffee grounds is that you don’t need to sterilize it since the steaming process while making the drink does that. Anyway, take a look at the following links for proofs.
http://tribes.tribe.net/a4f0851e-dcf9-41cb-955c-25800c4c3aa9/thread/f53ff281-ffe9-43c8-8804-5e9806bd9cc2 (find the “Ooops” thread using the “find” tool of your browser)
http://happyfood-funnyfarm.blogspot.com/2009/03/turn-coffee-grounds-into-gourmet.html
The following two links show how aggressive oyster mushrooms are. The first link shows it competes with green mold and the second link shows how successful it is.
http://www.montanamushrooms.com/2009/04/14/oyster-mushrooms-on-coffee-grounds/
http://www.montanamushrooms.com/2009/06/22/oyster-mushrooms-on-coffee-grounds-2/
As a big bonus to this, when the mycelia stop producing what commonly know as “oyster mushrooms” (i.e., the reproductive part), the decomposed coffee grounds are actually high-end compost!
A bit of warning though. As some have noted, it can get quite smelly. It supposedly should produce a sweet smell. If it stinks, then probably there’s some mold growing.
It’ll take a couple of years before I’ll do an experiment on this. I have no more space at home at the moment 