Want to grow mushrooms at home? Here’s how it’s done

If you’ve been curious about trying to grow mushrooms at home, you have come to the right place. In this post, I’ll be sharing our recent mushroom growing experience with you and some tips as to how you can grow them yourself.

Affiliate link | I’m including affiliate links in this post, including links to the Curious Farmer mushroom kit we used that will help you grow mushrooms at home yourself. If you click on the link and make a purchase, I’ll make a small commission at no extra cost to you. It helps me pay for the costs of running this blog and keeps my content free.

We used this Oyster Mushroom growing kit from Curious Farmer on Etsy and, honestly, it couldn’t have been any easier. Each kit should yield 2-3 crops of shrooms that you can harvest and eat at home. Yum!

I bought the kit as a birthday present for my partner and he absolutely loved it. If I had known how fun and easy it was to grow mushrooms, I’d have done it A LOT sooner.

How do mushrooms grow?

Mushrooms grow from teeny tiny spores; too small to see with the naked eye. Collectively these spores are known as mushroom spawn. The spawn supports the growth of mycelium, which appears as a white thread-like plant, usually growing under ground.

Mushrooms are actually the fleshy fruit of the mycelium and they push through the soil when the plant fruits. Because the mycelium grows out of sight, you might only know the plant is there when mushrooms start to appear above ground.

Where do they grow naturally?

Mushrooms like darkness, humidity and cool temperatures to grow. But different kinds of mushrooms will thrive in slightly different growing environments. Some mushrooms prefer to be underground and some thrive in decaying logs, woodchips, straw and even cardboard.

Mushrooms can be found in woodland, fields, meadows and even gardens here in the UK, so keep your eyes peeled while you’re out in the country side. You are most likely to see mushrooms from September to November.

Not all mushrooms are edible, so it’s important that you make sure you know exactly which variety you have before you eat it. The Autumn Edition of Nevermind the Burdocks is a user friendly guide to foraging in the British Isles.

How easy is it to grow mushrooms at home?

Growing at home with the Curious Farmer mushroom starter kit that we used was an absolute doddle. They really had done all the hard work for us and the instructions were very simple.

The kit, which came in a cardboard box, arrived within 5 days of ordering. The box, which is about 30cm high, opens at the top and contains a plastic bag, which contains the mushroom starter. There were also some instructions inside the box. Here’s what we had to do:

1. Open the cardboard window at the front of the box (this is easy because it’s perforated)
2. Cut an X shape in the plastic bag through the window using a knife
3. Remove the bag from the box and soak overnight with the X cut facing down
4. Return the bag to the cardboard box in the morning
5. Spritz the X with water every morning and evening using a spray bottle
6. Watch the mushrooms grow!

How quickly can you grow mushrooms at home?

Pretty quick. Our first crop of oyster mushrooms was ready to harvest exactly 7 days after soaking overnight and we are now on our second cycle. It was awesome to watch the mushrooms grow, every time we looked at them there was development. I had no idea that they would grow so fast!

We got 270g of oyster mushrooms from the first crop and it already looks like we’ll get even more from the second. They were really easy to harvest, we were able to snap the whole clump of mushrooms away from the box with our hands and then separate the mushrooms together. It took no longer than a couple of minutes and we had SO MANY mushrooms.

What do they taste like?

I’ve eaten plenty of shop bought mushrooms, including oyster mushrooms and our home grown ones tasted very different. They were fresh and delicious and, weirdly, they tasted incredibly clean. We are lucky to have wonderful local tap water here in Snowdonia, which I think enhanced the flavour of the mushrooms themselves. We absolutely loved them and ate a couple uncooked and as they were.

We had enough mushrooms to make a delicious stir fry that evening and a wild garlic and mushroom pasta the next day. If you like mushrooms, I definitely recommend giving the kit ago.

Is it cost effective?

I did a quick price comparison in a Supermarket and oyster mushrooms work out to around £1 per 100g of food, which means that, so far, we’ve had around £2.70 of mushrooms from our kit, which cost us £18.00. If we have 3 full yields, the mushrooms then (if you value them weight for weight) we’ll have had around £8.10 worth of oyster mushrooms.

Those prices don’t account for the freshness of the mushrooms or the fact that we got to tend to the mushrooms ourselves and watch them grow. It also doesn’t account for the educational value of learning about growing mushrooms and the fact that we might be able to produce more mushroom plants from the mushrooms we’ve harvested.

Overall, I would say that it’s worth the price and I would definitely buying the kit again in the future. If you’re curious about trying to grow mushrooms at home, the Curious Farmer oyster mushroom kit is a really easy and exciting way to get started!

Read more of my posts about gardening, growing and nature here!

1