The easiest way to start mushroom farming at home is by buying a mushroom growing kit.
It may seem complicated, but it’s really not! There’s no need for specialized skills, tools or equipment.
Also, the kit comes already prepared – with mushroom compost inoculated with white coloured mushroom mycelium. You just need to follow the right steps.
Many people think growing mushrooms using a mushroom kit is a complex task – but it isn’t!
They are fun for beginners learning how to grow mushrooms like you, and to seasoned cultivators alike.
You can follow a few general steps to ensure your success. These include opening your grow kit, making a hole in the grow bag, soaking the casing, setting-up your kit in the proper place, watering it frequently, when and how to pick mushrooms etc.
How to Grow Mushrooms Using Organic Mushroom Kit
1 – Open The Kit
All mushroom grow kits are delivered fully colonized and ready to fruit.
The kit is intended to get started as soon as possible; a week or two weeks’ delay is okay; a month’s or more delay is excessive.
It will still continue to fruit, but the longer you wait, the less mushrooms you’ll get.
If you do want to delay starting your kit for a few weeks, you can store it at low temperature from 50°F to freezing.
The kit will come with a little bag of dried peat moss combined with a little calcium carbonate. This is called a casing.
A casing is a material used as a blanket to hold water and protect the mushroom mycelium developing in the compost.
2 – Make a Hole Grow Bag/Casing
Make a hole on the top of the grow bag and scratch the dirt about 1/2” deep with a fork or nail.
The idea is to scratch with enough force that it appears as though you are cutting through the brick. The roughness of the casing forms a microenvironment in which new mushrooms can grow.
Continue doing this until the white stuff looks not so much white, looser, and less thick.
3 – Soak
Once you’ve finished scratching, find a bowl large enough to hold your mushroom bag.
Fill it halfway with water, and let the casing side of the mushroom bag soak in it for six to ten hours. Make sure that the part with the hole is completely covered.
Soaking is important for hydrating the soil and giving the soil enough moisture to feed your mushrooms. The casing helps to hold in the water and keep the mushroom mycelium growing in the compost.
Then, with the hole facing up, place your mushroom bag in the box in which it came. That’s it now you can start the process of growing your equipment. Make a note of the date you started your kit.
4 – Set Up the Mushroom Kit
Now that you’ve completed setting up your kit, you’ll need to put it somewhere for the mushrooms to grow.
For optimum growth, you should store it under fruiting conditions:
- Find a sunny spot, such as a shaded windowsill. Never let the sunshine shine right into your mushroom kit. The sun could dry it out, overheat it, and kill it.
- No mushroom will grow unless your mushroom kit is open for gas exchange. With enough oxygen, they will create carbon dioxide and grow tall and “leggy”.
- You can keep the kit at room temperature in the range of 60- and 74-degrees F, but be sure to mist it with water often to keep the humidity high.
- It will be helpful if you have a humidifier and may place it beside the grow bag.
Some packages will include plastic tents to cover the bag and keep the humidity levels stable. Leave it in a humid environment for a week or so.
5 – Basic Care
Mushroom fruiting bodies tend to be 90% water, and practically all that moisture must come from the fruiting block itself.
Don’t let the casing dry up because it’s hard to get it rewet, and if your mushroom block doesn’t have sufficient water, it will not produce fruit or quickly abort any new mushrooms that do emerge.
A little sprinkle here and a dusting of water there in the casing (spray four or five pumps into the soil area) once a day is sufficient to keep it moist.
Don’t overwater the casing; there is no drainage in the kit, and too much watering will stack up the mycelium, flood it out, and drown the mycelium,
If the temperature is over 70 degrees Fahrenheit, you may have to water more often.
Remember This: Don’t plan on covering the top of the kit to keep it from drying out; the mushrooms want fresh air circulating in the kit in order to grow properly.
6 – Pinning
Repeat the spraying process once a day for the next eight days or until you see white mushroom mycelium creeping up into the casing.
If mycelium grows and covers the entire surface of the casing it is entirely normal. Mycelium usually takes one or two weeks to appear.
At this point, pictures of various stages of exposure exist the mushroom kit in a cool, brightly-lit place but out of direct sunlight (do not put on a windowsill).
Examine daily. In a day or so you should see developing young mushrooms (primordial).
After about twelve or fourteen days, little one-centimeter diameter round mushrooms begin to grow on the surface of the casing. They will grow singly or in bunches all over the surface of the casing.
If necessary, if this step must be done, put more holes in the bag and the mushrooms will be able to grow nicely.
If the temperature is too high, spray the mushrooms several times a day with boiled and cooled water or water left out overnight (the evaporation will promote growth), but do not soak or drown.
What to Expect: Pretty much just sit back and relax for the next week while your mushrooms go from tiny sprouts to the grown. They grow so fast from this point and should double in size every day.
7 – Pick Your Mushrooms
After five days of pining, the mushrooms are approximately one to two inches in diameter.
It is mature and ready to be plucked when it stops growing.
Harvest them when the thin veil covering the gills beneath the mushroom begins to split open; this keeps most spores from being released and permits them to survive longer when refrigerated.
The type of mushroom grown also factors into yield:
- the larger the mushroom, the fewer it will grow
- the smaller the mushroom, the more it will grow
At this point, harvest all of the mushrooms by gently turning a full turn in situ and pulling them up of the growth medium, being careful not to damage the mushroom growth next to them.
Wash out the dirt so that it is no longer sticking to the mushrooms’ base. Cook them in any of your favorite mushroom sauce and serve!
The Right Time: The size of is no criterion as to age; also the little mushrooms are gathered when the veil breaks.
8 – Reuse
Once they’re done fruiting on your kitchen counter you can re-use your kit and keep growing.
Restore the water lost to the mushrooms by re-watering the casing with a half-cup of water.
Put the kit back into a cool, dark place, and repeat a similar process for the second harvest. Depending on the temperature and species of mushrooms, it usually develops within one to four weeks.
When the second crop of mushrooms has been harvested, rehydrate the kit with half a cup of water then wait for the third crop.
As the kit matures, little black flies and molds will begin to pop up on the surface of the casing. If you’re going organic, spray the inner upper half of the compost bag with a light layer of vegetable oil to fend them off. The oil acts as flypaper, enticing them to land there and trap them.
When you have depleted all the nutrients in your kit, mushrooms will no longer form. That begins roughly twelve weeks from the time you first started your kit.
You can then recycle your kit. You can break it up and add one cup of the material as the spawn ingredient for another new kit, or break it up and use it as fertilizer for your garden soil or onto your compost pile.
Final Thoughts
Mushroom growing kits are an easy way to have lots of fun, learn about mother nature, and yet yield beautiful and tasty food with almost no effort.
Because the kit already contains mycelium that’s growing, all you have to do is provide the right conditions for it to produce mushrooms.
This usually means exposing the kit to a cool temperature for one day and watering it regularly.
So if you’re learning to grow mushrooms, or you want something simple to do, try mushroom growing kits.