How to Grow Mushrooms in Your Own Garden

Now that you’ve mastered tomatoes and carrots, you may wonder how to grow mushrooms. The gourmet cousin of most vegetable gardening, growing mushrooms is an exotic hobby but is becoming more common among hobby gardeners. Expensive and treasured, truffles are the elite mushroom and cast a prestige on most gourmet mushrooms. Mushrooms through the centuries have been avoided for their poison while others have been eaten and used for medicinal purposes.

In our modern day, mushrooms’ health benefits were publicized only recently, when previously it was thought they contained little nutritious value. The popularity of mushrooms has since taken off, and chefs around the country use countless types of gourmet mushrooms. Different mushroom breeds are medicinal, edible, ornamental, or poisonous. Mushrooms also benefit the soil where they grow and add valuable nutrients.

The Mushroom Growth Process

Garden stores sell books that describe the complex process of growing mushrooms. You’ll want to experiment with different growing methods and study how mushrooms grow best. Every mushroom species is different and some mushrooms can only grow in the wild. Many mushroom types originate in the forest and flourish in hidden places. Mushrooms are such a complex plant that an entire branch of science is devoted to their study: mycology.

To start out with mushroom growing, you might consider purchasing a tabletop mushroom kit, similar to what is used in schools, or any basic mushroom growth kit. Oyster mushrooms are supposedly the easiest to grow.

When you buy a mushroom kit, a grower has already completed the first steps of mushroom growth for you. From there you can graduate to the more complex kinds of mushroom growing. The fungi life cycles are very different from those of other plants, so if you are interested in growing them, it would help to read about their pathology.

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