How To Grow Mushrooms At Home

Growing edible mushrooms in your own home is not really rocket science. In fact, you can start growing mushrooms in the following few weeks in case you start preparing the substrate and cultures today. Unlike more traditional agricultural practices which involve herbs, fruit trees, vegetables, etc., mushroom farming is anything but difficult.

The reason for this is fairly simple: unlike plants, fungi is extremely resilient and it may literally ‘take care of itself' if ideal conditions are attained. Only one batch of inoculated wood chips can yield mushrooms for many years at a time.

And the best thing about this is you can actually increase the total mushroom yield by producing/purchasing viable spawn. If you're like most mushroom enthusiasts, you may be attracted to the thought of producing your own pure mushroom culture. This is achieved with the addition of mycelium to your sterile base which has been supplemented with the necessary nutrients.

The culturing process is in fact the time-consuming part of the whole process. You must check out the agar media for contaminations and you would also have to cross-check the look of the mycelium growing on the petri dishes to ensure that you are not growing the mycelium of some wild fungi.

Why is culturing performed? Culturing is made to produce viable mycelium that would then colonize the sterilized material that will later become the spawn or ‘seeds' that will then be utilized to inoculate the substrate. Culturing can be hard work but it really does pay back because after you have healthy batches of pure culture you can just keep the cultures inside a freezer for later use.

Let's discuss the substrate that you are using to grow your mushrooms. Generally, you may require some form of loose substrate like straw or husks. Some edible mushrooms like the shiitake mushroom) would only grow on organic or synthetic logs.

These edible is only able to be grown properly if sawdust or plug spawn are used. There are lots of strategies you could incorporate sawdust spawn or plug spawn into an organic or synthetic log. The most common way is drilling large holes into the wood.

A hand injector is then used to directly apply the sawdust spawn to the wood. If the mushroom farmer has prefered plug spawn, the wooden plugs are just hammered on the holes and then sealed by using a special wax. Some mushroom farmers saw out small wedges from shorter cuts of wood.

The resulting space is then filled up with sawdust spawn then sealed once more with the wedge of wood. Obviously, you may drill holes in smaller logs and utilize plug spawn instead of sawdust spawn. Sawdust spawn requires extra care so if you feel pressed for time, use plug spawn instead.

Mushroom varieties such as the oyster mushroom do well if they are grown in bottle or plastic bags. The plastic bags are filled to the brim with inoculated substrate and then left in a temperature-controlled growing area. The humidity of the growing area should be controlled through misting or by installed a centralized humidifying system.

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