Preparing the growing medium when growing mushrooms
Mushroom growing can be both lucrative and fun. It all depends on how well you can manage to grow them, and on the amount of space you have available. And of course it depends on the quantity you wish to grow. If you’re just getting started and would like to study the process, I would suggest that you buy one of the mushroom starter kits. These mushroom starter kits usually provide you with a container to grow the mushrooms in, a growth medium, and, of course with the mushroom spores or spawn. Generally speaking, growing mushrooms from such a kit is extremely easy.
All you have to do is place the growth medium inside the box and place the spawn in it. Then you just keep the box closed in a room in your house which is safe from draughts, and the mushrooms just grow. It’s really just that easy. You have to water the mushrooms, of course. This involves misting them with a water spray. You wait for the mushrooms to grow sufficiently, and then harvest them. After you harvest them, you keep misting the growth medium again until the next batch grows.
You can sometimes get a good many mushrooms from a single batch of growth medium and spawn, and they can provide some very nutritious and tasty meals for your family. So a mushroom growing kit is a great idea if you like mushrooms, or even if you want to learn the basics of growing them. But if you want to grow them on a larger scale, you’re going to need more space. Of course they don’t take up too much space, but you still need the bare minimum. I would suggest the garden shed as the best possible place to grow them, or a greenhouse should you have one available.
Bear in mind, though, that mushrooms will never stand the excess of light available in most greenhouses, and you’ll have to find a way of darkening the greenhouse, or at least of darkening a certain section of the greenhouse. If you can do that, you can have quite a few batches of mushrooms set up and growing right at once. You can either buy growing mixture and spawn, or you can make your own growing mixture and buy the spawn, just as you wish. Making your own growing mixture is likely to lower your operating costs if you’re at all thinking of commercial mushroom growing.