How hard can it be, well, that kind of depends on what you mean by grow some mushrooms.
You can “fruit” your own mushroom by buying and Grow Your Own Kit, an excellent and exciting way to get into mushroom growing, and many eager food enthusiasts do this, some on a regular basis.
But I am on a voyage of discovery and just like Neo, I want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
SO what are mushrooms?? Mushrooms are fruit… kind of like an apple is the fruit or an apple tree, a mushroom is the fruit of Mycelium.
Mycelium, is the living breathing organic part. Hyphae are the individual strands that grow, meet to create the colony that is Mycelium. The Mycelium will grow into and colonise the material, and once that material is colonised the Mycelium will produce mushrooms.
This works in exactly the same way as an apple tree, The apple tree creates apples that are a dispersal vehicle for the seeds that will create new apple trees. The mushrooms are a vehicle to allow the Mycelium to reproduce and colonise new material.
Mycelium is a fascinating subject in its own right, watch out for an upcoming in depth blog on Mycelium.
But the point of this is for us to grow mushrooms, so lets get back to that!!
We need to create some mycelium. In order to do that you need to create a culture. You can take a mushroom from the wild and harvest some mycelium, and then try to culture that and make it reproduce in a controlled way, or if like me you don’t have access to wild versions of the mushrooms you want to grow you can buy a liquid culture from a specialist supplier.
Mycelium colonising straw
To give your mycelium the best chance of successfully colonising its target substrate, you can culture if first. You could, and I have just applied liquid culture directly onto a sterilised substrate, but this is a “risky” way of doing it. In Mycology, (Mushroom stuff), the biggest enemy is contamination. Every mould spore in the air, (and there is a lot of them microscopically floating around just waiting to foil your unsuspecting mushroom grower!!) is a risk.
Hyphae need to colonise the substrate and grow “into” it, but mould and many other things are constantly trying to do the same thing. What we need to do as mushroom cultivators, is to minimise the amount of competition, and increase the strength of your mycelium, it is always a battle but we can give our mycelium the best chance to winning the battle.
You could just add liquid culture onto substrate, and I have done this successfully on sterilised substrate, but it is a high risk approach. To increase our chances of success we can culture the Liquid culture on a sterile growing medium. This allows us to grow the mycilium and allow it to increase in “strength”, and also has the advantage that we can make sure that the liquid culture is not contaminated already.
After adding your Liquid Culture (known as LC) to your growing medium, you will need to wait for a week to 10 days to see any significant growth, although this is highly variable depending on the strain you are working with.
Once you have some growth and it is lovely and clean, then you can move it onto spawning medium. This is a medium where the mycelium really gets to expand and build its “strength”. Again the Spawning medium, which is normally some sort of grain. Grain is full of energy for the mycelium to consume and grow, and gives it an easily transportable medium.
The colonisation of the grain spawn will take weeks, but once it is colonised then it can be added to the final substrate, and put into incubation as the final substrate to colonised and the Mycelium goes through (hopefully) rapid growth.
Once your substrate is nicely colonised you will want to move it to another environment that will simulate growing conditions. This normally means increased humidity.
Once in the “fruiting” environment, your colonised substrate will start to produce mushrooms.
As you can see there is quote a lot involved, and as with everything in this world, if the market is big enough, there will be someone offering a convinient short cut.
If you want to put in the work to fruit your own mushrooms, you can use a GYO box click here. If you wanted to go through the incubation and fruiting environment, it become a bit more complex, but it is definitely possible.
We hope you have found this useful, feel free to browse our site, and our facebook page, there is a lot of information there, and you can also post questions and we and the community will try and offer any help or advice.
