Those tabletop hydroponic kits make growing your own plants indoors a simple and easy affair. You can grow herbs, vegetables, and all sorts of other plants without any of the laborious gardening work it usually entails. The Bonsai Mushroom Pods look to bring the same convenience to growing mushrooms.
Billed as “safe, portable grow kits” specifically designed for mushrooms, they basically make growing the fleshy, spore-bearing fungal creations an easy and largely automated affair. Whether you want to grow mushrooms for food, magic spells, or just freaking people out with weird mushrooms in your bedroom, this thing lets you do that many times over.
The Bonsai Mushroom Pods is a kit containing everything you need to cultivate one type of mushroom. What kind of mushroom? It’s up to you, as they let you choose the type of liquid mushroom culture you want. For now, you can choose from mushrooms popularly used as health supplements (reishi or lion’s mane) and edible mushrooms that can be used in cooking (pioppino, chestnut, or pink oyster). You can also choose the type of substrate to grow the mushroom on, with the choice of either wood or manure. That’s right, you can tell your husband (or your wife) that you’re growing mushrooms in manure on that little jar in the bedroom. Awesome.
Once you receive the kit, you can start the process by taking the syringe (which is prefilled with the mushroom culture) and the container holding the substrate. Inject the syringe into the substrate until all the liquid’s inside. From there, you just store it at room temperature until the whole thing turns completely white, which should be around 20 days (give or take). From there, you remove the lid and attach it to the included “fruiting capsule,” which is a cylindrical plastic with a digital screen at the base.
The Bonsai Mushroom Pods’ fruiting capsule, basically, replaces the lid, so that your mushroom will have all the room it needs to grow. The digital screen shows the relative humidity and the temperature of the mushrooms in real-time, so you can see exactly how they’re doing. You can adjust the airflow into the fruiting capsule by twisting the lower portion of the lid, although you’ll have to arrange your own growing space to make sure the mushrooms get the amount of light and the ideal temperature levels they need.
Once you’ve used up all the mushrooms for your nefarious activities, you can reuse the same kit for growing new ones. If you want the same easy set up, you can just order refill packs for both the mushroom culture and the substrate directly from the outfit, then do the exact same steps as last time. However, you can also use them with your own substrates and cultures if you want to go into more hardcore DIY mushroom growing, since information on both of those are readily available from many places online.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Bonsai Mushroom Pods. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $69.
