Growing Mushrooms At Home

Growing mushrooms at home has become extremely popular in recent years, boosted by lockdown when people had lots of time on their hands to experiment with new hobbies. As many people have found, it’s not actually that hard to do and apart from improving self-sufficiency it can also be quite fun.

It doesn’t matter if you plan on growing gourmet mushrooms, medicinal mushrooms or even (where it’s legal) so-called magic mushrooms; the process is more or less the same.

There are countless reasons why growing mushrooms is a great idea. The most obvious one is that they taste great, but some types of mushrooms offer health benefits and cultivated varieties such as Shiitake and oyster mushrooms provide nutrients that other vegetables are low in or just don’t contain.

Beyond their nutritional value, mushrooms are also well known for their medicinal value and mushrooms such as Lion’s Mane, Reishi and Turkey Tail have also been found to stimulate and support our immune functions. All that aside, growing mushrooms is actually quite fun, and even educational.

All about growing mushrooms

This website aims to provide you with everything you need to grow mushrooms at home, from plain advice on how to get started through to all the supplies and equipment you might need – although in most cases you don’t need to buy much at all. Experienced mushroom growers seem to love using jargon, maybe to impress folks but, where possible, we’ll avoid using unnecessary language or at least explain it easily.

Just remember; there’s nothing terribly hard about growing mushrooms. You can grow mushrooms on kitchen counters and all around the house, but ideally they need a supply of indirect sunlight, a stable temperature (will vary between mushroom strains) and regular misting to keep humidity levels good. You don’t need special training or skills to grow them successfully. If you think about it, mushrooms growing in the wild typically live near or on the floor, shaded by trees and where moisture and humidity levels are high. You just need to replicate that. We’ll explain how.

Types of mushrooms

There are many types of mushrooms that you might want to grow at home, ranging from the simple button mushrooms you might buy in a supermarket or less common gourmet types, through to those with known medicinal and health benefits and even those with more exotic uses. You’ll find plenty of information on the more popular and more useful mushroom types, along with quick guides on how best to grow them. Just click on the ‘Mushroom Types‘ menu item to read about the mushroom types that you’re most interested in, or the ‘Growing Guides‘ menu item to see what you need to do and know to actually grow them.

Buy or do it yourself?

If you want to grow mushrooms at home you have a couple of choices to make (apart from which mushrooms). You need live mycelium which generally comes in the form of liquid culture. One way or another, you need grain spawn and also the right substrate. You can buy all these things very easily, not just from our online store but from a multitude of places online. Or you can make all these things yourself, saving money but requiring a bit of time and patience.

Reading some of our articles on how to do each of these things should help you to decide which of these things you want to do yourself, whether that’s starting at preparing agar petri dishes or just your own substrates. It’s just a matter of how much time and patience you are willing to devote to the processes.

The keys to successful mushroom growing are understanding the need to create and work in a clean and sterile environment, working in a consistent manner, being willing to accept occasional failures, especially to begin with, and having patience. Trying to rush things is one of the biggest mistakes you can make and almost always leads to tears!

Mushroom growing supplies

We run a small business growing and selling mushrooms to local market sellers and restaurants and what we do is very similar to what you need to do to grow mushrooms at home. We simply do it on a larger scale. We decided to launch this website to cater for the growing number of home growers and those who want to get started growing mushrooms, and we plan to increase our production levels to allow us to sell growing kits and some of the other equipment and supplies you might want. Visit our shop to see how we can help you.

Most of you won’t need a lot more than grow kits of one type or another, but our online mycology supplies store will be stocking items for beginner and more advanced mushroom growers. You’ll find items enabling you to clone and grow mushrooms from start to finish, including items such as pressure cookers for sterilising substrates, petri dishes and syringes for spore cultivation and possibly even the laminar flow hoods we make and use ourselves. We don’t want to over-work ourselves so these items will be added to our shop over time.