Ask Me Help Desk - Enquiry about mushroom cultivation methods

Coconut fiber may not have enough nutrients to grow mushrooms. Depending on the type you are growing, you would need to add a little more "food" for them. Are you growing paddy straw? If so you need rice straw and cotton seed hulls. Buttons, you need manure and straw that has been composted. Some mushrooms grow on dung, some on straw and some on wood chips or saw dust. Give me the name of the mushroom you are trying to grow and I can give you the parameters.
Also, you need a way of sterizing the substrate. A 55 gallon drum and a burner to boil water. A basket to hold the substrate while you submerge it into the boiling water. Jars and lids with micron filters or bags with micron filters. There are many ways to proagate the spawn ten thousand times by using spores , cloning and liquid inoculation for faster results. When using spores, you will need to grow out lots of mushrooms and choose the best strains, then by cloning you can propagate that strain. Once you have found the best strain, you must start a bank of that mycelium to draw from for future generations and cropping. That requires many, many test tubes and refrigeration. Not to mention agar.
Once the mycelium has been grown out in pertri dishes with agar, you can then grow it out in quart mason jars on sterilized rye seeds. Each jar can then be added to 10 more jars and so on. These jars will then be used to innoculate your bulk substrate, ie: composted manure and straw, rice straw and cotton seed hulls or wood chips and rice bran, depending on the type you are growing.
As far as selling your mushrooms, any restaruant, and many markets will buy them. The markets are hard to sell to if they already have a good supplier since they want to be sure you will have a constant supply for years to come.