Frugal Living Tips

How to grow mushrooms at home

by Natalie E. Rowles
(Pinetown KZN S.A.)

I have just photographed my mushroom kit and took these two photographs to show you the size of these mushrooms. The bigger ones I will harvest tonight for supper so to give space for the smaller mushrooms to grow larger still, before harvesting them too in a day or two.

It takes 21 days to reach this stage for harvesting your first lot of mushrooms, with a week or so in between later to harvest the much smaller ones. I reckon I will get at least six weeks of continuous harvesting of these fresh and organic mushrooms, produced with only distilled water and nothing else.

The largest mushroom I will keep growing for a few days longer, so I can harvest the spores/spawn. When this mushroom starts to open its closed cap, showing its veil at the gills, I will gently pull and twist it and cut the stem close off to the casing. Then I will cut the stem off right at the opened cap area.

The next step is to place the open end of the mushroom down on glass or an A4 laminated cardboard which has been spotlessly cleaned. Then I will place a glass or a glass dish over the mushroom, keeping it like that for at least 12 hours, to harvest the spores. The spores will dropped out into a heap and become visible. With a clean knife I will scraped off the spores and put it in a glass and add some distilled water to it.
This mixture I will now pour over a prepared home-made mushroom kit - probably made from wet, torn, clean cardboard pieces, wet, clean sawdust, shredded non inked newspaper mixed with my worm compost and worm tea.
I just love carrying out experiments and this one will be most interesting experiment to date!