How to go about expanding on your mushroom growing
Most things these days have been made exceedingly simple and mushroom growing is not an exception. There are mushroom growing kits that will have you growing mushrooms within an hour after the kit arise. However, relying upon somebody else’s expertise (and that is what you do when you buy a kit), can only get you so far. When you buy a kit, and rely upon someone else’s expertise, you also obviously have to pay for that expertise, and this can send your costs up to unacceptable levels.
The simple fact is that if you want to grow mushrooms on anything but the smallest scale, you’re going to have to learn the details of mushroom growing yourself. It’s the only way to cut costs. If you pay for a kit every time, you may end up paying as much for your mushrooms as you would pay in a store anyway. Of course, the mushrooms that you grow in your kit are more organic, so if your aim in growing mushrooms is merely to assure yourself of a supply of organic mushrooms, obtained at the least possible trouble, then a kit may indeed be the best choice.
But if cost matters to you, as it matters to most of us, then learning to do at least some of the tasks involved in mushroom growing is in your best interests. Let’s not go for complete independence right away, but instead learn of some ways to cut costs that will still keep the task of mushroom growing fairly simple.
One of the first things you need to do is to stop relying upon kits that provide you with everything. Culture a little independence in yourself. Start by choosing an area of your property that you think will be good for growing mushrooms. A greenhouse, properly modified for darkness, can be excellent, but a garden shed can do just as well, albeit on a smaller scale. Now visit your local gardening store and pick up some flat boxes. These will do very well for planting trays. You can buy mushroom growing medium at this stage. After all, these are only your first steps towards complete independence.
Another thing you can think of buying are the mushroom spores themselves. These are called spawn when they’re processed, and they’re pretty freely available. If you put these three components together, you can have a medium sized mushroom growing setup operational in a very short time, and at a fraction of the cost of buying complete kits.