Growing mushrooms at home - how is it done?

In a situation where a kilogram of oyster mushrooms or champignons can cost a dozen or so zlotys, home cultivation of these mushrooms becomes more attractive. Few people realize that you don't need a large, industrial mushroom farm to get mushrooms of great quality. Moreover, you do not need special skills for this. And from home or garden cultivation, you can collect a few kilograms of tasty, aromatic, chemical-free raw material that can be used to prepare homemade specialties.

Home mushroom cultivation - how to go about it?
There are ready-made kits for growing mushrooms at home on the market. Thanks to them, you can have your own champignons (including brown champignons recognized as the most aromatic), oyster mushrooms popular in Poland or extremely healthy, and still little known in our country, shitake mushrooms. Such a set can be purchased as a "ready-made" - it is simply a bale of a substrate already overgrown with mycelium. The buyer will only have to make sure that the mushrooms grow in the right conditions.

And it is precisely the conditions in which the fungus can mature for harvesting that make it a proposition for almost everyone. Mushrooms can grow at very low temperatures. For the oyster mushroom it is only five degrees Celsius, and for the mushroom it is five degrees more. In autumn, a hay bale or cardboard with soil can stand on the balcony, in the garage, in the pantry and even in the basement (in the case of mushrooms that do not need daylight to grow).

How to grow oyster mushrooms at home
Oyster mushroom, on the other hand, requires a bit more space (ready-made bales with which the mycelium is delivered are about 60 centimeters high and weigh several kilograms). These mushrooms can be grown even at low temperatures reaching 5 degrees Celsius. The expected harvest is from 5 to even 7 kilograms of mushrooms. Oyster mushroom is a rather neglected mushroom species, placed much lower than forest mushrooms. Meanwhile, ripe oyster mushrooms are a rich source of folic acid, mineral salts, B vitamins and amino acids. It is also credited with lowering the level of bad cholesterol in the blood. It is worth not only permanently including them in your diet, but also trying to grow them yourself for your own needs - the "surplus" of crops is easy to conserve and use in the next opportunity.

Home-grown shitake mushrooms - Chinese medicine on a plate
The harvest of shitake mushrooms (shiitake, hardwood, cottage cheese) is slightly lower than that of mushrooms or oyster mushroom. About 3 kg of mushrooms can be obtained from one bale. These mushrooms need a lot of humidity to grow, as well as access to light. So it is much better to grow them at home or in a pantry with access to natural light. You can use, for example, an old aquarium, in which it is easy to maintain high humidity after being covered.

Find more information here: casing after first flush