Growing mushrooms indoors and outdoors
Last
week, I posted how to
clone mushrooms then
expand
your spawn as the
first steps toward growing your own mushrooms. Of course, if you
have extra cash and little time, you can always buy spawn from one of
the many companies that cater to the home mushroom grower.
Regardless of how you get it, what do you do with that spawn?
The pros grow their
mushrooms indoors in bags, trays, or jars. These methods are
definitely the most cost-effective for large-scale growers since the
growing conditions can be tweaked easily to speed up mushroom
production. However, I'm leery of indoors growing since it
requires sterile conditons and lots of up front equipment costs.
Basically, by providing the perfect conditions for your mushrooms,
you're also providing the perfect conditions for lots of molds and
bacteria, so you need to fight contaminants constantly.
On the homestead scale,
I think that outdoor growing is usually the best way to go. We've
had good luck growing both
oyster mushrooms and shiitakes on logs, and a similar method can be
used to inoculate fresh stumps.
A new method I want to
check out is growing mushrooms in beds of wood chips, straw, or other
materials. If you inoculate your chips in early spring or fall,
the mycelium will naturally expand through the substrate and you may
get mushrooms within the same year. Just be sure to give the
fungus at least four weeks to grow before cold weather kicks in and put
your mushroom bed in a damp, shady, north-facing area.
This post is part of our Growing Gourmet Mushrooms lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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