How to Grow Mushrooms.
As you know, I like to keep it simple and I'm going to tell you how to get started growing mushrooms.
This project is the cheapest way I could find to see if I liked growing mushrooms.
Now I love growing mushrooms. This project cost me $16 and some straw I had on the farm.
What is a mushroom?
It is a flower.
The actual plant is the white spiderweb looking stuff called mycelium and the mushroom is the flower.
What do mushrooms grow in?
The first thing a gardener needs to know is that mushrooms grow in organic matter, not in dirt like plants do.
You can grow mushrooms in all types of organic matter: leaves, saw dust, grain, compost, straw, logs, poo, even cloth.
Mushroom words:
Mushroom seeds are called spores.
The white spiderweb looking stuff is called mycelium. Say it out loud. (My-cell-ee-em) It makes you sound smart. lol.
The straw or any organic matter your using to grow mushrooms on is called substraight.
My mycelium loves the substraight and eats it day and night.
The spores landed on the substraight and a few weeks later it was a mass of white mycelium.
My mycelium was very cozy in its bed of substraight and gave me mushrooms.
The mushrooms filled every bag I had and the mycelium just kept sending up more.
Getting started:
Ok, so you've thought about growing mushrooms but it seems too difficult. It is as easy as planting a bean.
For this project you will need:
Spawn (mushroom spores in sawdust) Start with oyster mushrooms for they are the easiest, delicious and a sure success. Store bought oyster mushrooms are not very good because they don't have a very good shelf life but they are wonderful when dried.
Bale of straw. (Doesn't mater what kind.)
Big cooking pot.
Clear plastic Bags.
First order your spawn. This will cost $16 if you order from Fungi Perfecti.
After you receive your spawn you will want to boil a pot of straw for a half hour. The bigger the pot the nicer.
Take the staw out and put it in a clean bowl to cool. Hot straw kills spawn. Boil up some more straw while this is cooling so you achieve a continuous process.
Stuff cool straw in bags with spawn. Watch it done Here. It is an 8 minute video but you should watch how she stuffs the bags. The music is loud but I like the "made in India" message. Next poke some holes with a needle.
Let it sit in a semi-dark moist area for a month or two and observe how it turns white.
When you see mushrooms starting to poke through the bag, you want to make a bigger hole so they can come all the way out.
You also want to make sure they have light but not direct sunlight. If they don't have light, they grow slow, taste strong and look like corel.
They will double in size every day and should be picked when they are about the size of an oyster. Their shape, not their taste, is how they got their name.
They are yummy, yummy, yummy and will grow on most woody organic matter. Native grass didn't work so well for me but they grew great on the 2x4s of my worm bin.
After you have had success with this bag method, you will probably want to step up production in your own way.
How I'm doing it now:
I had great success with the bag method above and when I was done I simply put the spent bags in soaked straw on the north wall of my green house. Now mushrooms are poking out here and there along the wall and I'm expecting a large crop any day now. Did I do this sterile? Nope. Other kinds of mystery mushrooms are growing out of there too as you can see in the pictures. The top photo I identified as Witch's Cheese (not yummy, nor does it have a pleasent texture {not unlike wax} but is not considered toxic) The lower photo shows some weird melting mushrooms that are also shown in the "made in India vidio". I contacted Fungi Perfecti about this and they said that it is perfectly normal to have other mushrooms growing in outside beds = cozy.
How to save mushroom spores:
When you have mushrooms growing, it is easy to save spores. All you have to do is pick a large mushroom and place it on a piece of green paper for a couple days. Some mushroom spores are white and others are black but there is no such thing as a green mushroom spore so the green paper lets you see spores of any color. yay!
I guess that you could use paper of any color. Oyster mushroom spores would show up great on black paper but you could do it on white. I just like to see the spores. Putting a mushroom on a peice of paper so that you can look at the spores is called: Making a Spore Print.
After you have removed the mushroom from the paper, you'll see your spore print. You can just fold the paper and put it in foil, a dry bag, jar or somthing and use it later or you can scrap it off the paper on to your substraight right away.
Mushrooms are very easy to grow.
The next step:
Now that you're a mushroom grower and have learned the basics, you can move on to growing harder mushrooms like button mushrooms or portobellas. Do research on the web and remember youtube when you want to see how other people do it.
You can also drill holes in a large log, stuff some spawn in these holes and have oyster mushrooms galore.
This is a good way to do it if you have logs, trees or stumps that Oyster mushrooms like.
Now that you've done this very simple and rewarding project, you'll find that further research is a pleasure.
Happy growing.
~ Bryan Shillington
-- Ian "Doc" Shillington N.D. (Retired) Doc@AcademyOfNaturalHealing.com Rocky Mountain USA Club 575-772-5888 Listen to Doc's FREE Audio Lecture on Natural Health at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO84kxHrkBs&feature=channel Listen to Doc's Music at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDLA4QzYLvs&feature=related Join Doc's FREE Herbal Remedies Group on Yahoo to get the TRUTH about your Health: http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Herbal_Remedies/
