how do you grow mushrooms?

[jem218]

hi there
this is probably going to make me sound really dumb.....but how do you grow mushrooms? is the only way to buy a manfactured kit?
kind regards
jane

[Tinybu88les8]

I'm wondering about this myself. I love mushrooms and would absolutely love to grow portobellos and shiitake... as well as a couple other exotics! <333

[momo]

I've seen websites that sell 'plug spawn' that you hammer into hardwood logs or stumps to inoculate them with the mushroom spore. After 9-12 months the mushrooms will colonize the wood and start to sprout and they should keep going for years.

Happy hunting!

[Sammiches]

It's my understanding that mushrooms grow in very moist, partially or mostly shaded locations. You'll want an extremely concentrated growth medium, and usually something rotting associated with it, such as a full cow manure pile or soil where moisture retention is not an issue.

As mushrooms grow from spores, you'll want to either buy some spores online or if you're able to find some in the grocery store, some have spores on them though they're usually harvested before then.

[nes]

Come to my backyard and you can have all the mushrooms you want .

You can certainly intentionally grow mushrooms at home, but there seems to be allot of prep work involved (including baking your soil, etc.) so buying a kit maybe simpler, especially with your first batch.

[jem218]

hi there thanks for your replies, I will admit that it all sounds quite complicated for me and I will just invest in a kit I think!! lol don't want to be completely lazy!
jane

[Gary350]

Buy a kit. It is the best way to guarantee your not growing poison mushrooms.

I bought a kit about 20+ years ago. I followed the directions and had mushrooms in about 30+ days. Once they start to grow get ready because they just keep on coming, and coming, and coming. It didn't take long to Over Dose on mushrooms. They produce real well for several weeks then they taper off. Sprinkle on a thin layer of organic material on the soil every week or to keep the mushrooms coming. If you lightly sprinkle the soil with new organic material the mushrooms will come slower, 4 or 5 cups of mushrooms per week is plenty for us. Make spore prints on paper to grow more mushrooms when the soil is used up.

Be sure to grow the mushrooms in the suggested soil as I recall it called for composted cow manure in a bag.

[snowleopard394]

I've actually tried to do this from start to finish. If you wanted to do it all yourself you'd need sterile technique, which is difficult unless you have access to a lab. You start with a whole mushroom of the type you want to grow. Instead of using the spores from it, you break it in two pieces and cut out a tiny bit of the inside with a sterile scalpel. That bit of mushroom then goes onto a Petri plate with sterile agar media, and it produces mycelia... basically it starts growing until the plate is covered in fuzz. If there's contamination by bacteria or another fungus, you have to get rid of the plate and start over.

Then you make "spawn." Basically you get some kind of media (a lot of things will work - cardboard, wheat, whatever your type of mushroom might like to grow on). It has to be sterilized by pressure cooking it. Then you take a sterile scalpel and transfer a bit of the fuzz from the plate into a bag containing your sterile media, which you'll need to close up so that nothing else can get in. It grows like that for a while, making whatever is inside nice and fuzzy. If it gets contaminated with bacteria or another fungus at this point, it also has to be thrown out.

If all goes well, you end up with a bag full of fuzzy carboard, straw, or whatever else. That is what's called "spawn." Once you have the spawn, you can drill holes in logs and put some of the spawn in the holes. Then you can use a bit of wax to cover the hole so that the spawn stays nice and moist. Or you can mix the spawn in with some pasteurized straw, put it all in a plastic trash bag, and poke holes in the side of the bag. The mushrooms will come out of the holes. Or you can mix it in with some wood chips and spread it on the ground. What method you choose depends on what mushroom you're growing. When you use the spawn to inoculate stuff, you can stop worrying about it being totally sterile. At this point you've got enough of the fungus that you want, so that it can out-compete whatever is in its environment. You just need to be fairly clean.

Anyway, that's how you grow mushrooms from start to finish, in case you were curious. And it's why you should probably start with the spawn or a kit. ;P