What You Need to Know When You Want to Grow Mushrooms at Home

What You Need to Know When You Want to Grow Mushrooms at Home
By Christopher Praizner

Who says that it requires a rocket scientist to grow your own batch of mushrooms at home? Perhaps this is one of the easiest agricultural practices to venture into. As long as you have your substrate and your culture, you only need a few weeks, maybe less than a month, to prepare and start growing your mushrooms.

Have you ever wondered why it is so easy? The answer is very logical, really. Mushrooms do not need plenty of attention so long as their needs are satisfied. You do not need to water them everyday nor add some fertilizers and the likes. They literally take care of themselves. Isn't that great? Less time to spend culturing them and taking care of them but you heap lots of bucks from them. Your substrate can even last for years! It is so low maintenance.

Are you not convinced yet? Mushroom cultivation is so versatile hat you can either increase or decrease your production without having to resort to additional capital. You simply just have to increase your spawn, and the rest is history.

But before digging deeper into the marketing side of things, you need to understand how o grow your own culture at home.

Why is this important?

Yes, this is the most important part of the cultivation process-, and this is the part, which consumes most of the time. When you make your own culture, you want to make sure that it is a pure one. You also need to check if the one you are growing is indeed the one you wish to grow and not some wild one. This part is, in fact, the most crucial.

Culturing is done so that you get the pure and viable source or mushrooms. Once you have achieved that, you can be rest assured that what you sow into the substrate is indeed the right kind of mushroom. You can even store batches of the pure culture in a freezer for future use.

What's with the substrate?

The substrate is where you are going to "plant" your spawn. It may come as straw or husks, or it can be some kind of wood chips, depending on the kind of mushroom you wish to grow.

How do you plant?

Of course, you should have your spawn ready. You can either drill holes into the wood or allow them to grow in plastic bags. You use a hand injector when you want to insert the spawn into the wood. There is another way to insert the spawn. You simply add the spawn to the plug,which will then be hammered into the wood. A special wax is used to cover the holes to seal the plugs. When the substrates are too small to be drilled into, you can opt to saw into small pieces of wood. This type is best when you use sawdust spawn. But you need to remember that using this kind of spawn requires extra care. It is recommended that, if possible, use plug spawn instead.

There is another kind of cultivation where you grow certain kinds of mushroom in plastic bags or bottles. Such varieties include the oyster mushroom. The bags are filled with the substrate and then left in an area, conducive for the mushrooms to grow. It can be that that area is temperature controlled or just leave them in a moist yet dark area of the house.

Whatever technique you use, if your process is impeccable, you would still end up having the best mushroom cultivation at home. The information given to you is necessary for you to achieve such results. Enjoy planting!

Grow your own mushroom is a fun hobby. What you need a string of patience to go along with planting a living organism.

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