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.