How to Grow Mushrooms at Home

A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing Your Own Mushrooms at Home

Growing mushrooms at home is an exciting and fun way to experience culinary and holistic mushrooms. Whether you enjoy them for cooking or health, growing high-quality mushrooms at home is easier than ever with SHROOMBOX.

What Do I Need?

To get started growing mushrooms there are a few supplies that will be essential:

Mushroom spores or liquid culture

• This is the “seed” that cultivates the material. It is often sold in syringes. Once given the proper food and environment, spores will germinate and turn into mycelium, which is a web or root-like structure. The mushrooms are the "fruiting bodies" that eventually grow out the mycelium structure. Think of mycelium as the tree and mushrooms as the apples!

Mushroom food

• Different mushrooms like different foods. Most thrive on grains, wood, or manure.

  
  

Mushroom substrate

• A “topping” that provides moisture and protection while the mushrooms grow.

  
  

Fruiting chamber

• This is the place where the colonized mycelium goes when it is ready to fruit into mushrooms. SHROOMBOX is a set-it and forget-it mushroom fruiting chamber that uses positive airflow to reduce contamination while offering controlled humidity and fresh air exchange to provide the perfect growing conditions for your shroom babies. It’s like a hotel for your mushrooms!

  
  

Miscellaneous but helpful additional supplies

• Scalpel, alcohol pads, antifungal cleaning supplies, disposable gloves.

Avoid Common Pitfalls

The most common reason for an unsuccessful mushroom grow is that contamination (mold) is exposed to your material. The best course of action when mold or contamination occurs is to throw away the material, which means starting over from scratch. For this reason, it is very important throughout the mushroom growing process that steps are taken at every level to prevent contamination.

Growing Your Mushrooms

Mushroom Spores

After deciding which type of mushrooms you would like to grow, the first step in the process is to purchase spores or liquid mycelium. The primary difference between spores and liquid culture is speed. The liquid culture has already begun producing mycelium and will colonize the mushroom food more rapidly, but both will work in time.

Choosing Your Mushroom's Food and Substrate

Once you have obtained your spores, you need a food source and substrate that is consistent with the species of mushroom you are trying to grow. When selecting mushroom food and substrate, you can purchase materials like rye berries or coco coir separately to use at various stages in the growing process, but I recommend the use of “all-in-one” grow bags that include both the mushroom food and substrate together in one bag or package. These bags, commonly called "cakes," reduce the probability of contamination when the colonized grain is mixed with substrate, since the material remains unexposed to fresh air throughout the process. Grain jars are a common alternative to all-in-one bags, but they do require mixture of the grain to a substrate material once the grain is fully colonized, which can create a point of exposure for contamination in an unsterile environment.

Inoculation and Initial Colonization

To inoculate the “all-in-one” grow bag, take your spore syringe and inject the entire syringe directly into the grain material. Usually, there is a square patch located on the bag. This self-sealing patch is where you insert the syringe. Always wipe down the injection site with an alcohol wipe and use gloves during this process to prevent any contamination from entering your grow bag.

After the material is inoculated with the spores, it should be placed in a dark location that is climate controlled to match the specific species of mushroom you are growing. Every mushroom species has a specific temperature that it prefers during the colonization stage, so you should keep your growing mycelium in that ideal temperature range without any exposure to light. It is important to make sure there is no exposure to fresh air at this stage in the process. Bags should remain sealed and any jars kept closed. After 14-21 days, maybe more or less depending on the mushrooms you are growing, the mushroom food should be colonized to about 80 or 90%. You can tell if it is sufficiently colonized by the amount of white strands that have taken over the material. Fully white is 100% colonized.

Once the grain is fully colonized, it needs to be mixed with the substrate material to finish growing before it is ready for fruiting conditions. In an all-in-one bag, you would mix the grain portion with the coco coir substrate portion at this step. If you are using a grain jar or separate grain bag for a monotub, you would combine it with the substrate in your monotub location. Fresh air should not be introduced yet, which means your all-in-one bag should remain sealed and closed. If using a monotub, the monotub holes should remain covered. The mycelium will continue to colonize rapidly and within 7-14 days, your mycelium should be close to ready for fruiting chamber condition, which is the final step of the growing process.

Fruiting Chamber

The fruiting chamber is the most exciting step of the mushroom growing process. There are a variety of ways to create fruiting chamber conditions for your mushrooms that can be as low-tech as a plastic bag or a water bottle or as high-tech as the SHROOMBOX.

It is at this stage that we introduce fresh air! In addition to fresh air, we are introducing blue light and controlling the humidity of the environment to create the perfect conditions to stimulate mushroom fruiting. When we are introducing the mycelium to fruiting conditions, we need to keep these factors in mind: how much fresh air exchange are my mushrooms getting? How much light? Is the humidity ideal? All mushroom species are different, but generally speaking, mushrooms wants blue light for 12 hours a day and relative humidity at around 85-90% with constant or intermittent introduction of fresh air. These conditions can be achieved by setting a water bottle with fruiting mycelium by a window. With this approach, you must ensure that it gets proper light and a misting of water with routine fanning. Or these perfect conditions can be achieved by using a set-it and forget-it fruiting chamber like SHROOMBOX, where you simply enter the desired humidity setting and plug it in and let the box do the rest for you.

After approximately 7 days in fruiting conditions you will see the first signs of mushroom growth via "pins"--primordia that develops like little buttons across the surface of your cake. After another 7 days or so, these pins will fully develop into mushrooms, fruiting from the surface of your cake or monotub and ready to release new spores. It’s at this time you can harvest your mushrooms!

Harvesting and Rehydration

To harvest, place your cake on a clean plate or surface and use a scalpel or razor blades to cut the fruited mushrooms from the cake at the lowest connected point on the stem. You can remove all the undeveloped pins as well at this stage. Once all the mushrooms have been harvested, the cake can be rehydrated and re-entered into fruiting conditions for a second or even a third flush of mushrooms! The cake will continue to fruit when rehydrated until all the food material has been consumed by the mycelium. I have had some cakes continue to fruit after 6 or 7 flushes (each time the flush being smaller than the previous flush).

To rehydrate your cake, simply run it under cold water for 5-8 minutes, then soak the cake for 12-18 hours. FInally, run it again under cold water for 5-8 minutes before returning the cake to your SHROOMBOX or other fruiting chamber. Harvested mushrooms can be dehydrated and stored in jars for years.

And it’s really that easy! With trial and error, your process will improve and you will learn more of the nuances involved in preventing contamination and keeping mycelium happy. But with the right equipment you can turn frustration into fun. Growing mushrooms at home really can be an exciting and clean way to enjoy the culinary and holistic benefits they offer.