Category: Miscellaneous
27 Results
Growing Mushrooms Using a Casing Layer
If you’ve ever seen pictures of a button-mushroom farm, you might be asking yourself … why does it look like all the mushrooms are growing out of the soil? Aren’t mushrooms supposed to grow from a substrate, different from the way that plants grow? Many moons ago, button mushroom growers discovered that adding a layer
Getting a Second Flush from Shiitake Blocks
One of my favorite things about growing mushrooms is how they just keep giving and giving! Once you get a successful first flush, you are likely to get second, third and sometimes even fourth flush off the same straw log or fruiting block. Getting multiple flushes is the best way to get the highest overall
Growing Mushrooms The Easy Way (Outdoor Garden)
Let’s face it, growing mushrooms can be complicated. You have to worry about managing cultures, sterilizing grains, making spawn, mixing substrates and trying to do it all without introducing contamination that could ruin your whole project. Of course, if you love growing mushrooms as much as I do, all those complicated terms sound like music
Using Pressure Cookers for Growing Mushrooms
If you ‘re wanting to grow mushrooms at home, you need to get yourself a dependable pressure cooker. There’s really just no way around it. You see, fighting contaminates is a constant battle. The cultivator needs to be aware of potential sources of contamination, and how to prevent the bad guys from getting a leg-up
Growing Oyster Mushrooms Outside
Growing oyster mushrooms doesn’t have to be complicated. Sure it’s fun to have a highly controlled grow room, to monitor the environment and to try and optimize to perfection things like humidity, temperature and fresh air. But sometimes, we just want to grow some mushrooms. And I can’t think of a better way to do that than
Working With Mushroom Cultures on Agar
Growing mushrooms from scratch requires being able to store and properly propagate mushroom cultures (think mycelium) on nutrient rich agar. For the mushroom cultivator, it is an essential skill. Properly transferring cultures allows you to “grow out” mushroom different species for the purpose of making grain spawn. It also allows for the ability to “clean” a
Mushroom Yield and Biological Efficiency
Mushroom yield and biological efficiency are important parameters that need to be understood and optimized by the mushroom cultivator. When you first start out growing mushrooms, you might not be all that concerned about how many mushrooms you get. At first, just getting some nice looking fruits is a huge success! But as you get more proficient at growing
Understanding Mushroom Substrates
Finding the perfect mushroom substrate for your grow- and getting the right substrate recipe– is one of the most important aspects of mushroom cultivation. New growers will quickly realize that growing mushrooms is significantly different than growing plants. Although the concept of a mushroom substrate can be thought of as somewhat analogous to the soil for
The Best Books on Mushroom Cultivation
To see further, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Knowledge is power. Why try to reinvent the wheel when we can learn from the failures, successes, and triumphs of others? This applies to mushroom cultivation just the same. Every grower needs a few good mushroom books on their shelf. Growing mushrooms is a complex and intricate process, and
Mushroom Grow Bags: The Ultimate Guide
Mushroom grow bags are an essential tool for cultivation, both for the professional cultivator and the enthusiastic hobbyist. They can be used as spawn bags- in which the bags are used for sterilizing grain and propagating mushroom cultures- or, they can be used to create supplemented sawdust fruiting blocks for growing gourmet mushrooms. If you’re
The Complete Guide To Starting A Mushroom Farm
You want to be a mushroom farmer, and I totally understand why. Learning how to grow mushrooms for any reason can be extremely rewarding and engaging. They’re just so interesting! The more you practice growing mushrooms, the more there is to learn. Your journey will be long, because there’s an endless variety of new techniques
Best Humidifier for Growing Mushrooms
One of the main paths to success for mushroom cultivation is maintaining the proper humidity at the right time of the mushroom growing cycle. Mushrooms can be up to 90% water, and require high levels of humidity in order to initiate pinning and promote healthy development. Too dry and your substrate will crack and be hesitant
