How to Develop Mushrooms in Your Own Garden

If you’re a mushroom fanatic, chances are you are paying a hefty price to choose up the precious fungi at your regional grocery. Considering that hunting wild mushrooms can be risky business (as Frodo can tell you), numerous mushroom lovers are now opting to grow their personal at household. It is not as well hard to do, and with a tiny patience, you are going to have all the mushrooms you can possibly eat.

Deciding on Your Mushrooms

Your mushroom growing expedition starts with selecting the sorts of mushrooms you want to develop. You can experiment with one form, or be brave and attempt a assortment. polka dot bars and easy-to-grow varieties contain white button mushrooms, Shiitakes, and oyster mushrooms.

Most residence gardeners begin out with one particular wide variety, as the distinct fungi call for diverse growing habitats. White button mushrooms grow on composted manure, while oyster mushrooms thrive in straw, and Shiitakes usually do most effective on hardwood or sawdust.

If your space is limited, begin with 1 selection and grow in batches nevertheless, if you have plenty of space, really feel absolutely free to go wild and try them all at once! In this post, nevertheless, we’ll talk about developing button mushrooms, as these are the most common amongst household gardeners.

Beginning Your Spawn

Mushrooms develop from spores or spawn that can be purchased at a very good garden center. If your neighborhood garden center doesn’t carry mushroom spawn, there are plenty of retailers on the web who carry an outstanding wide variety.

Set up a expanding tray that is at least six inches deep, and fill it with a very good mushroom compost. This can be a mix of properly-rotted products like straw, hay, chicken litter and cottonseed meal. Most mushroom composts involve sphagnum moss peat for consistency. When you can make your own, it may possibly be easiest to get some pre-mixed.

Wet down your compost so that it’s quite moist (but not soggy), then mix in your mushroom spawn. Make sure it is completely incorporated into the compost, then tamp it all down nicely with a tray or board.

Let Your Mushrooms Grow

Your trays should really be kept at a steady temperature of 65-70 degrees for the subsequent couple weeks. Maintain the mixture damp by spraying it down day-to-day with water.

Soon enough, you are going to see a white webbing commence to appear across the manure. That signifies your mushrooms are sprouting! Cover the surface with a layer of damp peat moss and prime it off with moist newspapers. Continue to preserve the whole issue damp, and at a steady temperature of 55 degrees.

Sprout, Harvest, and Repeat


Following one more ten days, you’ll begin to see tiny white mushroom sprouts appearing. More than the subsequent handful of days, the sprouts will develop into complete-sized mushrooms. As soon as they are at the size you want, you can get started harvesting and employing them.

But don’t throw out your mix just yet. Preserve it all damp and cool, and a different crop will sprout inside two weeks. This will keep going for as long as six months as lengthy as you retain the ideal temperature and maintain the trays effectively-watered.

As soon as your mushroom trays are fully spent, you can start out once more from scratch, or move on to a new sort of mushroom! While expanding mushrooms at household takes a small work and a lot of patience, you will find that your residence-grown mushrooms taste far improved than any you could locate at a grocery retailer.