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.