Extra tips & tutorials

The consumption of mushrooms probably occurred during prehistory, in the hunting and gathering period. Unlike plants, mushrooms could not be cultivated at first and were collected for a long period of time.

A mushroom develops in two stages: a vegetative phase when it grows and decomposes organic matter, and a fruiting phase, when mushrooms (fruiting bodies) are produced.

Some mushrooms can be cultivated from commercially available spawn either as dowels, grain inoculated spawn or as truffle trees.

Commercially-available mushroom spawn:

There are various types of substrates which are used in mushroom growing, including:

Recommended mushroom species for cultivation.

The mushroom growing substrate referred to as ‘compost’ is quite different from garden compost or soil.

Woody materials and logs can be prepared much more quickly than compost. The logs should be cut from healthy trees (preferably due to storm damage or tree maintenance work) during the dormant season.

Materials

This instruction relates to growing Oyster Mushrooms from dowels; these are intended for inoculation into hardwood logs.

The best advice for success is to start by growing Oyster mushrooms, the easiest and most forgiving variety for any home cultivator to grow.

Shiitake mushrooms require cellulose-rich material and will grow on a variety of woody substrates.

Agaricus is unlike other mushroom spawn in that it is a secondary decomposer; this means that it needs to work with bacteria which carry out the primary decomposition of cellulose material into a form accessible by Agaricus.

A member recently asked for details on growing the famous (and VERY expensive) Matsutake, the source of some pretty vicious armed confrontations between foragers and landowners not too many years ago.

Mushrooms can be preserved in several ways, but some species are better preserved in certain ways rather than others. What follows is a brief guide.