>>2685332Advice: buy oyster mushroom grow kit from online or sometimes you can find them in big box hardware stores (Lowes, Home Depot). Grow the kit as per the instructions. If you have success and like it and want to grow more, you can probably take a chunk of the mycelium and innoculate a sterile mix of media in a bucket with holes and mesh tape and start the whole process over again on a larger scale.
idk if anyone harvests spores because if you've already got live mycelium, it's easier to take a piece of that and use that to start a new culture.
I grow outdoors, wine caps in the garden beds, parasol mushrooms in the yard, ink caps in the wood chips, turkey tail on the logs in the brush pile, and hopefully some blewits eventually in the leaf litter. I'm considering oyster mushrooms next year outdoors on oak logs.
Mushrooms that are contaminated with something will look off, either melty or moldy or whatever. Healthy mushroom looks like a good mushroom, unhealthy mushroom looks moldy or melty or just generally bad. Pleurotus ostreatus is a vigorous fungi though, I don't even think you need perfectly sterile media, just not something that's extremely dirty. You could use processed wood stove pellets if you wanted, probably, or cedar animal bedding mulch, although I'm not sure how the mycelia would go for the cedar.
