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by 0_____0 1439 days ago
In terms of complexity, IMO basic home cultivation is somewhere between baking a simple loaf of bread and assembling an IKEA shelf unit and installing it on the wall. It takes basic web search skills to find info on front-to-back DIY technique, and one can find colonized media online or at the farmers market.

That being said, every level of simplification grants a hobby a new audience. I think the objection here is the attempt to create a Juicero model, where you get a fancy machine that requires (maybe DRM'd? not sure) media pods in perpetuity if you want to keep using it.

(edit: doesn't appear to be vendor locked media, but the machine is $299... I spent less on that for my pressure canner, mason jars, fruiting chamber, and food dehydrator put together. sort of puts into question who this is for.)
1 comments
imiric 1439 days ago
> basic home cultivation is somewhere between baking a simple loaf of bread and assembling an IKEA shelf unit

It's a bit more involved than that, no? I'm not familiar myself, but don't you need to take into account things like temperature and humidity as well? If their mushroom blocks can tell the box the ideal conditions for each particular strain, and those can be maintained to produce a better end product, that already seems like a win over doing all of that manually.

> the machine is $299

Yeah, that's a bit much. They have to factor in mobile app development somewhere, right? :)

Again, I'm not saying that this particular product will succeed. But I think there might be a segment of the market that wants to get into home growing, but doesn't want to mess around with the DIY aspects of it.

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0_____0 1439 days ago
If you can clean your kitchen/bathroom properly, and you can follow the instructions to bake a loaf of bread, you can almost certainly follow some of the simpler procedures.

During the fruiting phase, things are pretty easy. Once the substrate is colonized you sort of just take the lid off of your fruiting chamber, mist it with a sprayer, and wave the lid at it to blow the excess CO2 out. Once a day. That's what this $299 box does for you.

The part that's akin to baking bread is the initial media preparation and inoculation. You need to measure your media, hydrate it, put it in a hot thing (bread:oven::mycoculture media:pressure canner) for the requisite number of minutes. My first mycoculture attempts were far more successful than my first attempts at breadmaking.

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