About us – Ex Hobby Mushroom Growers

Hobby mushroom growers account for a large percentage of those growing mushrooms at home. Established some years ago, we now run a small business growing and selling mushrooms to local market sellers and restaurants. However, we started out as hobby mushroom growers. The more we learned, the more we got involved and the more we grew and, before we knew it, we had a full-blown cottage industry.

Once people found out what we were up to we found ourselves answering questions and helping friends and family grow their own, and although a few gave up once the novelty wore off, quite a few are now regular mushroom growers. One or two went online to read more and ended up thoroughly confused by what they found; the many different ways, techniques and opinions that lurk online.

My name’s Brian and I started the business and have grown to love mushrooms. I always wanted to create a website, not so much to sell online (which creates its own problems) but to help people who want to grow their own mushrooms – to help hobby mushroom growers who want guidance. While unable to work after injuring my back, I decided to get this website started, and here we are..

Our Aim – To help Hobby Growers

As mentioned above, this website wasn’t really created to sell online but rather to provide information and advice for budding home mushroom growers. However, we are creating an online store which aims to supply home mushroom growers with everything they might need to grow mushrooms at home. The website is called mushroomkits.co.uk and you can visit now it by clicking the link (opens a new frame). Initially we plan to offer a limited range of items and things like home grow bags until we can judge the demand and build up the correct stock levels. Once we’ve built up sufficient spare stocks we’ll be adding things like spores, liquid culture and any other items we think you might need to get going.

We’ll be adding guides to the more popular mushroom strains that hobby growers are likely to want to grow, plus growing guides to help you understand what you need to do – not just to grow mushrooms but also to help you learn about the whole process from start to finish. By the time we’ve finished we’ll also have added plans to help you build your own laminar flow hood (don’t panic if you have no idea what they are as smaller growers can survive without one).

You might want to grow your own mushrooms to save hunting around shops to find over-priced versions of what you want, or you might be a keen grower of organic foods or have medicinal / health reasons for wanting to grow specific mushroom strains but whatever your interest, we hope this website will be of help to you.

Setting up to grow on a larger scale?

If you’ve decided you want to start growing mushrooms on a larger scale to supply local demand, or even to sell online, we plan to offer guidance as well as offer help for those interested in bulk orders. Prices can be very tight for some things and it won’t be worth buying in bulk – for example if you want honey to make liquid culture, just head off to a supermarket like Tesco – but for less commonly available items we should be able to lighten the load a little.