Growing Your Own Mushrooms

This entry was posted by on Sunday, 22 November, 2009 at

On the last farmer’s market day of the year (around Halloween), we bought a Grow-Your-Own-Mushrooms kit from the farmer we usually buy mushrooms from. Great novelty gift, to be sure. We couldn’t resist.

It’s a medium-sized box that’s really heavy, a solid 30lb brick of soil which is pre-seeded with mycelium. In case you missed Mycology 101, mycelium is the white stringy mat of threads which is the real fungus itself. When mycelium threads intersect from different organisms, they combine DNA and produce mushrooms as a ‘fruit’; the mushroom then releases spores from its vents (on the bottom of the cap) to spread new mycelium. In a nutshell.

(For the pictures below, click to get the bigger photo)

From Mushrooms

Opening the box, you can see the mycelium throughout the soil:

From Mushrooms

…just add some peat moss to the top, water the whole thing, then wait 2 weeks.

From Mushrooms

On day 14, things started to get interesting:

From Mushrooms

Day 16:

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Day 19:

From Mushrooms

Day 21, time to harvest! The cap’s diameter is twice the size of the stem length.

From Mushrooms

Here’s a tiny youtube video of us ripping up the first big one:

Picking the shroom

…which we then ate in an omelette. Yum. Many more mushrooms to come over the next month.

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4 Responses to “Growing Your Own Mushrooms”

  1. Jack Repenning
    November 23, 2009 at 12:03 pm

    Wow, you just grow it in the box? That box looks sufficient to inoculate about an acre of mushroom beds!

    Of course, keeping it inside helps avoid volunteers, which I dunno about you, but *I’m* eternally grateful to “someone else” for knowing the difference between the edible and the poisonous kinds!

  2. Don Collins
    November 26, 2009 at 8:03 pm

    Glad it was you and not me that our daughter experimented on. Some women poisoned Clint Eastwood like that in an old movie, and he died.

  3. Ben Collins-Sussman
    December 6, 2009 at 12:23 am

    Sadly, it seems that we never got our 2nd crop. The whole box was overtaken by fuzzy mold. 🙁

  4. caglar
    January 30, 2010 at 8:52 am

    It is a really helpful information about mushrooms. I live in a village and mushromms are very important for us,
    there is also a very useful guide that i got great informatin about mushrooms:

    http://agricultureguide.org/