The secrets to mushroom growing

If you always liked mushrooms, mushroom growing is a great way to assure your family of a regular supply of this excellent food. Many people think that growing mushrooms takes some special kind of skill, or at least extremely specialized growing conditions. But this is absolutely not true. In reality, mushrooms are as easy to grow like anything else and can be a good deal easier to grow than many kinds of food.

They often need less care and require growing conditions that potentially allow even a person in a city to grow them. Did you know, for example, that mushrooms can be grown in your own flat? I know of city residents who have grown mushrooms in a box in their homes. Of course, if you live in the countryside you have the option of growing mushrooms on a far larger scale, simply because you have so much more space available. But even if you live in the city, and have a garden shed, you could grow your mushrooms in it.

Now, all mushroom growing takes is some growth medium and some mushroom spores or spawn, as they are also called. Yes, that's all that it takes to grow mushrooms. Now, while mushrooms may not take too much space, and may not require too much care, the ambiance you provide them with can be all important.

Mushrooms do not like light, so make sure you keep light away from them. If you're growing them inside your house, you can grow them in a closed box that will keep the light out, and the temperature inside the box stable. If you are growing them in a shed or in your greenhouse, you will need to ensure that there is a very minimum of light falling on them, and also that you exclude draughts. You will also need to maintain a stable temperature range, because mushrooms are very susceptible to changes in temperature. If you do not maintain a stable temperature range, and it varies beyond around fifty to sixty degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, your mushrooms are in trouble.

On the other hand that's all that it really takes to grow mushrooms. You just need spawn and the growing medium. Place the spawn in the growing medium and place it in a dark, moist place. Water it regularly every day, and pretty soon your mushrooms will be ready for harvest. There really isn't all that much to mushroom growing.

Tips and tricks that can help you towards successful mushroom growing

How you go about mushroom growing can directly impact how successful (or not) you are at growing them, of course. If you go into this without sufficient information, you may end up with a lot of wasted effort. On the other hand, if you do a little research (something that's so easy to do with the internet as available as it is) you can easily make it a vast success. Because the simple fact of the matter is that it's extremely easy to grow mushrooms. You just have to do things right. To start with, it's best not to use mushroom spores directly.

While it's possible to buy mushroom spores, these spores are actually so tiny that they're microscopic. This means that they can be quite difficult to handle, at least until you get used to things. You can also harvest spores from mature mushrooms, simply by cutting the cap off and placing it on a large sheet of paper or on a sheet of glass. However, I would advise against using spores, not only because they are inconvenient to handle (a single breath of wind will scatter them all over the house or yard), but also because they're vulnerable to contamination, and if they contaminated with spores from wild, poisonous mushrooms, the consequences could be disastrous.

Preventing contamination is also the reason why it is recommended that you always go in for mushroom growing indoors. Indoor growing greatly reduces the chances that a few wild spores might come to rest in your mushroom beds, and grow up among your safe mushrooms. If the mushrooms that grow from the wild spores turn out to be poisonous, it could cause serious problems for anyone who eats them. And that's just one reason why you shouldn't grow mushrooms outdoors.

Another reason is that the growth medium is so rich that a lot of germs and unhealthy algae and fungi can start to grow in it if it's left in an open environment. In a closed environment, things are more controlled, and this means that your mushrooms can be relied upon to not only not be poisonous, but also not to carry any disease producing pathogens. Of course, you will wash the mushrooms before cooking them, but considering the growth medium that mushrooms grow in, it's better to be safe than sorry. These are just a few tips that you can use to help you with your mushroom growing.

Preparing the growing medium when growing mushrooms

Mushroom growing can be both lucrative and fun. It all depends on how well you can manage to grow them, and on the amount of space you have available. And of course, it depends on the quantity you wish to grow. If you're just getting started and would like to study the process, I would suggest that you buy one of the mushroom starter kits. These mushroom starter kits usually provide you with a container to grow the mushrooms in, a growth medium, and, of course with the mushroom spores or spawn. Generally speaking, growing mushrooms from such a kit is extremely easy.

All you have to do is place the growth medium inside the box and place the spawn in it. Then you just keep the box closed in a room in your house which is safe from draughts, and the mushrooms just grow. It's really just that easy. You have to water the mushrooms, of course. This involves misting them with a water spray. You wait for the mushrooms to grow sufficiently, and then harvest them. After you harvest them, you keep misting the growth medium again until the next batch grows.

You can sometimes get a good many mushrooms from a single batch of growth medium and spawn, and they can provide some very nutritious and tasty meals for your family. So a mushroom growing kit is a great idea if you like mushrooms, or even if you want to learn the basics of growing them. But if you want to grow them on a larger scale, you're going to need more space. Of course they don't take up too much space, but you still need the bare minimum. I would suggest the garden shed as the best possible place to grow them, or a greenhouse should you have one available.

Bear in mind, though, that mushrooms will never stand the excess of light available in most greenhouses, and you'll have to find a way of darkening the greenhouse, or at least of darkening a certain section of the greenhouse. If you can do that, you can have quite a few batches of mushrooms set up and growing right at once. You can either buy a growing mixture and spawn, or you can make your own growing mixture and buy the spawn, just as you wish. Making your own growing mixture is likely to lower your operating costs if you're at all thinking of commercial mushroom growing.

Planting the spawn is only the first step in mushroom growing

That's right, planting the spawn is only the first step in mushroom growing, but it's nevertheless necessary to get it right. Seedling boxes work very well when planting spawn. Remember, of course that you must not use mud in the boxes, but instead compost, or specially prepared manure mixed in well with equal quantities of straw. There are simple ways in which to prepare the 'soil', or growth medium as it is more correctly called.

But if you don't want to be bothered with this, there are plenty of commercial preparations available. Bear in mind, though, that the commercial preparations will cost more than any nutrient formula you make yourself. It's also absolutely not true that the commercial preparations will work any better than your home-grown growth formula. Now, the right way to plant the spawn is to mix in spawn flakes with the nutrient formula. Make sure you space the flakes out sufficiently that the young mushrooms have a place to grow. Then you need to make sure that the growth nutrient is watered sufficiently.

However, if you're buying your spawn commercially, like most people who go in for mushroom growing at home, you have a choice between flakes and complete bricks made up of spawn. If you go in for the bricks instead, you just need to break them into one-inch cubes and poke holes in the nutrient mix that go in about two inches. Place a cube in each of these holes, close up the holes, and commence watering. Either kind of spawn works just as well. The moment you start watering, the spores will begin to grow, though this growth may not be apparent at first. In time, however, a find white web will form on the surface of the nutrient formula. This white web is actually the root system of the budding mushrooms.

Keep watering, and in time the tiny mushrooms will appear. This is a time when you need to reduce the amount of water to a considerable extent, because too much water at this time will cause your new mushrooms to wither and die. The mushrooms will not need too much water now until it's time to harvest them. Harvesting is pretty effortless - you can just use a kitchen blade to cut right through the stems. A simple twist and pull is also an effective method of harvesting mushrooms. Once you harvest each mature mushroom, it makes room for the next mushroom growing in its place.

How does it really go when mushrooms grow

That's an interesting question indeed, and you may well be stumped by it even if you happen to be an excellent gardener. Even if you've had your own well-kept lawns and garden for years, you may still find mushroom growing difficult, because the simple fact of the matter is that mushroom growing is a whole new ball game.

But why is this so? It's because mushrooms are not really plants, but fungi, and this changes all the rules. You can't use mud to grow them in, for one thing. The usual fertilizers and pesticides won't work - not that you'll want to use them if you're set on growing organic mushrooms for consumption. Anyway, the point that I want to make is that there are a lot of new things to learn, and the sooner you can get started learning them, the better you'll ultimately be at either providing your family with a regular mushroom diet, or at growing them commercially for sale.

Now, the first parameter when you're growing anything (not just mushrooms), is space. If you're just growing enough for the occasional mushroom meal for your family, then you could even grow mushrooms indoors, inside your house. But if you want to grow them on a larger scale, you're going to have to have a garden shed, at the very least. A greenhouse or a small barn would be even better. One nice thing about growing mushrooms is that you can use your space very efficiently. Simply fill the available space with shelving, with the shelves about a foot apart, and with space for you to move around (or in-between) the shelves, of course. After this, it's a simple matter of acquiring a great many flat trays (each about three to four inches deep) and placing them on the shelves.

You may wonder how it's possible to grow mushrooms this way, and I'll remind you that these fungi don't need the presence of light in which to grow, and so can be grown in this way most efficiently. Then you need to buy some commercial mushroom growing medium, or you can make your own (it's not difficult) and fill the trays with it. Plant the mushroom 'seed' - the correct term to use here is spores or spawn, and not seed - and you'll have your mushrooms growing in no time at all. While this is a very cost-effective approach, there are ways to make mushroom growing even more cost-effective by harvesting spores, but that's a subject for a separate article.

The conditions needed for mushroom growing

More and more people are becoming interested in mushroom growing. There are a good many reasons for this. Firstly, there's the simple issue of the increased cost of living. Most people find that any way that cuts down on living expenses is one that is eminently useful. Now, most would think that growing one's own food would be too much bother, but when that food is mushrooms, you'll find that it's hardly any bother at all.

Of course, this depends to a great extent on the scale upon which you want to take up mushroom growing. On the very smallest of scales, mushroom growing is truly effortless. Everything is really so pre-packaged these days, from TV dinners to mushroom growing, and all you have to do, really, is to purchase a kit. The kit will have virtually everything that's needed, and all the instructions that you require. But, since it is a kit, it will not save as much on costs as a little more innovation of your part might do.

If you would like to save the most, of course, you should do everything yourself, from harvesting spores from mushrooms that have become mature to actually doing all the tasks of preparing the growth medium (a reasonably big job) on your own. Generally speaking, I would only advise this for people who are thinking of going commercial, but to be honest, even doing everything yourself is pretty easy.

There are lots of instructions available on the internet, and if you're here, you already know for yourself what a source of knowledge the internet can be. Feel free to experiment, and never be so afraid of failure that you don't try something new. Yes, you might make a few mistakes along the way, but mushrooms are really a low-maintenance organism, and ultimately I have not the slightest doubt that you'll be growing those mushrooms with hardly any effort at all. The growth medium itself is often a simple method of self-fermenting a special mixture of manure and straw over a few days.

This takes a little careful overseeing, but other than that is really pretty easy to do, and it more or less makes itself. Extracting spores from mature mushrooms can be as simple as placing the cut-away cap on a piece of glass and waiting a day or two for the spores to fall out, and then collecting them. There's really nothing about mushroom growing that needs to be an unsolvable mystery.

How mushroom growing can benefit the health of your entire family

Mushroom growing may be more important to the health of your family than you may think. Our society is so heavily industrialized these days that industrialization extends even to our food sources. That being that case, we find that a great many companies involved in industrial food production are concerned more with maximizing yields, rather than about the nutritive value of the foods that they are producing. So many crops are taken from a single area of land that the nutritive value of the food grown on that land can become seriously reduced.

There is also an indiscriminate use of pesticides and fertilizers in commercial mushroom growing, so much so that there is a positive long term threat to the health of your family inherent in these practices. One way to counter this is to grow your own food. While growing fruits and vegetables can be relatively easy, providing good sources of protein can be much more difficult, especially if you don't want to keep animals, or are a vegetarian.

That's exactly where growing mushrooms come in. Mushrooms are an excellent source of protein, and they can be grown fairly effortlessly, providing you with a reliable source of organic protein for your family. You might think that growing them is bound to be difficult, but if you learn a little more about the subject, you'll understand just how easy and simple it is to grow mushrooms. For those who are mainly interested in a source of organic protein, one of the many kits on the market provides an easy and fairly effortless approach to growing mushrooms that can let you get started on growing them virtually right away.

A kit of this sort is also a very good way of learning the basics of growing this wonderful food without too much risk of lost effort or failure. Once you gain in confidence after using these kits, you can go on to creating your own containers, making your own growth medium, and perhaps even harvesting spores from grown mushrooms to start a new generation of mushrooms. All this will come with time.

Don't be impatient, and focus upon your successes in growing organic food rather than upon costs in the beginning. Your costs will gradually reduce in time as you become more experienced, and your operation becomes consequently more efficient. As you gain experience and lower costs, you could conceivably even go commercial with your mushroom growing, selling your produce to stores or in the open market.

How long does mushroom growing take?

Just how much time should it take you to harvest mushrooms from your mushroom growing? Well, if you like large mushrooms, these can take up to three months to mature fully. This means that if you want to have a mushroom meal regularly, you're going to have to use a little strategy. The first strategy, of course, is to plant a great many mushrooms. The second strategy is to plant the spore or spawn in different areas of your mushroom beds at different times. Since the mushrooms in your mushroom beds will be sprouting and maturing at different times, you can be assured of a supply of mushrooms all through the month.

When you first plant your mushrooms, whether you use spores or the more manageable spawn that is sold these days, you're going to have to keep your mushroom beds wet for about three weeks, and the temperatures stable around about fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit or so. This stable temperature and moisture are what encourages the mushrooms to bud. After about two weeks or so, you'll see a delicate white net meshed over the growth medium. This net consists of mycelia and is the root system that each mushroom growing puts out, though the mushrooms themselves will not be in evidence yet.

Nevertheless, nutrients are moving inwards, and the spores are growing into budding mushrooms, which will become visible to you about three weeks from planting the spores or spawn. Of course these mushrooms will be too small to consume, but once they appear, the growing process is well on track. Then it's only a question of keeping them growing. To do this, you need to keep out all draughts, and also cut down on the moisture a little. Watering the mushroom beds is all important in the first stages, and this needs to be done at least twice a day, but once the mushrooms actually start to appear, this can be cut down to misting once or twice daily.

The mushrooms will take their nutrients directly from the nutrient-rich growth medium, and only need some gentle misting to prevent them from drying out. And that's all that you really need to do, to maintain the environment, and your mushrooms will grow. Keep the temperature in a steady range, don't let the light touch your mushrooms, and keep out the draughts. As you can see, mushroom growing can be so simple.

Growing mushrooms successfully enough to share with your friends and acquaintances

Mushroom growing on a small scale is relatively easy, as everyone knows. All you need is a little growth medium and some spores, and the mushrooms virtually grow themselves. These days you even have kits which allow you to grow mushrooms even more easily.

These kits provide you with everything that you could possibly need, and all you need to do is to water the mushrooms regularly and make sure they don't dry up. However, this sort of mushroom growing will provide the occasional mushroom meal for your family, but nothing more than that. If you want to grow enough mushrooms to share with your friends and acquaintances, you're going to have to go one better than this. You'll have to take a little trouble and prepare the containers for growing the mushrooms, and perhaps even the growth medium, yourself. However, if you succeed at this, you might even be able to go on to grow mushrooms commercially, or at least enough to sell them locally.

Now the first thing you need when you're considering growing mushrooms on a larger scale is space. After all, you can't grow anything unless you have the space to plant it in. You'll need some kind of garden shed or outhouse at the very least, but if you have this, growing mushrooms on a medium to large scale should be fairly easy.

Let's start with growing mushrooms on a medium scale first. The ideal growth container for mushrooms on this scale is a log or a thick piece of wood. Yes, mushrooms aren't plants, and they require very different conditions from plants to be grown successfully. For one thing, they do not use soil, nor are they usually grown in a flower pot. Instead, if you want to grow mushrooms on a medium scale, you would be well advised to get yourself a log. If you ever walked in a forest, you may have noticed how much mushrooms like logs.

If you get your mushrooms a large piece of wood, they will grow in it only too happily. You'll have to make a few minor modifications to the wood, like making some holes in its surface. The mushrooms spores, of course, go right into these holes. Plaster a little growth mixture on top and water it regularly and you should have mushrooms growing in just a little while. After that mushroom growing is only a question of watering them regularly before you can start harvesting them on a regular basis.

Getting your mushrooms to bud can be the key to growing mushrooms

The simple fact is that mushroom growing is rather easy. All you have to do is follow a few simple tips and the mushrooms will virtually grow themselves. You just need to be careful of one or two things. Now two things that mushrooms need to grow exceptionally well are the right temperature and the right levels of temperature. But what many people don't know is that these levels of temperature may require changing at different stages of the mushroom growing process. That is to say, that mushrooms spores that are just putting out mycelia need a different range of temperature and humidity from mushrooms that have actually begun to grow. Why this is so is anyone's guess.

Mine would be that these changes in temperature actually in some way reflect the growing conditions that mushrooms experience in the wild. However, whatever the reasons for this, the simple fact is that by tweaking and carefully controlling levels of temperature and humidity, you can get your mushrooms to grow far more successfully than would otherwise be possible. Now, the first thing to remember is that higher levels of temperature and humidity will encourage your mushrooms to bud and to put out roots. This means that in the first three weeks after you plant your mushroom spawn (or spores) you need to maintain higher levels of temperature and humidity than you will maintain later on.

In these first crucial three weeks (crucial, because if the mushrooms don't bud and put out a good net of mycelia now they might turn out stunted later) you need to keep temperatures hovering around about sixty five degrees Fahrenheit, and to make sure that the temperature does not vary more than a few degrees from that setting. If you know anything about growing mushrooms, you know that this setting is actually nearly ten degrees higher than that recommended for growing mushrooms, but the fact is that at this stage of your mushrooms' development, these are the temperatures that suit them best.

While maintaining these temperatures, make sure that you spray the growth medium with water twice a day and mist the environment as well to keep levels of humidity high. Keep things this way until you can actually see the mushrooms, and then lower temperatures to around fifty five degrees, and mist the mushrooms just once a day. Do this and your mushroom growing will result in a crop of large, healthful mushrooms.

Creating a nutrition mix for use in mushroom growing

If you're just going in for mushroom growing as a hobby, it's possible to grow them on a log. However, just as with any other organism, plant or animal, mushrooms will grow much better if you offer them the right nutritive mix. Just how to go about preparing that mix is what this article is all about.

There are several reasons why you might want to make your own nutritive mix. For one thing, there's the cost of buying readymade mixes. Making your own nutritive mix is fairly simple, and by doing so, you may avoid much of the cost normally connected with growing mushrooms yourself. Of course, making your own mix will take a little effort, but the results are well worth it. A good nutritive mix for mushrooms is usually made from cow or horse manure. This cannot be used directly, as you would when fertilizing plants, but must be prepared and matured by a special process if you want to use it successfully for mushroom growing.

You start by taking a large enough quantity of equal parts of straw and any good kind of manure. You need to mix these well until they form a thoroughly homogeneous mix. While mixing them, you need to keep adding in sprinklings of gypsum. Keep mixing this for about half an hour, then take a piece of sacking and cover the mixture carefully. You will find that the mixture will exhibit a steady rise in temperature that you must carefully observe. Wait until it reaches a hundred and sixty degrees F before attempting anything further.

The moment the temperature reaches a hundred and sixty degrees F you can go to the next stage. It involves removing the sacking. Mix everything well and remember to spray on lots of water while doing it. This will cause an immediate fall in temperature. When everything is well mixed again put the sacking back on and wet it nicely.

The process I've just described might have to be repeated quite a few times before the manure is ready for use. How will you know that it's ready? At first, the mixture will have a sticky appearance. But as you process it again and again, this sticky look will give way to a flaky appearance. When the pile looks this way, it means that the medium is ready for use. After this, it's just a question of placing the nutrient mix into the right kind of container. Something flat and wide would be ideal for mushroom growing.

How to ensure that your mushroom growing is successful

A good many people think that mushroom growing must be something that is very difficult to do, and this is actually quite a serious misconception. Because the fact is that while growing mushrooms may not necessarily be easy, it's not really all that difficult either, at least if you know what you're doing. If you're here reading this article, you already realize that the internet is a wonderful resource and you can use it to learn the subtle skill that is mushroom growing. Once you know the basics you can go on to become an expert mushroom grower.

These days, even if something isn't easy, it can be made easy by a large amount of 'do-it-yourself' companies out there. With the prices of commercial goods rising, an increasing amount of companies base their products around the concept of 'do it yourself. There are do-it-yourself laptop kits and do-it-yourself solar panel kits, and yes, mushroom growing isn't an exception, because there are some wonderful do-it-yourself kits out there, and buying one of these kits would be an excellent step towards learning mushroom growing.

I would suggest that you go for the smallest kits. This is because these small kits are usually self-contained, and contain everything that you can possibly need to grow mushrooms, and this includes a container to provide the growing mushrooms with humidity and darkness. This container can be kept anywhere in the house, or even mounted upon a wall. You will also get a supply of growth medium with the kit and a supply of what is known as spawn, which is, to put it more simply, a collection of mushroom spores, that give rise to new mushrooms.

There will be clear instructions on how to put things together, of course, but that's a simple job. And once you do, all it takes to ensure that the mushrooms grow is to water the growth medium regularly. Clear instructions on when and how to do this will also be provided with the kit, and you just have to follow them. Of course, this is just a humble beginning - pretty soon you'll want to expand, and can then by supplies of growth medium and spawn at a local gardening store to set things up on a larger scale. That's all that it really takes to learn mushroom growing.

Ultimately you can even make your own growing medium and culture your own mushroom spawn to lower expenditure in your mushroom growing.

How to use a greenhouse for mushroom growing

Everyone knows that mushroom growing needs a dark, moist area. But many people don't realize that one can actually arrange an area that is sufficiently moist and dark in one's own greenhouse. The fact that people don't realize that they can potentially grow mushrooms right in their own greenhouse means that they often don't use this optimal place, even when they have it at their disposal.

It's true that a greenhouse may not seem like an optimal location in which to go about your mushroom growing at first sight. But this is a fallacy. A greenhouse can easily be adapted to the task of growing mushrooms and doing so can involve something as simple as covering the greenhouse with a canopy of plastic. So long as you screen out the light your mushrooms should do perfectly well. Another thing that you're going to have to see to if you want to grow mushrooms in your greenhouse is ensuring that temperatures remain stable. Mushrooms don't like too much of a variation in temperature and so this is something that you must try to avoid. If you can keep the temperature above around fifty degrees F and below sixty degrees F or so, your mushrooms should do just fine.

Now, another thing that you need to know about mushrooms is that if you want them to grow reasonably well, or indeed even to grow at all, you can't begin by planting them in mud. This is because fungi, which is what mushrooms are, don't grow in soil. Their organism is essentially made up of quite different materials from those of plants, and this means that mushrooms will refuse to grow unless planted in a medium that is rich in nitrogen. Such a medium is called a growth medium, and it can either be produced yourself with some effort or can be bought in a store. If you intend to create the growth medium yourself, bear in mind that this can take some effort and is hardly worthwhile unless you intend to grow a fairly large quantity of edible mushrooms.

On the other hand, for those in the initial stages of mushroom growing or those without much experience, I would recommend a readymade growth medium. This will be more than adequate to your needs until you gain more experience, or alternatively, wish to expand productivity. At that stage, you can always begin producing your own growth medium to reduce the costs of your mushroom growing.

The best tips and tricks to mushroom growing

Mushroom growing is really not all that difficult if you know what you're doing. While it is true that mushrooms can prove a real health hazard if you allow the mushrooms you're growing to become contaminated by wild mushrooms, in reality this rarely happens unless you decide to grow your mushrooms outdoors. If you decide to grow your mushrooms outdoors, please be warned that you must be an expert at recognizing the strain of mushrooms that you're growing.

A person cultivating mushrooms usually provides an ideal environment in which the mushrooms can thrive, and if you do this outdoors, it's quite possible that strains of wild mushrooms will try to take advantage of the ideal growing conditions that you're providing. This is impossible to counter as mushrooms spread via microscopic spores blown by the wind, and these microscopic spores will inevitably infest the growing environment that you have provided for your mushrooms.

This wouldn't be a problem if there were not so many strains of deadly poisonous mushrooms among wild mushrooms species. Actually, no matter how confident you are of being able to recognize safe mushrooms, you should still preferably grow your mushrooms indoors. This really is your best bet because it is much more difficult for wild spores to infest such a controlled environment. And this decreases the chances of a dangerous accident occurring. So, how long do mushrooms really take to grow?

Well the mushroom growing period can obviously vary from species to species but your mushrooms will usually take at least a week or so to put out their mycelia. After that, the growing process begins, and your mushrooms will be ready for harvesting about eight weeks into this period. Don't be fazed by the long growing times, because mushrooms actually take much less time to grow than a great many other food crops, and the fact that they grow so quickly is an added and considerable advantage.

If you want to have mushrooms regularly, then all you need to do is to ensure that you plant a great many of them at staggered intervals, so that there are always some mushrooms ready to harvest. This is an easier task than you might think, because it's just a question of planting more mushrooms in the seedling box trays that they favor. Since mushrooms grow in the dark they require an exceptionally small amount of space. This means that when you go in for mushroom growing at home, you can plant them in trays set in rows, or even on shelves, one on top of the other.

All the information you need to set up a mushroom growing operation

If you have some spare area in an outhouse or even in your cellar or garage, you can utilize it for mushroom growing, which are tasty, nutritious and a great source of organic protein. Remember that food that you grow yourself will always be guaranteed to be free of harmful fertilizers and pesticides, as well as of all the subtle array of bio-chemicals that commercial food-providing companies today use to maximize yields. If you're at all conscious of the food you eat, and if you want it to be healthful, then you could do worse than growing your own food.

Growing your own food ensures that not only will the food be healthful, but also that you can maximize yields by providing the best possible growing environment for the food you're growing. This is especially true with mushrooms. If you go in for mushroom growing and get the growth environment right, you can have enormous yields. Of course you can go in for commercial growth medium, but these things are best created yourself. And it's not difficult. So if you want to get started growing mushrooms, what would you need?

Well, first of all, to best use the space you have available, I would suggest that you get yourself some shelving. This can also be made oneself. Then you need a large number of flat trays in which you will actually plant the mushrooms. Of course, the length and breadth of these trays will be based upon the space you have available, and the size of a tray that will best make use of that space, but as a general rule, don't purchase any tray that might potentially be too hard to lift. The trays should also as a general rule not be any deeper than four inches. See if you can get a good deal on a larger number of trays at your usual gardening store - trays like these are often used for seedlings.

Once you have your trays, fill them with growth mixture and add in mushroom spore or spawn flakes, which are easily available in gardening stores, or on the internet. Water the mixture carefully, and the mushrooms will start putting out their mycelia, which is a sort of fungal root. Once this happens, keep watering at least twice a day, preferably with a mist spray, until the young mushrooms start to appear. Once you reach this point, you need to stop watering while the mushrooms mature. Once they reach the size that you need, you can harvest them. This is all you need to know to go in for mushroom growing.

How to make sure your mushroom growing doesn't get derail

The key to successful mushroom growing is really the environment that you maintain, and the nutrient mix that you use. Mushrooms are not organisms that adapt well to a variable environment, so if you want to grow mushrooms, you're going to have to ensure that the environment that you grow them in remains stable.

The first aspect that you need to concentrate upon is light. While mushrooms can survive a small quantity of light, what they really love is darkness, so you're going to have to maintain a dark environment if you want your mushrooms to grow. On a small scale, this sort of darkness can be maintained just about anywhere. You could even grow mushrooms in a closed box mounted on a wall, right in your own home.

However, large-scale growing had best not be done inside the house; this is because the nutrient mix used for mushrooms is so rich that it can encourage the growth of all sorts of pathogens. Growing mushrooms on a large scale inside the house could flood your house with these pathogens, and lead to infections and respiratory diseases. However, it's perfectly save to grow mushrooms inside the house on a very small scale.

If you have space in your garden shed, and if it doesn't suffer from draughts, it can do just fine for growing mushrooms. If you have a greenhouse available, you could use it for your mushroom growing, so long as you take the trouble to build a darkened enclosure for the mushrooms, or screen the glass panes of the greenhouse in some way. And of course, if you have a barn, that would be perfect.

Wherever you grow them, remember that your mushrooms need stable temperatures, and maintaining those temperatures can be absolutely crucial. If the temperature range were to rise or fall more than five degrees above or below fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit for any length of time, you can be sure that your mushrooms will die.

For the same reason, draughts are absolutely fatal to mushrooms, because they usually include a drastic rise or fall in temperature, and this is what kills off mushrooms. The good news is, however, that if you manage to maintain the environment, and let's face it, it isn't that hard to do, mushroom growing can be pretty effortless. So long as you get the environment right, you can be assured that your mushrooms will give you little or no trouble.

Just how easy is growing mushrooms?

Is mushroom growing as easy as it's made out to be? The answer is yes. This is because mushrooms are actually fairly simple organisms that require a very specific set of environmental conditions in which to grow. If they don't have this set of conditions, they don't grow. On the other hand, the good news is that if they do have that set of conditions, they grow almost without any maintenance at all. Another bit of good news is that these conditions are easy to provide. All you really need to grow mushrooms is dark and humidity.

You can provide dark by simply having an enclosed space, and humidity can be provided for by spraying the growing medium in which the mushrooms are planted with a water spray twice a day. Mushrooms are very productive, and you'll have a new harvest of mushrooms starting to grow even as you take out the grown ones. And they're very nutritious and well worth the little effort it takes to grow them. If you're growing them just to provide the occasional mushroom meal for your family, you needn't bother to take too much trouble or effort over them.

Simply walk into your local gardening store and buy a complete mushroom kit. They are also available online, at even more competitive prices, and if you buy these kits online they'll be delivered right to your doorstep. These kits really make mushroom growing easy, because they contain just about everything that a person needs to get started. They usually come in a closed container that can be put up just about anywhere in the house that has the right temperature range. The container itself provides the mushrooms with dark, so you don't have to worry about that aspect of things.

The container will also contain mushroom spawn and a growth medium, and all that you actually have to do with this system is to spray the growth medium regularly - surely not much of a task. You see how, with a mushroom kit, your mushrooms are virtually guaranteed. If you feel up to the task at some later time, you can try growing mushrooms on a larger scale, perhaps in a shed in the garden or in an outhouse. But if you're just starting up and want to get the hang of the very basics of mushroom growing, then one of these starter kits is really your best bet.

A step by step guide to mushroom growing

Mushroom growing is very easy if you know exactly what you're doing, and it's not difficult to learn the different steps involved in the process. Now, the basics of preparing growth medium and containers has been covered elsewhere, but the actual basics of how to plant and care for mushrooms will be covered in detail in the course of this article.

You will most likely buy mushroom spores or spawn when you first learn to grow mushrooms, and before you learn to harvest the spores from mushroom caps for yourself. Now, there are two types of this spawn available. It is available in flakes, but it is also available in bricks as well. How you plant the spores or spawn depends on what sort that you buy. I would suggest, if you're thinking of planting mushrooms regularly, that you buy and plant both types, and see what works better for you.

If you buy and plant both types, there are very different methods of planting them. The bricks need to be broken into chunks, each about one inch in diameter. These chunks are put into the growing medium, spaced about half a food from each other. You need to make holes about an inch or two deep before you put these chunks in. Flakes are mixed right into the growth medium. Take about a quart of these flakes and spread them over fifteen square feet, and continue until you have the growth medium evenly covered. You need to mix these into the growth medium while doing this.

Make sure that the flakes are not visible on the surface of the growth medium. Whether you use chunks or flakes, the next steps to mushroom growing are the same. You spray a mist of water on to the mixture regularly, and keep it in the dark. Soon the mushroom spawn will begin to put out mycelia, which are the fungal version of roots. Once these are out, the mushrooms will really start to grow. As a matter of fact, in time you will see an intricate web of these pale white mycelia form.

Slightly increasing the temperature to about sixty five degrees Fahrenheit in this time will encourage growth. Remember to water daily. In a few weeks you should be able to see the mushrooms. You should not water in the period between when the mushrooms appear and the harvest. You can harvest mushrooms when they are either very small, or when they mature. Just use a sharp knife to harvest each mature mushroom, and there'll soon be another mushroom growing in its place.

How to go about expanding on your mushroom growing

Most things these days have been made exceedingly simple and mushroom growing is not an exception. There are mushroom growing kits that will have you growing mushrooms within an hour after the kit arise. However, relying upon somebody else's expertise (and that is what you do when you buy a kit), can only get you so far. When you buy a kit and rely upon someone else's expertise, you also obviously have to pay for that expertise, and this can send your costs up to unacceptable levels.

The simple fact is that if you want to grow mushrooms on anything but the smallest scale, you're going to have to learn the details of mushroom growing yourself. It's the only way to cut costs. If you pay for a kit every time, you may end up paying as much for your mushrooms as you would pay in a store anyway. Of course, the mushrooms that you grow in your kit are more organic, so if your aim in growing mushrooms is merely to assure yourself of a supply of organic mushrooms, obtained at the least possible trouble, then a kit may indeed be the best choice.

But if cost matters to you, as it matters to most of us, then learning to do at least some of the tasks involved in mushroom growing is in your best interests. Let's not go for complete independence right away, but instead learn of some ways to cut costs that will still keep the task of mushroom growing fairly simple.

One of the first things you need to do is to stop relying upon kits that provide you with everything. Culture a little independence in yourself. Start by choosing an area of your property that you think will be good for growing mushrooms. A greenhouse, properly modified for darkness, can be excellent, but a garden shed can do just as well, albeit on a smaller scale. Now visit your local gardening store and pick up some flat boxes. These will do very well for planting trays. You can buy mushroom growing medium at this stage. After all, these are only your first steps towards complete independence.

Another thing you can think of buying is the mushroom spores themselves. These are called spawn when they're processed, and they're pretty freely available. If you put these three components together, you can have a medium-sized mushroom growing setup operational in a very short time, and at a fraction of the cost of buying complete kits.

The basics of mushroom growing

Many people don't realize that mushroom growing is something that can be done right in their own greenhouse. And since mushrooms are such wonderful food, this can be a superb addition to one's diet. However, you may need to change things about in your greenhouse if you want to grow mushrooms, because the one thing these edible fungi cannot stand is too much light. Yes, they can tolerate a little light, but perhaps I should modify that statement and say that they can tolerate a VERY little light.

Better than even a little light is no light at all. They also like a stable temperature range, so make sure that stays within the range of between fifty and sixty degrees Fahrenheit - anything more than that will cause problems for your mushrooms. You need to be careful to keep out any draughts. The air needs to be moist, because that's just how mushrooms like it. If you've looked at any mushrooms growing in the woods, you'll have noticed that they don't exactly grow in the soil. Similarly, when you grow them in your greenhouse, or even in a garden shed, you're going to have to arrange (or buy) a special growing medium for them.

There are two ways of going about mushroom growing, and the method that you choose will depend upon just how many of these fungi you plan to grow. If you're starting out on the very smallest scale, a log of wood should do just fine for a growing medium. Yes, that's absolutely right, you can grow mushrooms on a log of wood. And why should that surprise you - haven't you seen them growing around tree stumps in the woods? All you need is a good log of some reasonably hard type of wood - oak does just fine.

Take that log and make a few reasonable holes in it, and fill each of them with some mushroom spawn. Then let nature take its course. If, on the other hand, you intend to grow mushrooms on a larger scale, you're going to need to bed them down in trays filled with a special mushroom growing medium. Well, I did tell you before that they won't grow in soil. What you're going to need is some compost mixed up with straw or a mixture of straw and horse manure. You can plant the mushroom spawn in this, and your mushrooms will grow just fine. If you need to grow more mushrooms, you'll just have to set out more trays and set aside more space for your mushroom growing.

Mushroom growing for the ambitious commercial planter

So what sort of person does best at mushroom growing? It's a cliché, of course, but there are people and there are people. And while some people are happy enough with their daily routine, there are those others who wish they could reach for the stars. Well, that same philosophy could apply to mushroom growing, at least facetiously speaking. Not that reaching for the stars is any real part of mushroom growing, but while some people who grow mushrooms are quite satisfied with growing them out of kits, you'll have others who want to grow mushrooms on a much larger scale, who learn how to make the growing medium, how to harvest the spores for 'replanting' and who learn to cut costs to make themselves truly independent and commercially viable.

However, if you want to grow mushrooms commercially, all the will in the world won't make it possible unless you have some place to grow them in. You can even grow mushrooms on a medium to large scale in a spare room in your house, but I'd advise against this if you can possibly avoid it. While many people do grow mushrooms commercially within their own homes, it's best not to push your luck - the growth medium for mushrooms is not of materials that you'd want in large quantities within your house.

An outhouse or perhaps a greenhouse, or, in a pinch, a garden shed, would do much better. Now, the second thing that you'll need are containers in which to put the growth medium. You might need a number of large, flat trays for this. How many trays you need, of course, depends on the number of mushrooms you want to grow. I'd advise you to start out small while you're still in the experimental stages, and then expand as your experience improves and you gain more knowledge and confidence.

Most garden stores should have trays of the kind that you need. After this, you obviously need material to plant your mushrooms in, and no, soil absolutely will not do. Mushrooms do not grow in soil. Instead you need a special medium to grow them in. You can try compost if you're willing to experiment, but if you're not, then a specially cultured medium of horse manure and straw is what will make your mushrooms grow best.

This is not worth preparing unless you're really thinking of doing things on a large scale, but if you are, go ahead, because with this and the containers, you have everything you need for your mushroom growing.

Mushroom growing for an amateur gardener

Actually, I wonder whether the word gardener suits a person engaged in mushroom growing, since mushrooms are fungi, and so can hardly be said to grow in a garden. In fact, mushrooms grow in a very different environment from plants and gardens, requiring a complete, or almost complete absence of light, an absence of light that would quickly kill most plants.

However, if we use the word gardener in the sense of a person who cares for growing things, then I suppose the name fits. It's very easy to care for mushrooms, primarily because they are basically a wild organism that has been harnessed by men for food. Another nice thing about mushrooms is that they are fungi, not plants, and this means that they can be a far greater source of protein than plants can ever provide. Another good reason for growing mushrooms if you're a health-conscious individual is the fact that if you grow the mushrooms yourself you can be sure that they were grown without all the excess additions of pesticide and fertilizers that are so common in most industrially grown foods these days.

When you try your hand at mushroom growing yourself you know that they are both organic and that they will benefit the health of your family. In this day and age when so much of our lives seem controlled by the mechanized and the artificial, homegrown mushrooms can provide a wonderful source of health-building protein for your family. Best of all, this wonderful food is easy, and indeed almost effortless to grow. There are starter kits available that make the whole process extremely simple without spoiling the organic aspect of things in any way. These starter kits are an excellent way to learn the basics of growing mushrooms, and I would certainly recommend them if you have never grown mushrooms before.

Mushroom kits are also a great idea for anyone who wants to grow mushrooms on a small scale without too much trouble. These kits come complete with everything you could possibly need to grow your own mushrooms, including the growing medium itself, and plenty of mushroom spores.

The procedure, if you have one of these kits, is easy and even elementary. All you need to do is to put the growth medium into a container, which is also sometimes provided. Even if the container is sometimes not provided, it should be easy enough for you to find a flat box that should do perfectly well. Once the mushrooms are planted in the box, they do require a certain amount of light watering, or rather spraying every day. This is all the care needed for most home mushroom growing.

Making the right growth medium needed for mushroom growing

Most people who go in for mushroom growing just go out and buy both the spores (or spawn) and the growth medium. They do this because this is the easiest way to grow mushrooms. But if you are thinking of growing mushrooms commercially, this can add massively to your costs. Or at least, it can add to your costs to an unacceptable extent. If this is the problem you're facing, this article will tell you how to cut down on those costs by making the growth medium yourself. It's not as hard as you think and can go a long way towards making you a master of growing mushrooms.

Of course, no matter of knowledge is going to help you unless you have space in which to grow your mushrooms, so that's something that you need to think about well in advance. If you're thinking about mushroom growing on a commercial scale, you need to wonder where you'll put all those happily-growing and healthy mushrooms. Because it's possible to grow enough mushrooms for the occasional mushroom dinner right in the house, but if you want to go commercial, well, you're going to need a greenhouse area at least.

If you have the area, the next thing you're going to have to think of are planting containers. Remember that mushrooms are not plants, and they don't need a deep container in which to grow. Instead think large and flat, containers that are more shallow pans than real pots. Most stores that specialize in gardening supplies should be able to accommodate you. Once you've got everything arranged, the best thing you could do would be to begin with one pan. And this is about the time you need to prepare your mushroom growth medium.

It's easy to put together - you need cow or horse manure and straw. Mix them well in a shallow tub with holes in the bottom so that water can run off. You need to mix straw well into this. Add gypsum to the mix as you go about the mixing process. Now cover it with a sack and store it for a while. After some time mix the pile again and cover it again. Repeat this several times. Finally, your mixture should be ready, and you can go ahead and empty it into your boxes.

Then plant the mushroom spores in the mixture and cover it with more of the mixture, and you'll soon have your first mushroom growing.

Commercial growth medium for mushroom growing
Mushroom growing needs growth medium. Commercial growth medium is easy enough to make, and can considerably cut your costs when growing mushrooms. However, creating it can be a reasonably lengthy process, and you need to think about whether you'll actually be growing mushrooms on that large a scale. If you are, then making your own growth medium is just about the best thing that you can do.

If, on the other hand, you're going to be growing a lot of mushrooms, but not necessarily on a commercial basis, then perhaps buying some growth medium when you need it is a better way to go. Remember that with mushrooms you can't just use soil, because mushrooms are rich in protein, and so use up a lot of nitrogen. Well, in case you decide you want to go in for commercial mushroom growing, here's how you go about preparing it. Firstly, the mushroom growth medium consists of a roughly equal quantity of manure and straw.

These need to be mixed thoroughly in a large, flat container with holes in the bottom. As you mix these two ingredients, you need to keep adding a third in, which is gypsum. After the mixture is well mixed, all you need to do is to throw some burlap sacking over it. This sacking keeps the heat that the mixture generates inside. You need to check the temperature of this mixture at regular intervals - perhaps once every day.

The temperature will climb. When it touches about a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit, you should remove the sacking and remix the pile thoroughly. Spray water onto the pile thoroughly while mixing it. Now you need to put the burlap sacking back on the pile and to wet it completely. Once again repeat the whole process, checking the temperature of the pile every day. When the temperature climbs as before, repeat the remixing process.

This process needs to be repeated at least four times. At some point, the pile will not smell of ammonia anymore. It will also take on a distinctive fluffy quality instead of looking sticky. Now it is almost ready to use. You now need to cover the manure with the burlap sacking and then wet the sacking thoroughly. After this, just leave it alone for a week. At this point, the mushroom growing medium is ready and just needs to be put into the containers for you to be able to plant your mushrooms in it.

5 Amazing Small Scale Mushroom Farm Examples | GroCycle

Meet these 5 small scale mushroom farmers from the Low Tech Mushroom Farming Community. See the different ways that they are all approaching growing mushrooms on a small scale in their local area. You'll meet: - Marc from Sustain A Shroom: https://www.facebook.com/sustainashroom/ - Cougar & Shannon from Phenomenal Fungi: https://phenomenalfungi.com/ - Phil from Fairymount Fine Foods: https://www.facebook.com/Fairymount/ - John & Samantha from Peak District Mushroom Farm: http://peakmushroom.co.uk/ - Glenn & Anthea from Woodland Gourmet Mushroom Farm: https://www.facebook.com/WoodlandGour... Want to learn more? Join us for a FREE workshop: How to Grow Mushrooms The Low Tech Way https://grocycle.com/workshop/

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Free Workshop: Starter Guide To Mushroom Farming | GroCycle

Join us for this in-depth workshop where we discuss how to get started growing mushrooms and setting up a mushroom farm business. To learn more about our Low Tech Mushroom Farming Online Course, check out https://grocycle.com/go In this video we discuss a wide range of topics including: 00:00 Introduction 01:00 How we started growing mushrooms 01:30 What GroCycle does (what we produce on our farm) 02:47 Projects we've worked on 04:30 Mushroom cultivation courses 05:59 Why grow mushrooms? 06:54 What is low tech mushroom farming? 09:01 Part 1: Growing your first crop (the easiest way to grow mushrooms at home) 09:39 Practical example with fuel pellets 11:55 How to know when to harvest your mushrooms 13:04 Part 2: Creating a controlled growing environment 13:55 Substrate preparation & inoculation 14:42 Incubation space 16:00 Fruiting space 17:30 Shotgun fruiting chamber 18:00 4 Tier Greenhouse (Martha fruiting chamber) 18:39 Hydroponics tent 19:39 Insulated grow rooms 20:34 Shipping container mushroom grow rooms 21:56 Part 3: Running your mushroom farm 22:25 Mushroom substrate / non sterile substrate 25:00 Can mushrooms fix nitrogen? 25:40 Pasteurising mushroom substrate (lime bath/high ph pasteurisation, soap, hot water, chlorine) 26:33 Inoculation with mushroom spawn 27:04 How to reduce your spawn rate 27:22 Why Oyster mushrooms? 27:44 Testing strains to increase yields 28:46 Do you need to use mushroom bags? Mushroom buckets 29:52 Incubating your substrate 30:20 How do you know when it's time to fruit? 31:24 How do mushrooms grow so fast? 31:52 How do you have a crop every week? Ongoing mushroom production 32:44 Part 4: Can you make a living out of this? 33:40 Examples of mushroom production costs 34:34 The demand for fresh mushrooms 35:10 Comparison of supermarket mushrooms vs our mushrooms 36:40 Mushroom Grow Kits 36:53 Educational schools program 37:00 Mushroom jerky, dried mushrooms, mushroom tinctures 37:17 Workshops & mushroom farm tours 37:52 Ready to fruit substrate supply / substrate blocks 38:07 Meat alternatives, mushroom burgers, snacks, ready meals 38:53 The Low Tech Mushroom Farming Online Course 40:32 What is included in the course? 41:32 LTMF Course Community Support Group 43:37 What does it look like inside the course? 48:42 LTMF Course vs. other educational options 54:18 The Grow Kit Masterclass 55:37 Conclusion To learn more about our Low Tech Mushroom Farming Online Course, check out https://grocycle.com/go Check out some other related videos from our channel: How much does a low tech mushroom farm cost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoR4Q... Economics of mushroom production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18oNt... How to grow mushrooms at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8DLG... Designing a mushroom farm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O11o... 5 amazing mushrooms farm examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXNml... How to run a profitable mushroom business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5UAh... Profitable mushroom farming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpCOH... 5 things I wish I knew before I started growing mushrooms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Faq0w... How we built a mushroom farm at the V&A museum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z52As... What is low tech mushroom farming?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EF0U... GroCycle mushroom farm tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auURG...

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