About a month ago saw a great Al-Jazeera news piece on “Feeding the billions” which looks at sustainable solutions for food production. In this segment there was a story about a Finnish company growing mushrooms using discarded coffee grinds. They also sell grower-starter kits to people who want to try this at home.
So I decided to try this and so-far it is looking pretty simple and promising. I have not had it produce a harvest (of oyster mushrooms) yet but the process has been fascinating although somewhat slow. The kit is now full of coffee-grinds, so I am just waiting for the mushrooms to grow out of the kit into a cluster for harvesting. This kit can apparently produce 150-300 grams of mushrooms per harvest 2-3 times.
The great thing about this is that you only need to buy the mushroom spawn once, and from there you can reuse and expand your mushroom farm into multiple kits.
http://www.helsieni.fi/en/home/
Below a pic of my still “unimpressive” grow-kit 🙂
kamakawida 