>>1782523Oyster mushrooms are really easy. I grow reishi, chestnut, and oysters on coffee grounds, peanut shells, potato peels, etc (basically non-meat compost ingredients) and dirt cheap hardwood pellets.
All you need to start is a pressure cooker (useful to have anyways) and some sterile way of inoculating the jars. You can make a still-air box for next to nothing or make a laminar flow box (I built one with a cheap little USB plug in HEPA filter unit for cars) for about 50$ if you want to make agar cultures. It's all just techniques that you'd use in a microbiology 101 class.
I'm talking about indoor growing, of course. Outdoor growing on logs is a little less sterile but is also less predictable and might take longer.
Pic related is a very photogenic flush of chestnut mushrooms just before being added to scrambled eggs
