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.