Mushroom Growing

18/09/2021

Hey Shroomers:

Check it out:
Here is the original video URL from YouTube.com:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wKP-aCcPNk

I often get asked the question, "Which type of mushrooms should I start with as a beginner growing mushrooms at home?

Great question! There are several types of mushrooms at your local grocery store such as Sh*taki, White, Cremini Portobello, and Wild mushrooms... But which one is best?

My choice is Oyster Mushrooms!

Be sure to click the link below from YouTube.com titled, "How To Grow Oyster Mushroom At Home."

Thanks,

Daniel.


Here is the original video URL from YouTube.com:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wKP-aCcPNk

Oyster mushrooms, the common name for the species Pleurotus ostreatus, are one of the most common types of cultivated mushrooms in the world. Also referred t...

06/09/2021

Hey Shroomers:

Learn this simple method to grow mushrooms outdoors in your garden, by creating a woodchip mushroom bed.

You'll see how we create a 4m2 mushroom bed and inoculate it with spawn from the Wine Cap mushroom (also often known as King Stropharia or Garden Giant).

We created this bed in March by layering the spawn in between layers of woodchip. The first crop of mushrooms was harvested from the garden in September.

Here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIYWzfVW-ws

Enjoy,

Dan T.

Learn this simple method to grow mushrooms outdoors in your garden, by creating a woodchip mushroom bed.You'll see how we create a 4m2 mushroom bed and inocu...

06/01/2021

PREPARING THE GROWTH MEDIUM WHEN GROWING MUSHROOMS - by Dan Tetreault, B.Sc.(Biol.)

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.
If you want to grow mushrooms 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 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.

To Our Shared Success,

Dan T.

"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White,
Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You

"I harvested my first home-grown mushrooms today and I am so happy! I love eating mushrooms and have been thinking about trying to grow them for a while, but I always thought it was extremely hard and believed you needed specialized equipment. Then a few weeks ago I stumbled across your site and fel...

05/01/2021

PLANTING THE SPAWN IS ONLY THE FIRST STEP IN MUSHROOM GROWING - by Dan Tetreault, B.Sc.(Biol.)

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 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 by 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.

To Our Shared Success,

Dan T.
"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White,
Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You

29/12/2020

🐞MUSHROOM GROWING FOR THE AMBITIOUS COMMERCIAL PLANTER - by Dan Tetreault, B.Sc.(Biol.)
🧄
So what sort of person does best at mushroom growing? It's a cliché, of course, but there are people and there are people. And while some people are happy enough with their daily routine, there are those others who wish they could reach for the stars.

Well, that same philosophy could apply to mushroom growing, at least facetiously speaking. Not that reaching for the stars is any real part of mushroom growing, but while some people who grow mushrooms are quite satisfied with growing them out of kits, you'll have others who want to grow mushrooms on a much larger scale, who learn how to make the growing medium, how to harvest the spores for 'replanting' and who learn to cut costs to make themselves truly independent and commercially viable.

However, if you want to grow mushrooms commercially, all the will in the world won't make it possible unless you have some place to grow them in. You can even grow mushrooms on a medium to large scale in a spare room in your house, but I'd advise against this if you can possibly avoid it.

While many people do grow mushrooms commercially within their own homes, it's best not to push your luck - the growth medium for mushrooms is not of materials that you'd want in large quantities within your house.

An outhouse or perhaps a greenhouse, or, in a pinch, a garden shed, would do much better. Now, the second thing that you'll need are containers in which to put the growth medium. You might need a number of large, flat trays for this. How many trays you need, of course, depends on the amount of mushrooms you want to grow.

I'd advise you to start out small while you're still in the experimental stages, and then expand as your experience improves and you gain more knowledge and confidence.

Most garden stores should have trays of the kind that you need. After this, you obviously need material to plant your mushrooms in, and no, soil absolutely will not do. Mushrooms do not grow in soil. Instead you need a special medium to grow them in. You can try compost if you're willing to experiment, but if you're not, then a specially cultured medium of horse manure and straw is what will make you're mushrooms grow best.

This is not worth preparing unless you're really thinking of doing things on a large scale, but if you are, go ahead, because with this and the containers, you have everything you need for your mushroom growing.

To Our Shared Success,

Dan T.
"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White,
Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You

22/12/2020

MUSHROOM GROWING FOR THE AMATEUR GARDENER - by Dan Tetreault, B.Sc.(Biol.)

Actually, I wonder whether the word gardener suits a person engaged in mushroom growing, since mushrooms are fungi, and so can hardly be said to grow in a garden.

In fact, mushrooms grow in a very different environment from plants and gardens, requiring a complete, or almost complete absence of light, an absence of light that would quickly kill most plants.

However, if we use the word gardener in the sense of a person who cares for growing things, then I suppose the name fits. It's very easy to care for mushrooms, primarily because they are basically a wild organism that has been harnessed by men for food.

Another nice thing about mushrooms is that they are fungi, not plants, and this means that they can be a far greater source of protein than plants can ever provide.

Another good reason for growing mushrooms if you're a health conscious individual is the fact that if you grow the mushrooms yourself you can be sure that they were grown without all the excess additions of pesticide and fertilizers that are so common in most industrially grown foods these days.

When you try your hand at mushroom growing yourself you know that they are both organic and that they will benefit the health of your family.

In this day and age when so much of our lives seem controlled by the mechanized and the artificial, home grown mushrooms can provide a wonderful source of health building protein for your family.

Best of all, this wonderful food is easy, and indeed almost effortless to grow. There are starter kits available that make the whole process extremely simple without spoiling the organic aspect of things in any way.

These starter kits are an excellent way to learn the basics of growing mushrooms, and I would certainly recommend them if you have never grown mushrooms before.

Mushroom kits are also a great idea for anyone who wants to grow mushrooms on a small scale without too much trouble. These kits come complete with everything you could possibly need to grow your own mushrooms, including the growing medium itself, and plenty of mushroom spores.

The procedure, if you have one of these kits, is easy and even elementary. All you need to do is to put the growth medium into a container, which is also sometimes provided. Even if the container is sometimes not provided, it should be easy enough for you to find a flat box that should do perfectly well.

Once the mushrooms are planted in the box, they do require a certain amount of light watering, or rather spraying every day. This is all the care needed for most home mushroom growing.

To Our Shared Success,

Dan T.
"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White,
Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You

"I harvested my first home-grown mushrooms today and I am so happy! I love eating mushrooms and have been thinking about trying to grow them for a while, but I always thought it was extremely hard and believed you needed specialized equipment. Then a few weeks ago I stumbled across your site and fel...

19/12/2020

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

QUESTION:

"How do you make the right growth medium needed for mushroom growing?" [FREE GUIDE: Cut Costs]

ANSWER:

Most people who go in for mushroom growing just go out and buy both the spores (or spawn) and the growth medium. They do this because this is the easiest way to grow mushrooms.

But if you are thinking of growing mushrooms commercially, this can add massively to your costs. Or at least, it can add to your costs to an unacceptable extent. If this is the problem you're facing, this article will tell you how to cut down on those costs by making the growth medium yourself.

It's not as hard as you think, and can go a long way towards making you a master of growing mushrooms.

Of course, no matter of knowledge is going to help you unless you have space in which to grow your mushrooms, so that's something that you need to think about well in advance. If you're thinking about mushroom growing on a commercial scale, you need to wonder where you'll put all those happily-growing and healthy mushrooms. Because it's possible to grow enough mushrooms for the occasional mushroom dinner right in the house, but if you want to go commercial, well, you're going to need a greenhouse area at least.

If you have the area, the next thing you're going to have to think of are planting containers. Remember that mushrooms are not plants, and they don't need a deep container in which to grow. Instead think large and flat, containers that are more shallow pans than real pots.

Most stores that specialize in gardening supplies should be able to accommodate you. Once you've got everything arranged, the best thing you could do would be to begin with one pan. And this is about the time you need to prepare your mushroom growth medium.

It's easy to put together - you need cow or horse manure and straw. Mix them well in a shallow tub with holes in the bottom so that water can run off. You need to mix straw well into this.

Add gypsum to the mix as you go about the mixing process. Now cover it with a sack and store it for a while. After some time mix the pile again and cover it again.

Repeat this several times. Finally, your mixture should be ready, and you can go ahead and empty it into your boxes.

Then plant the mushroom spores in the mixture and cover it with more of the mixture, and you'll soon have your first mushroom growing.

To Our Shared Success,

Dan T.
"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White,
Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You

"I harvested my first home-grown mushrooms today and I am so happy! I love eating mushrooms and have been thinking about trying to grow them for a while, but I always thought it was extremely hard and believed you needed specialized equipment. Then a few weeks ago I stumbled across your site and fel...

15/12/2020

JUST HOW EASY IS GROWING MUSHROOMS? - by Dan Tetreault, B.Sc.(kin.)

Is mushroom growing as easy as it's made out to be? The answer is yes. This is because mushrooms are actually fairly simple organisms that require a very specific set of environmental conditions in which to grow.

If they don't have this set of conditions, they don't grow. On the other hand, the good news is that if they do have that set of conditions, they grow almost without any maintenance at all. Another bit of good news is that these conditions are easy to provide.

All you really need to grow mushrooms is dark and humidity.

You can provide dark by simply having an enclosed space, and humidity can be provided for by spraying the growing medium in which the mushrooms are planted with a water spray twice a day.

Mushrooms are very productive, and you'll have a new harvest of mushrooms starting to grow even as you take out the grown ones. And they're very nutritious, and well worth the little effort it takes to grow them. If you're growing them just to provide the occasional mushroom meal for your family, you needn't bother to take too much trouble or effort over them.

Simply walk into your local gardening store and buy a complete mushroom kit. They are also available online, at even more competitive prices, and if you buy these kits online they'll be delivered right to your doorstep. These kits really make mushroom growing easy, because they contain just about everything that a person needs to get started. They usually come in a closed container that can be put up just about anywhere in the house that has the right temperature range. The container itself provides the mushrooms with dark, so you don't have to worry about that aspect of things.

The container will also contain mushroom spawn and a growth medium, and all that you actually have to do with this system is to spray the growth medium regularly - surely not much of a task. You see how, with a mushroom kit, your mushrooms are virtually guaranteed. If you feel up to the task at some later time, you can try growing mushrooms on a larger scale, perhaps in a shed in the garden or in an outhouse. But if you're just starting up and want to get the hang of the very basics of mushroom growing, then one of these starter kits is really your best bet.

Happy Shrooming!

Dan T.
"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White,
Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You

"I harvested my first home-grown mushrooms today and I am so happy! I love eating mushrooms and have been thinking about trying to grow them for a while, but I always thought it was extremely hard and believed you needed specialized equipment. Then a few weeks ago I stumbled across your site and fel...

12/12/2020

REQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS on Mushroom Growing - by Dan Tetreault, B.Sc.(kin.), RCT

FAQ:
Just how does one go about mushroom growing

ANSWER:
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.

Happy Shrooming!

Dan T.

"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White,
Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You

09/12/2020

HOW TO USE A GREENHOUSE FOR MUSHROOM GROWING - by Dan Tetreault, Dec. 8, 2020

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 green house 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 growing 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.

Happy Shrooming Everyone!

Dan T.
"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White, Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You

02/12/2020

HOW TO ENSURE YOUR MUSHROOM GROWING DOESN'T GET DERAILED - by Dan Tetreault, Dec. 1,2020

The key to successful mushroom growing is really the environment that you maintain, and the nutrient mix that you use. Mushrooms are not organisms that adapt well to a variable environment, so if you want to grow mushrooms, you're going to have to ensure that the environment that you grow them in remains stable.

The first aspect that you need to concentrate upon is light. While mushrooms can survive a small quantity of light, what they really love is darkness, so you're going to have to maintain a dark environment if you want your mushrooms to grow. On a small scale, this sort of darkness can be maintained just about anywhere. You could even grow mushrooms in a closed box mounted on a wall, right in your own home.

However, large scale growing had best not be done inside the house; this is because the nutrient mix used for mushrooms is so rich that it can encourage the growth of all sorts of pathogens. Growing mushrooms on a large scale inside the house could flood your house with these pathogens, and lead to infections and respiratory diseases. However, it's perfectly save to grow mushrooms inside the house on a very small scale.

If you have space in your garden shed, and if it doesn't suffer from draughts, it can do just fine for growing mushrooms. If you have a greenhouse available, you could use it for your mushroom growing, so long as you take the trouble to build a darkened enclosure for the mushrooms, or screen the glass panes of the greenhouse in some way. And of course, if you have a barn, that would be perfect.

Wherever you grow them, remember that your mushrooms need stable temperatures, and maintaining those temperatures can be absolutely crucial. If the temperature range were to rise or fall more than five degrees above or below fifty five degrees Fahrenheit for any length of time, you can be sure that your mushrooms will die.

For the same reason, draughts are absolutely fatal to mushrooms, because they usually include a drastic rise or fall in temperature, and this is what kills off mushrooms. The good news is, however, that if you manage to maintain the environment, and let's face it, it isn't that hard to do, mushroom growing can be pretty effortless. So long as you get the environment right, you can be assured that your mushrooms will give you little or no trouble.

Cheers,

Dan T.
"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White,
Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You

25/11/2020

HOW TO GO ABOUT EXPANDING ON YOUR MUSHROOM GROWING - by Dan Tetreault, Nov.24, 2020

Most things these days have been made exceedingly simple and mushroom growing is not an exception. There are mushroom growing kits that will have you growing mushrooms within an hour after the kit arise. However, relying upon somebody else's expertise (and that is what you do when you buy a kit), can only get you so far. When you buy a kit, and rely upon someone else's expertise, you also obviously have to pay for that expertise, and this can send your costs up to unacceptable levels.

The simple fact is that if you want to grow mushrooms on anything but the smallest scale, you're going to have to learn the details of mushroom growing yourself. It's the only way to cut costs. If you pay for a kit every time, you may end up paying as much for your mushrooms as you would pay in a store anyway. Of course, the mushrooms that you grow in your kit are more organic, so if your aim in growing mushrooms is merely to assure yourself of a supply of organic mushrooms, obtained at the least possible trouble, then a kit may indeed be the best choice.

But if cost matters to you, as it matters to most of us, then learning to do at least some of the tasks involved in mushroom growing is in your best interests. Let's not go for complete independence right away, but instead learn of some ways to cut costs that will still keep the task of mushroom growing fairly simple.

One of the first things you need to do is to stop relying upon kits that provide you with everything. Culture a little independence in yourself. Start by choosing an area of your property that you think will be good for growing mushrooms. A greenhouse, properly modified for darkness, can be excellent, but a garden shed can do just as well, albeit on a smaller scale. Now visit your local gardening store and pick up some flat boxes. These will do very well for planting trays. You can buy mushroom growing medium at this stage. After all, these are only your first steps towards complete independence.

Another thing you can think of buying are the mushroom spores themselves. These are called spawn when they're processed, and they're pretty freely available. If you put these three components together, you can have a medium sized mushroom growing setup operational in a very short time, and at a fraction of the cost of buying complete kits.

To Our Shared Success,

Dan T.

"The Urban Mushroom Grower"

- on behalf of Jake White,
Certified Organic Farmer
Creator of Mushroom Growing 4 You