How to Grow Mushrooms at Home in an Indoor Compost Bin

There's no need to be in the dark about how to grow mushrooms. These tasty chameleons of the food world are extremely healthy: they're fat-free, low in calories, and filled with vitamins, antioxidants, and other nutrients. They can even help keep your brain healthy. For how to grow mushrooms at home, establish the right growing conditions, and acquire mushroom spawn, the material used to propagate mushrooms to get started. Use these step-by-step instructions to grow oyster mushrooms, portobellos, shiitakes, and others.

How Do Mushrooms Grow?

Mushrooms grow from spores (not seeds) that are so tiny you can't see individual spores with the naked eye. In the wild, mushrooms grow on both soil and other substrates like wood, but no soil is necessary for growing them at home. Instead, they'll grow on substances like sawdust, grain, straw, or wood chips for nourishment. A blend of the spores and these nutrient sources is called spawn. Mushroom spawn acts a bit like the starter you need to make sourdough bread.

The spawn supports the growth of mushrooms' tiny, white, threadlike bodies called mycelium. The mycelium grows before anything resembling a mushroom pushes through the soil.

The spawn itself could grow mushrooms, but you'll get a lot better mushroom harvest when the spawn is applied to a growing medium. Depending on the mushroom type, this might be straw, cardboard, logs, wood chips, or compost with a blend of materials like straw, corncobs, and cocoa seed hulls.

Where to Grow Mushrooms

Mushrooms like dark, cool, and humid growing environments. When you're growing mushrooms at home, a place like your basement is ideal, but a spot under the sink could also work.

Before you start growing, test out your spot by checking the temperature. Most mushrooms grow best between 55°F and 60°F, away from direct heat and drafts. Enoki mushrooms grow better in cooler temperatures, about 45°F. Learning how to grow mushrooms is a good project for the winter because many basements will get too warm in the summer for ideal conditions.

Mushrooms can tolerate some light, but the spot you choose should stay mostly dark or in low light. If you decide to grow mushrooms in your basement, putting them in a closet where they won't be disturbed might be best. Some mushroom types still grow best outdoors in prepared ground or logs, a much longer process (six months to three years) than in controlled environments inside.

Types of Mushrooms to Grow

Many varieties of mushrooms grow in the wild, and you can grow most of them at home (sorry, you can't grow morels at home—they only pop up in nature). One of the benefits of growing your mushroom varieties instead of wild-harvesting them is that you can be sure you're not picking a toxic mushroom.

Cremini, enoki, maitake, portobello, oyster, shiitake, and white button mushrooms can all be grown indoors, but each type has specific growing needs. For example, white button mushrooms must be grown on composted manure, shiitakes on wood or hardwood sawdust, and oyster mushrooms on straw.

How to Grow Mushrooms

When planning for how to grow mushrooms indoors, there are a couple of options for materials you can use for planting. You can buy a mushroom grow kit packed with a growing medium inoculated with mushroom spawn. Mushroom growing kits are a good place to start if you're new to the process because a kit will provide everything you need. If you start without a kit, the type of mushroom you choose to grow determines the substrate you grow the mushrooms on, so it's essential to research each mushroom's needs. Button mushrooms are one of the easiest to grow if you're learning how to grow mushrooms for the first time.

Step 1: Fill Trays With Compost

Use 14x16-inch trays about six inches deep that resemble seed flats. Fill the trays with the mushroom compost material and sprinkle spawn on top.

Step 2: Use a Heating Pad

Use a heating pad to raise the soil temperature to around 70°F for about three weeks or until you see the mycelium (white, threadlike growths). At this point, drop the temperature to 55°F to 60°F. Cover the spawn with an inch or so of potting soil. Use a household thermometer placed at soil level to monitor soil temperature.

Step 3: Keep Soil Moist

Keep the soil moist by spritzing it with water and covering it with a damp cloth, making sure that you keep spritzing the cloth as it dries.

Step 4: Harvest Mushrooms

Button mushrooms should appear within three to four weeks. Harvest them when the caps open, and the stalk can be cut with a sharp knife from the stem. Avoid pulling up the mushrooms, or you risk damage to surrounding fungi that are still developing. Harvesting every day should result in a continuous crop for about six months.

Once you learn how to grow mushrooms in your home, it's super easy to keep them growing. Eventually, you might need to add fresh spawn to grow more mushrooms, but as long as you keep the cloth damp and harvest the mushrooms as they appear, you should have a steady supply. Once you've got plenty, make sure to use them up in your favorite mushroom recipes within a few days of harvesting since most will only keep for a few days in the fridge.

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