Growing Mushrooms
Important Tips For Growing Mushrooms
For many people, growing mushrooms has become a healthy way of including this plant in their diet or recipes. If you’re new to growing mushrooms, there are various periodicals and books that cover the topic more intensely than we will here.
Growing mushrooms can be described in four different stages. The first is the task of getting and keeping a mushroom tissue culture, which can be as simple as cutting off a part of a plant. If you start with a culture, this will ensure that your strain is exactly the one that you want. You can purchase mushroom tissue cultures from commercial growers, or you can start them from fresh mushrooms.
Step two of growing mushrooms involves using some of the tissue culture that you have obtained to begin a mushroom starter, or “spawn”, which is normally grown atop a small amount of sawdust or sterilized grain.
In step three, you will use your “spawn” to integrate tissue cultures into a material of organic type that you have chosen to help you support the mushrooms’ formation.
The fourth step of mushroom growing is getting the real mushrooms to grow in the substrate so that you will eventually have a colony of mushrooms there.
If you choose to purchase a mushroom kit, you are starting right at step four, since the company you buy the kit from has already done the first steps for you. All you will then need to do is to set up an environment that is conducive to growth, which is generally moist and cool. Some strains of mushroom are harder to grow than others, so you may want to start with one of the hardier strains if you’re new to the hobby.
You can also start growing mushrooms at step three, if you buy the spawn from someone who grows them, and then use that to introduce that fungus into your organic material. You can use sawdust, wood chips, logs, compost or straw for your substrates, or sometimes people use cardboard or newspaper. Check in a book or on-line about the specific type of mushroom you want to grow, in order to select the proper substrate.
The types of mushrooms you choose to grow will generally be one of two classes – one prefers to grow in a wood-based material, and one prefers compost. The button mushroom is a popular one, and grows well in compost, but they can grow in straw as well.
After you have worked with growing mushrooms from spawn or a kit, then you can better decide if you want to get so far involved as to start your own cultures. Depending on the time you have available, the prepared kits can make growing mushrooms a more enjoyable and less time-consuming hobby.