Easiest tek ever? Can you really grow mushrooms from an Uncle Bens’s Ready Rice package?
Can you grow mushrooms using the off-the-shelf Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice? According to many online cultivation forums, not only can you, but it’s even easier than you think. In this experiment, we explored the possibility of growing mushrooms using Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice. This convenient, pre-cooked rice product offered a unique growing medium for our fungi. Follow along to discover the steps, results, and potential benefits of using this unconventional method.
Growing Shrooms With Uncle Ben’s Rice?
This sounds too good to be true right? And if it is true, what will we do with all of the time saved preparing grain, packing jars, and pressure cooking???
From our research on various mushroom cultivation forums, the basic process for cultivating mushrooms using Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice is
- Purchase Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice from your local grocer
- Prep surfaces and utensils
- Cut a small hole in the prepared bag
- Inject 1CC of spore solution from the spore syringe of the variety of your choice
- Cover the slit with micro-pore tape to allow airflow
- Set aside in a dark place inspecting the bags after 5-7 days for mycelium growth and/or contamination
- Break up the mycelium chunks to spread mycelium-covered grain evenly throughout the bag and return the bags to the dark spawning area
- Once the bag is fully colonized (12-30 days) you may either place it into fruiting condition or prepare your spawn for a bulk grow
Although contamination was a primary concern of ours, we thought this method for growing mushrooms was too good to pass up. And so we decided to give it a try ourselves.
This is our experience with Uncle Ben’s Tek.
Things you will need:
- Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice – Plain brown rice (buy a 12-pack here)
- Spore Syringe or Liquid Culture Syringe
- Xacto knife
- 70% Rubbing alcohol
- Lighter
- Latex gloves
- Micropore tape
- Paper towels
Day 1: Inoculation
A best practice is to perform the inoculation process in front of a flow hood or in a still-air box. But for this article, we wanted to see if we can accomplish good results on a budget. Consequently, we set up in a room with little to no airflow and made sure to spray an aerosol disinfectant.
Inoculation Steps:
- Wipe down all surfaces, materials, and utensils with 70% isopropanol alcohol.
- Flame sterilize your xacto knife blade until red hot. Allow to cool for a few seconds, then cut a slit just large enough to fit your needle in the corner of the bag.
- Remove the cap from your spore syringe and flame sterilize until red hot. Allow the needle to cool, then insert in the small hole and inject 1cc of spore solution into the bag.
- Replace the needle cap and set it aside.
- Using micropore tape, re-seal the cut you made in the bag.
Repeat this process making sure to wipe down all utensils, bags, and flame sterilize your needle and knife with every bag. Once finished with inoculation we set our bags in a dark and dry place for colonization. The ideal temperature for colonization is around 78° F.
Check your bags every couple of days for signs of contamination. A contaminated bag may show signs of mold or put off a foul smell. If contamination is suspected, throw the bags away and try again.
After 5 to 7 days you should see mycelium beginning to form through the clear window at the bottom of the bag.
Day 13: It’s not you, it’s me. Time to break up
Upon checking our bags it appeared that they were roughly 80% colonized. While only a little bit of mycelium is visible from the window at the bottom of the bag, the bags feel dense which indicates that the mycelium network has taken hold of the rice. Additionally, the bags smell wonderful! No signs of contamination!
To speed up the growth you may break up the mycelial mass and evenly distribute the colonized rice with the un-colonized. This will help speed up the colonization process, but you will want to wait until roughly 60% of the grain has been colonized before performing this step.
Based on our rate of colonization, we could have done this around day 10.
Day 19: Spawn to Substrate
The recent Covid madness has had us pretty preoccupied, so our bags were sitting longer than we would have liked. However, today we opened our bags to check our progress. They were fully colonized and are ready for fruiting conditions.
As you can see, our Uncle Ben’s Rice bags are now fully colonized and have a wonderful mushroom smell to them.
It is important that the bags have a rich, mushroomy smell to them. If they smell sour or omit a foul odor, then its likely contaminated and will need to be trashed.
We will be testing two methods to fruit these mushrooms. The first is a bulk colonization technique using a simple coco choir substrate. And for the second we will be fruiting directly from the bag.
Method 1) Fruiting in a Monotub
For our bulk grow we added a liner (black trash bag) to our fruiting chamber and then layered the substrate and colonized rice. A top substrate layer was used to cover the exposed rice. We then cut back the trash bag and closed the container.
In this tutorial, we will be using a beginner-friendly simple coco coir substrate recipe – adopted from Bods Bucket Tek.
We will be testing two methods to fruit these mushrooms. The first is a bulk colonization technique using a simple coco choir substrate. And for the second we will be fruiting directly from the bag.
Edit: For our fruiting chamber we used a 56-quart Sterilite container with 1.5-inch holes drilled about 5 inches up on the sides (2), then one 1.5-inch hole on either end, near the top of the container. These holes were then lightly stuffed with polyfill.
For this experiment, we used 4 bags of grain and 9 quarts of the substrate which would give us a 1:2 spawn-to-substrate ratio and roughly a 3″ substrate depth.
Day 21 Monotub
Our spawn has taken to our coir substrate nicely. A week or so longer until we should see some pins!
Day 27 We Have Pins!
And we have pins ladies and gentlemen.
Looks like Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice is an off-the-shelf alternative to the traditional spawn prep methods. Out of the 10 bags we used, all produced white, fluffy, and healthy mycelium growth, with no signs of contamination.
Day 36 Harvest
Once the mushrooms begin to separate from the veils it is time to harvest.
Fruiting from a monotub using the Uncle Ben’s Tek worked out pretty well in this case.
Method 2) Fruiting from the bag
To produce fruits directly from the bag we first re-hydrated the cake by filling the bag up with distilled water and allowing the cake to absorb moisture for 12 hours.
Maintaining the ideal environmental conditions is more challenging when growing directly from the bag. So we decided to create a fruiting chamber using a 23-L Sterilite tub, moistened perlite, and ventilation holes stuffed with polyfill.
Our goal here was to keep optimal conditions between airflow, temperature, and humidity for our mushrooms to flourish.
Day 5 in the Fruiting Chamber
After 5 days in the fruiting chamber, you can see the mycelium has turned to a fluffy white and should begin fruiting any day now. The bag smells rich and earthy.
Setbacks
In the midst of the Covid pandemic, life got a little crazy and I had to transfer the tub to another location. I am ashamed to say that during this time the colonized bag was kept in sub-optimal conditions and neglected, which significantly halted its progress. This set us back about twenty days and required some delicate care to bring it back to life.
Success!
Nursing our Uncle Ben’s bag to good health has finally paid off! While we were able to fruit directly from the bag of ready rice, this method was more of a challenge than using a monotub as well as produced a far lower yield. In spite of that, it was a really fun experiment.
4.5
This is awesome and so low tech! I can’t wait to try it, did I see in an earlier post you were going to try and fruit straight from the rice?
We are! We had something come up right before the pandemic and the rice cake was introduced to less than ideal conditions which halted its fruiting. We are trying to revive but will be posting updates soon!
Hey Tanie, We’ve just posted our final progress picture of the fruits from the rice bag. Happy growing!
Amazing! thanks for sharing!! I attempted this myself but didnt want to wait for spore syringes to arrive so made my own syringes from spore prints (well i tried to) over 2 weeks on and zero contamination.. but also zero mycelium so it was a bit of a fail haha
When fruiting directly from the bag can you put more than one bag in the tub at a time?
Sorry for the delayed reply Evan. Yes you may! We have seen this done with many bags in a fruiting chamber. The biggest challenge when fruiting straight from the bag is maintaining the ideal temperature, humidity, and fresh airflow. We accomplished this using perlite and a modified mono-tub. Best of luck!
If I were to use the bulk cultivation method, what are the conditions required to allow the colonized grains to fruit? Thank you!
Hi Jillian, we used a 50qt monotub with holes on the sides to allow airflow, and holes in the lid to disperse gasses. All of the holes are covered initially during the incubation phase, then once the bulk substrate is fully colonized, we put into fruiting by removing the tape from the holes and exposing the tub to ambient light and temps around 73-78 degrees Fahrenheit. After about 10 days we had pins showing up!
Wow this is simply amazing! Great work! How many flushes did you get?
Thanks Jeff, We only pulled down one full flush. But this was primarily due to less than ideal conditions in the shuffle of the pandemic. Under the right conditions I would imagine you could get 3 for sure!
Best
I’ve got the uncle Ben’s ready rice whole grain brown rice bag and you mentioned feeling the bag if its solid to help in discerning when the mycelium have grown enough since the only clear part is on the bottom, but all the uncle Ben’s bags I’ve seen and the ones I got are vacuum sealed so they’re already really solid and packed together and I haven’t really been able to loosen it up much, it’s still one hard solid chunk. this may be stupid to ask but I just wanted to get your advice, as I only have 2cc of spores and was planning on putting it all in one bag. when you cut the small hole on the top to inject the spores, did the bag open up some and if not how will I know if the mycelium have grown all the way through? do you think it would be a good idea to inject 1cc through the cut hole on the top, tape that, then inject the other 1cc I have in through the bottom to better spread out the spores? this is my first grow attempt, though my roommate has been trying to do a grow his first time and it wasnt successful.
thanks in advance for any help!
Hi! I’m planning on fruiting from the bag and had a couple of questions. Do you need to put any water into the bag to keep the mycelium moist? If I follow the exact instructions do I need to worry about misting for humidity? What lighting would you recommend? How lose should the polyfill be? Thanks for your help!
Hey Jay, We placed the bag inside of an unmodified fruiting chamber (medium Sterilite container). Then placed it on top of a layer of moistened perlite to keep the humidity up in the chamber. We learned it was very important to mist and fan a few times a day for this to work; otherwise the rice cake would dry too fast. When misting, make sure to sprits the inside walls of your fruiting chamber, as well as allow for some of the tiny water particles to land on the spawn cake, then fan to promote pinning. There was a lot of trial and error on this, but if you are using polyfil I would pack it pretty tight. We did not use any special lamps for this. Simply put the fruiting chamber in an indirect source of light for 8 or so hours. Would love to see your results!
Should The bags be left standing vertically or laying down after inoculation?
Ours were left standing up in a fruiting chamber. Misting and fanning was extremely important during this time.
Hmmm. They’ve got 10lb bags on Amazon for ~$16.
Time to colonize too risky?
So can you get messed up when ingesting these mushrooms?? Just curious
You get unmessed up!
Can you tell me exactly everything I need to do this; I’m a beginner! Are these psilocybin or regular mushrooms?
how many bags do you recommend adding to a shoebox for colonization?
I use a pound when using a shoebox. So you may want to try two bags of rice.
So comparing the 2 methods, I’m thinking the coco coir method would have a much higher yield???? No pics of finished flush from that one?
Yes, the bulk substrate method does have a higher yield
I have 6 bags and after 7 days they are showing good signs of colonizing the rice. I’ve tried my best to leave them be, as per everyone on the internet lol, but this is a good read to get an idea from.
I’ll wait till 10 days before breaking them up. and I do plan to spawn to bulk.
Awesome! Wishing for a great harvest!
How many bags of spawn did you use to colonize the bulk substrate in the test?
Thanks for writing in. For this experiment we used 4 bags of grain and 9 quarts of substrate which would give us a 1:2 spawn to sub ratio and roughly a 3″ substrate depth.
Can you describe your specific “equipment” and process for the bulk cultivation ( fruiting chamber) ? I don’t see any air holes and it appears that you simply lined a plastic tote with a plastic bag ? Did you cover it ( lightly , tight ) ? Is that it ? Thanks
Ken
Hey Ken, thanks for writing in. Good question. I have edited the article to provide additional details on the fruiting chamber.
For our fruiting chamber we used a 56 quart Sterilite container with 1.5 inch holes drilled about 5 inches up on the sides (2), then one 1.5 inch hole on either end, near the top of the container. These holes were then lightly stuffed with polyfil.
Let me know if you have any more questions!
How would you go about trying to get a second flush of mushrooms directly from your Uncle Ben’s rice bag?
To promote additional flushes you will want to attempt to re-hydrate the cake. We removed the mycelium cake, placed it in a ziploc baggie and filled the bag with water. Then you seal the bag and allow the cake to soak up the water for 8-24 hours. Remove the cake and place back in the packaging in the fruiting chamber. Continue to introduce fresh air.
Instead of stuffing the holes with polyfil, could we just tape over them using the micro-pore tape?
Yes you can!
how often are you spraying the batch mushrooms with water? and how are you preparing for the second flush on batch growing ?
I am misting the sides of the container 1x per day if needed. I try to maintain condensation on the inside of the tub at all times. For subsequent flushes we do a 12 hr soak in cold water. Hope this helps.