Grow Guide for Mushrooms

Growing Medium

• Choose a growing medium for your mushrooms. The growing medium should be an organic material that features carbohydrates such as sugar, lignin, cellulose or starch. For example, consider using fresh strawy horse manure, which you should water well and turn every four or five days about four times to compost it. After that, the manure should be a dark color. The manure then can go in planting trays and be ready for growing mushrooms in about a week after "sweating out" heat.

Planting

• Purchase bottle mushroom spawn from a catalog gardening seed company. Then, break up the spawn into pieces smaller than golf balls and plant them in your growing medium so they are about 8 inches apart and 2 inches deep. Check the room temperature to ensure it remains about 70 degrees Fahrenheit for 21 days, and keep the room dark. Then, drop the temperature to 60 degrees Fahrenheit and cover the growing medium with potting soil. An ideal location for growing mushrooms is in a cool, dark area such as a cellar or basement or even the area under the kitchen sink. Make sure the temperature does not drop to below 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

Watering

• Your mushroom planting soil should be moist but not excessively wet. Water your mushrooms using a gentle spray nozzle attached to a garden hose or with a water spray bottle. Getting your mushroom growing soil too moist can attract pests such as sow bugs as well as lead to mushroom plant diseases. Do not water the topsoil unless the soil feels powdery.

Harvesting

• When harvesting mushrooms, do not pull them up out of the soil, as this could break them. Instead, push the soil around each mushroom down, and twist the mushroom stem off. You also can use a knife to cut the mushroom off at the base of the stem. Your mushrooms are ready for harvesting when the caps of the mushrooms have separated from the stems.