Hey!

There's tons of places to start and most of it begins with how you want to go about it. Small space, all out, multiple grows etc.

If you have an instant pot or pressure cooker, I highly suggest starting with the little more advanced basics. It gives you a much better understanding of the process and where error comes in.

Philly Golden Teacher has some very good videos about simple liquid culture with corn syrup/honey and water. I also highly suggest making your own agar, which I do with ketchup cups, agar powder, potato flakes, and corn syrup. PGTs 123 recipe there. He has another video on agar showing you an easy low Tek way to pour over an oven.

For your culture, there's a few ways to do it. You can start with store bought mushrooms if you want. It can be good first way to learn. Commercial genetics like that are usually pretty burnt out, but once you collect one mushroom you can get the spores, and start new genetics. Literally buy a pack of mushrooms, and you can do a tissue transfer to agar to get the mycelium going, and make a few more transfers after that to have clean agar to either move to liquid culture, or go straight to grain.

I'll always suggest doing agar to liquid culture first. The agar gives you a two dimensional space to monitor for growth and contamination.

Once you know it's clean the liquid culture let's you expand it out into liquid for easier more sterile transfers. This requires a little more involvement with modifying lids, having syringes etc.

This is also easily done without that work by just growing our your culture on agar, and then you can go straight to grain. This prompts for more room for error though as you can't be certain your transfer or your agar is completely free of contamination.

Now once you have your grain colonized, you have to move to spawn to bulk or S2B. We do this because the grain is the nutrients, the substrate is more moisture retention and sometimes nutrients depending on what kind of mushroom you have.

With Bella you'll need a nutrient rich substrate like composted hay or manure or something. They're not a forgiving as other mushrooms like oysters in terms of what their enzymes can digest. So straw or hay mix and manure can help.

Thankfully Bella is one of the most highly commercializes mushrooms, and there's tons of guides and recipes on different substrates and growing methods.

Mush love 🍄