To answer a question with another question, I suggest you first ask yourself which mushrooms you’d be interested in growing!

As you may or may not already be aware species of cultivated mushrooms are lumped into one of two groups. On one hand we have our organic woodland cleanup crews consuming various woods & wood wastes converting lignin into energy to proliferate & ultimately (hopefully) produce mushrooms. These lignicolous fungi, we describe as lignophiles, otherwise known as wood loving mushrooms. On the other hand we have our dung loving coprophilic fungi aka coprophiles such as Agaricus sp., Psilocybe sp. & many others. Other areas of cultivation not directly related to gourmet mushrooms include medicinal use of parasitic fungi like Cordyceps sp. & fermented foods like Red Yeast Rice or Tempeh. As these are not the most commonly grown, the discussion will not focus on them, but these important fungi needed to be mentioned nonetheless! Whichever mushroom interests you, continue reading to learn more about how to grow your own mushrooms!

What Is A Mushroom Substrate? What Is Mycelium?

Have you ever been digging in the mulch, and been curious to the white growth which seems to cover any surface beneath the mulch which the sun does not actually touch? This is what’s responsible for the mushrooms that may or may not have appeared in the same mulch bed, a network of mycelium.

When mycelium is growing, the term mushroom growers use to describe this is colonizing or colonization (#ColonizeThePlanet!) and the entire food source of this mycelium is considered its substrate. For our example above, the mulch bed is our substrate (and yes, people artificially grow things like Wine Caps and other mushrooms in their own wood beds at home) but for most mushroom growers, you’ll be working with a bagged substrate, a substrate in a container, jar or other vessel, outdoor logs (real trees!), or any combination of indoor or outdoor beds.

For the home grower, mycelium is generally procured in the form of a liquid culture, colonized petri-dish or as fully colonized mushroom spawn. Mushroom spawn is simply (in most cases) grains which have been colonized with a pure culture in sterile conditions. It sounds simple, but in practice creating clean spawn proves to be a challenge to some home growers, but is not impossible. I will not detail producing clean spawn at this time, there are many ways to skin that cat and spawn making requires a dedicated, perhaps multi-part article! Stay tuned for more on that!

What Do Mushrooms Grow On?

Mushrooms are now being grown on all types of interesting materials and wastes from coffee grounds to cardboard, from stuffed animals and furniture to coco coir and many things in between. More conventional to the western home mushroom grower, hardwood sawdust, straw, brown rice flour, CoCo Coir or manure are used (sometimes in combination) and there’s a lot of innovation which continues to propel home growing into more accessible spaces than ever (Uncle Ben, is that you?) and while I can’t detail them all, I encourage you to consider first the principals of growing mushrooms, not necessarily the application. There are a million ways to skin a cat, this applies to mushroom growing in absolute terms and is one of the reasons I was first attracted to growing mushrooms in the first place!

What Do Mushrooms Need To Grow?

In the most basic terms (without considering any specific species) mushrooms, like any other living organism, need food, water & air. More specifically, certain conditions must be met in order for mycelium to produce a fruiting body which we describe as a mushroom. Some more aggressive species have relaxed fruiting conditions and are near impossible NOT to fruit, whereas other mushrooms are far more particular requiring special attention to these parameters at certain phases of growth to see results. Those conditions (in no particular order of importance) are as follows:

Nutrition Water Humidity Oxygen/CO2 Temperature Light

How To Grow Wood Loving Mushrooms

Speaking again in general terms, with no regard to a specific species (unless noted), growing wood loving mushrooms is generally a more forgiving exercise as opposed to growing coprophilic mushrooms. Wood loving gourmet fungi grow happily (in most cases) on hardwoods, and most commonly for the home grower in the form of Hardwood Fuel Pellets (HWFP) which can be found at most big box hardware stores. These pellets are generally comprised of 99% OAK placing them in the compatibility range for nearly all wood loving gourmet mushrooms. These pellets are compressed with heat & pressure, and are generally clean enough to use by themselves by simply adding the right amount of boiling water to a bucket, covering with a lid & allowing to cool, spawning immediately.

Supplemental nitrogen nutrition is commonly added to HWFP substrates using wheat bran, cottonseed hulls or soybean hulls.

SUPPLEMENTING HWFP/SAWDUST SUBSTRATES IS NOT REQUIRED, you will see better yields than otherwise but an increased contamination risk is present. Sterilization is required for supplemented substrates.