Sporeshift Mushrooms

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Sporeshift Mushrooms We are a small mushroom farm growing gourmet mushrooms in an organic and sustainable way. Supplying all growing supplies and fresh Mushrooms.

Based in North Canterubury.

This week’s show-stealer playing some tunes 🍄2kg fruiting block of our Trumpet Oyster threw out this absolute stunner of...
23/10/2026

This week’s show-stealer playing some tunes 🍄

2kg fruiting block of our Trumpet Oyster threw out this absolute stunner of a cluster, and we couldn’t resist giving it a photo shoot on the farm fence before it went in the pan!

Look at those big frilly trumpets and the gills running all the way down the stems. That’s the Trumpet Oyster party trick, and it’s why the cluster looks like a bouquet from every angle.

Want a flush like this on your own bench? Trumpet Oyster is one of the easiest gourmet mushrooms to grow at home. Grab a kit or some spawn and get growing!

Trumpet Oyster spawn & kits: https://www.sporeshift.co.nz/product-page/diy-trumpet-oyster-mushroom-grow-kit

21/10/2026

Pinning in 6 days. Ready to harvest on day 11. 🍄

Our oat chaff trial is officially a success! These Pink Oysters (Pleurotus djamor) took off fast on hydrated, lime-treated oat chaff, and the rest of the tent isn’t far behind:

🌸 Pink Oyster: ready to pick now
🤍 Warm White: about 2 days into pinning
🩶 Grey Oyster: just started pinning
💙 Blue Oyster + Snow White: still incubating, looking good

Harvest tip: look at the cap edges. Once they’re just about flat, it’s time to pick. Leave them another night and pinks will start dropping spores everywhere.

So yes… you can definitely grow oyster mushrooms on oat chaff! Part 3 is coming once the blues and snow whites fruit.

Want to try it yourself? Pink Oyster spawn is 100% colonised on NZ wheat >> link in bio

16/10/2026

King Stropharia in 1-2-3 🍄🌱

It's spring planting time here in NZ, so I'm tidying up the greenhouse and tucking some King Stropharia (w**e cap) into the garden bed.

This soil was pretty old and not very looked after, so it's getting some love. We're using mushrooms, gypsum and woodchip to help built up the carbon content in this soil and return it to a nice fluffy texture it should be with vibrant worm and microbe activity.

Here's how easy it is:
1️⃣ Give the soil a light dig over and mix in a bit of wood chip
2️⃣ Scatter the King Stropharia spawn and tuck it down
3️⃣ Cover with a layer of wood chip mulch. She's done.

From there the mycelium grows up through the mulch. The mulch helps hold moisture in the soil, the King Stropharia helps hold that moisture too, and it breaks the wood chip down to build up your soil.

My mulch is old oak and poplar, about two years old, but fresh wood chip works too. King Stropharia is a primary and secondary decomposer, so it'll do well on both.

Get your mushrooms in the garden, build that soil health, and get some good veggie gardens going this spring 🌿

King Stropharia spawn is available now, link in bio. Subscribe to the shift for more garden mushroom tips!

14/10/2026

Can you grow mushrooms on oat chaff? 🍄🌾

A customer asked me this and honestly… theoretically it should work fine but I haven't personally grown on Chaff before. So I'm testing it and finding out for you.

Chaff is basically just chopped-up straw. It needs to be straight oat chaff though. A lot of chaffs are blends with hay and lucerne mixed through, and that's not what you want.

You can grab it from Farmlands and most feed stores, so it's easy to get hold of pretty much anywhere in the country.

How I prepped it:
🪣 Soaked for about 14 hours in hydrated lime water (around 5 g per litre). Full how-to video coming soon
⚖️ Weighed it out and mixed in spawn at 10% of the wet weight
🛍️ Packed it into a plastic bag and stabbed some holes in it. Done.

I'm running it with 4–5 of our oyster species to see how they go. Just a note: this method is for oyster mushrooms only.

(Excuse the dog, he's on mouse patrol. Should've been a cat 🐕)

What should I test next? Drop it in the comments 👇 Follow along for the results and subscribe to the shift!

Every flower in my garden is basically a mushroom… kind of 🍄🌷Stay with me here!When you see a mushroom, you're only seei...
30/09/2026

Every flower in my garden is basically a mushroom… kind of 🍄🌷

Stay with me here!

When you see a mushroom, you're only seeing a tiny part of the fungus. The real organism is the mycelium, a web of fine white threads living underground or inside wood (or inside one of our grow blocks!). The mushroom is just its "flower": the part that pops up to spread the next generation.

Plants work the same way. The roots, stems and leaves do the everyday work of growing and feeding. The flower only shows up when the plant's ready to reproduce.

🌷 Flowers make seeds. Mushrooms make spores, microscopic and released by the millions.

🧅 Tulips, daffodils and ranunculus grow from bulbs and corms that store energy underground, then wait for winter's chill to tell them it's time to bloom. A colonised mushroom block does something similar: it builds up quietly, then fruits when you give it the right trigger — fresh air, humidity, and for some species a cold snap.

🌳 That kōwhai? Its golden flowers only arrive once the tree's established, just like a log inoculated with mushroom spawn can take months before its first flush.

The honest bit: the analogy isn't perfect. Plants make their own food from sunlight, while fungi digest their food, which makes them closer relatives of animals than plants! But many plants rely on fungi underground. Most land plants partner with fungi in their roots and trade sugars for water and nutrients.

So next time you pick a flower… you're holding the plant's version of a mushroom 😉

Follow for more mushroom-brain moments 🍄 and subscribe to the shift!

This isn't coral. It's not a cauliflower either… 🍄Meet Pekepeke-Kiore (Hericium novae-zealandiae), aka "NZ Lion's Mane."...
29/09/2026

This isn't coral. It's not a cauliflower either… 🍄

Meet Pekepeke-Kiore (Hericium novae-zealandiae), aka "NZ Lion's Mane." Endemic to Aotearoa, found nowhere else on Earth, and you can grow it at home!

🌱 GROW IT
It's a slow, beautiful grower, taking about 4 weeks to mature (oysters double in size every day by comparison!). Keep humidity HIGH, give it indirect light and NO direct sun. Harvest when the branches open up and start dropping wee icicles.

🍳 COOK IT
Slice 3mm thick and fry in butter until golden, then add garlic for the last minute. It tastes like crayfish or crab meat. Seriously.

☕ DRY IT
Slice 3mm, dehydrate on low (around 50°C) until cracker-dry, then blitz to a powder. Stir it into coffee, smoothies or soups.

Now the honest bit 👇
You'll see NZ Lion's Mane sold as a brain supplement. Lab testing has found the same compound families (hericenones & erinacines) that true Lion's Mane is known for. But almost all the human research is on true Lion's Mane (Hericium erinaceus), and even that is early days with small trials, mostly in older adults. We grow Pekepeke-Kiore because it's native, delicious and a joy to watch grow. If brain health is your main goal, true Lion's Mane is the better-studied pick.

Grow your own: kit link in bio 🔗
Spotted one in the beech forest? Always identify any mushroom before consuming!

25/09/2026

Something a bit different in the lab today 🍄

We don't normally work with Agaricus bisporus (Button Mushrooms), but I've got white button and Swiss brown tissue clones going for a side project.

Fun fact: they're actually the same species. Swiss browns (cremini) are just the brown strain, and portobellos just older white buttons that have grown until the caps open.

About 10 days in and both plates are growing out nice and clean, so it's time to move them onto fresh agar.

Here's how the transfer goes:
🔥 Flame the scalpel to sterilise it
💧 Cool it off in a bit of agar so it doesn't burn the mycelium
✂️ Cut a small piece from the leading edge (the newest, cleanest growth)
🧫 Drop it onto a fresh plate, hands kept well out of the way
🎞️ Seal the edges with wrapping film to keep dirty air and contaminants out

Why bother? If any bacteria or mould has snuck in, each transfer moves the mycelium further away from it. A couple of rounds and you're left with a clean culture to store away in the library to work from for years to come.

Then it's label, stash, and let it run. Fiddly work, but this is where every good grow starts.

Want to see where these plates end up? Follow along and subscribe to the shift 🍄

22/09/2026

🍄 Life cycle of a shiitake - 2months in 2 mins!

From spawn to ready to fruit, a shiitake block runs on slow clock, roughly 8-10 weeks from inoculation to first flush.

It starts as sawdust and bran and then goes fully white to brown (that solid white mycelium you see on the fresh bags), then goes through pinning as the mushrooms start to form, right through to fruiting when those chunky shiitake caps finally push through and it's harvest time.

Every block on our shelves is somewhere different in that cyclen freshly spawned, deep in colonisation, or ready to send to our customers to fruit, which is exactly what makes a wander through the incubation room so satisfying.

Patience is most of the job with shiitake. The wait is worth it!

Subscribe to the shift — link in bio for your own shiitake block or kit.

18/09/2026

Never open a green spawn bag in the house or grow area.

This spawn is fully contaminated with Trichoderma that looks like dusty green on the grain. The second you rip the bag, that powder is not dust. It is spores.

A few things most growers do not get told:
Trichoderma does not just sit there competing for food. It produces enzymes that dissolve mushroom mycelium. Once it turns that blue-green colour it is already dumping a massive spore load. Commercial research has measured around a million spores per gram of material in a day. One contaminated grain is enough to start a problem in grow.

Those spores hitch on clothes, tools, dust, mites, and airflow. Open this in the kitchen or the lab and you have just seeded every clean bag, agar plate, and fruiting block in the building.

All clothes were washed after this video 😅

What to do instead:
Leave the bag sealled and put it in the rubbish or dump it out in the garden. Trichoderma is naturally everywhere.

Dump it well away from the grow area, or bury it, or give it to the chooks.

Change clothes / wash hands before you go back into your grow space.

Do not try to save a bag that is already sporulating. The green you can see is the late stage.

Prevention is boring and it works: proper sterilisation (Trichoderma spores die above about 60°C for 30+ minutes), clean culture, and never working dirty grain next to clean work.

Save this for the day a bag goes green. Follow for more farm-side grow tips from North Canterbury.

14/08/2026

These little wheat grains don’t look like much until you realise every single one is wrapped in pure mycelium.

We hydrate them, sterilise them, inoculate, incubate and let the culture run right through until each kernel is fully colonised. Then we have pure culture grain spawn — the clean starting point that carries the genetics, the nutrients, and the water the mushroom needs to take over whatever fruiting substrate we throw at it.

Sawdust, compost, whatever the species wants… this is what gets it moving.
Simple. Reliable. The foundation of every block and bag we put out.

Sporeshift supplies comercial grain spawn to many growers around the country. If you are interested to grow for local markets or restaurants please get in touch 🙏

All spawn is avaliable through the Sporeshift website. Link in bio.

Address

Ohoka
7692

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