Pleurotus ostreatus
The oyster mushroom is a white-rot fungus that fruits in overlapping shelves on dead and dying hardwood, especially beech. It is one of the easiest mushrooms to grow at home on pasteurised straw, sawdust, or coffee grounds. The true species is a cool-weather fruiter: it colonises warm and fruits in cool, humid, well-ventilated conditions.
Where it grows wild
A saprotroph and primary decomposer of dead wood, mainly of broadleaved trees such as beech, but also poplar, willow and others. It fruits on logs, stumps and standing dead or weakened trunks in temperate and subtropical forests. In Europe it fruits mostly from autumn to spring, and in mild winters in the UK it can be found all year.
Mainly lowland. Few records carry an elevation, and the weighted sites are at sea level to about 110 m.
🔒 Growing it like that
The wild conditions above, turned into targets for a shelf, a tent or a greenhouse. The full profile has:
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Profiles are drafts built from measured range and climate and from published sources; each section carries its own confidence in the app. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, used under its CC BY 3.0 licence, unmodified.