A step by step guide to mushroom cultivation

Mushroom cultivation is very easy if you know exactly what you’re doing, and it’s not difficult to learn the different steps involved in the process. Now, the basics of preparing growth medium and containers has been covered elsewhere, but the actual basics of how to plant and care for mushrooms will be covered in detail in the course of this article.

You will most likely buy mushroom spores or spawn when you first learn to grow mushrooms, and before you learn to harvest the spores from mushroom caps for yourself. Now, there are two types of this spawn available. It is available in flakes, but it is also available in bricks as well. How you plant the spores or spawn depends on what sort that you buy. I would suggest, if you’re thinking of planting mushrooms regularly, that you buy and plant both types, and see what works better for you.

If you buy and plant both types, there are very different methods of planting them. The bricks need to be broken into chunks, each about one inch in diameter. These chunks are put into the growing medium, spaced about half a foot from each other. You need to make holes about an inch or two deep before you put these chunks in. Flakes are mixed right into the growth medium. Take about a quart of these flakes and spread them over fifteen square feet, and continue until you have the growth medium evenly covered. You need to mix these into the growth medium while doing this.

Make sure that the flakes are not visible on the surface of the growth medium. Whether you use chunks or flakes, the next steps to mushroom cultivation are the same. You spray a mist of water on to the mixture regularly, and keep it in the dark. Soon the mushroom spawn will begin to put out mycelia, which are the fungal version of roots. Once these are out, the mushrooms will really start to grow. As a matter of fact, in time you will see an intricate web of these pale white mycelia form.

Slightly increasing the temperature to about sixty five degrees Fahrenheit in this time will encourage growth. Remember to water daily. In a few weeks you should be able to see the mushrooms. You should not water in the period between when the mushrooms appear and the harvest. You can harvest mushrooms when they are either very small, or when they mature. Just use a sharp knife to harvest each mature mushroom, and there’ll soon be another mushroom growing in its place.

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How mushroom cultivation can benefit the health of your entire family.

Mushroom cultivation may be more important to the health of your family than you may think. Our society is so heavily industrialized these days that the 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 cultivation, 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 for 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 comes 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 provide 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 cultivation, selling your produce to stores or in the open market.

Mushroom cultivation! How it's done

If you have some spare area in an outhouse or even in your cellar or garage, you can utilize it for mushroom  cultivation, which are tasty, nutritious and a great source of organic protein. Remember that food that you grow yourself will always be guaranteed to be free of harmful fertilizers and pesticides, as well as of all the subtle array of bio-chemicals that commercial food providing companies today use to maximize yields. If you’re at all conscious of the food you eat, and if you want it to be healthful, then you could do worse than growing your own food.

Growing your own food ensures that not only will the food be healthful, but also that you can maximize yields by providing the best possible growth environment for the food you’re growing. This is especially true with mushrooms. If you go in for mushroom  cultivation and get the growth environment right, you can have enormous yields. Of course you can go in for commercial growth medium, but these things are best created yourself. And it’s not difficult. So if you want to get started growing mushrooms, what would you need?

Well, first of all, to best use the space you have available, I would suggest that you get yourself some shelving. This can also be made oneself. Then you need a large number of flat trays in which you will actually plant the mushrooms. Of course the length and breadth of these trays will be based upon the space you have available, and the size of tray that will best make use of that space, but as a general rule, don’t purchase any tray that might potentially be too hard to lift. The trays should also as a general rule not be any deeper than four inches. See if you can get a good deal on a larger number of trays at your usual gardening  store – trays like these are often used for seedlings.

Once you have your trays, fill them with growth mixture and add in mushroom spore or spawn flakes, which are easily available in gardening stores, or on the internet. Water the mixture carefully, and the mushrooms will start putting out their mycelia, which is a sort of fungal root. Once this happens, keep watering at least twice a day, preferably with a mist-spray, until the young mushrooms start to appear. Once you reach this point, you need to stop watering while the mushrooms mature. Once they reach the size that you need, you can harvest them. This is all you need to know to go in for mushroom cultivation.

Just how easy is mushroom cultivation?

Is mushroom cultivation 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 cultivation 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 cultivation, then one of these starter kits is really your best bet.

The best tips and tricks to mushroom cultivation

Mushroom growing is really not all that difficult if you know what you’re doing. While it is true that mushrooms can prove a real health hazard if you allow the mushrooms you’re growing to become contaminated by wild mushrooms, in reality this rarely happens unless you decide to grow your mushrooms outdoors. If you decide to grow your mushrooms outdoors, please be warned that you must be an expert at recognizing the strain of mushroom that you’re growing.

A person cultivating mushrooms usually provides an ideal environment in which the mushrooms can thrive, and if you do this outdoors, it’s quite possible that strains of wild mushrooms will try to take advantage of the ideal growing conditions that you’re providing. This is impossible to counter as mushrooms spread via microscopic spores blown by the wind, and these microscopic spores will inevitably infest the growing environment that you have provided for your mushrooms.

This wouldn’t be a problem if there were not so many strains of deadly poisonous mushrooms among wild mushrooms species. Actually, no matter how confident you are of being able to recognize safe mushrooms, you should still preferably grow your mushrooms indoors. This really is your best bet because it is much more difficult for wild spores to infest such a controlled environment. And this decreases the chances of a dangerous accident occurring. So, how long do mushrooms really take to grow?

Well the mushroom growing period can obviously vary from species to species but your mushrooms will usually take at least a week or so to put out their mycelia. After that, the growing process begins, and your mushrooms will be ready for harvesting about eight weeks into this period. Don’t be fazed by the long growing times, because mushrooms actually take much less time to grow than a great many other food crops, and the fact that they grow so quickly is an added and considerable advantage.

If you want to have mushrooms regularly, then all you need to do is to ensure that you plant a great many of them at staggered intervals, so that there are always some mushrooms ready to harvest. This is an easier task than you might think, because it’s just a question of planting more mushrooms in the seedling box trays that they favor. Since mushrooms grow in the dark they require an exceptionally small amount of space. This means that when you go in for , you can plant them in trays set in rows, or even on shelves, one on top of the other.

Preparing the growing medium when cultivating mushrooms

Mushroom cultivation 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 droughts, 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 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.

The basics of mushroom cultivation

Many people don’t realize that mushroom cultivation is something that can be done right in their own greenhouse. And since mushrooms are such a wonderful food, this can be a superb addition to one’s diet. However, you may need to change things about in your greenhouse if you want to grow mushrooms, because the one thing these edible fungi cannot stand is too much light. Yes, they can tolerate a little light, but perhaps I should modify that statement and say that they can tolerate a VERY little light.

Better than even a little light is no light at all. They also like a stable temperature range, so make sure that stays within the range of between fifty and sixty degrees Fahrenheit – anything more than that will cause problems for your mushrooms. You need to be careful to keep out any droughts. The air needs to be moist, because that’s just how mushrooms like it. If you’ve looked at any mushrooms growing in the woods, you’ll have noticed that they don’t exactly grow in the soil. Similarly, when you grow them in your greenhouse, or even in a garden shed, you’re going to have to arrange (or buy) a special growing medium for them.

There are two ways of going about mushroom cultivation, and the method that you choose will depend upon just how many of these fungi you plan to grow. If you’re starting out on the very smallest scale, a log of wood should do just fine for a cultivating medium. Yes, that’s absolutely right, you can grow mushrooms on a log of wood. And why should that surprise you – haven’t you seen them growing around tree stumps in the woods? All you need is a good log of some reasonably hard type of wood – oak does just fine.

Take that log and make a few reasonable holes in it, and fill each of them with some mushroom spawn. Then let nature take its course. If, on the other hand, you intend to grow mushrooms on a larger scale, you’re going to need to bed them down in trays filled with a special mushroom cultivating medium. Well, I did tell you before that they won’t grow in soil. What you’re going to need is some compost mixed up with straw or a mixture of straw and horse manure. You can plant the mushroom spawn in this, and your mushrooms will grow just fine. If you need to grow more mushrooms, you’ll just have to set out more trays and set aside more space for your mushroom cultivating.

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