If you love mushrooms, your ability to grow mushrooms at home is going to greatly impact your life and your grocery bill.

While mushrooms don’t quite fall into the herb category, they certainly are eaten regularly with herbs and are often thought of similarly to herbs. I mean this in the sense that they seem different, are perceived as hard to grow, and often mysterious. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is, with food sources becoming more and more unstable, protein sources becoming more and more expensive, mushrooms are an excellent source of that much-needed substance in our diet plus many other essential nutrients as well.

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There are so many reasons to grow your own mushrooms. Maybe you believe in the medicinal value of the shiitake in Asian medicine and cuisine and the price point of buying them is too much for your bank account. You might love wild mushrooms like chanterelles or pine mushrooms but can’t go picking in season yourself, or don’t have someone to guide you to safe harvests. Or possibly you have health issues and can’t get out at all. Or maybe you are looking to eat less meat and need good organic protein sources.

If you didn’t know, mushrooms are an excellent source of protein as well as phosphorus, iron, and many other trace elements and minerals. You can check it out here at Self Nutrition Data.

Whatever your reasons, know you are not alone in your search for mushrooms.

When you combine the deliciousness of the nutritional value of mushrooms, with ease of growing, you can see why more and more people are getting into personal production.

Read More On the Science of Mushrooms

Medical News Today: What is the Nutritional Value of Mushrooms?

Reader’s Digest 5 Health Benefits of Mushrooms

Nutritional Value of Mushrooms from Nutrition Value

 

What Are Mushrooms?

Classified as a fungus, mushrooms growing conditions are vastly different from your regular garden, which may be why even very experienced gardeners are not sure of how to go about starting their own.

What you don’t need to grow mushrooms:

• sunlight or much of any kind of light, for the most part
• regular dirt
• You don’t even need garden space: a tupperware bin in the closet can grow mushrooms at a steady rate for you.

However, most people want to have a little more space than the closet, so a garden shed, the garage, or even a small corner of the greenhouse, done right, can give you a decent, continuous supply of edible fungus.

What You Need to Grow Mushrooms

• A few shelves in the back shed, or garage with flat growing containers with lids can give you easy access to watering and harvesting while giving the mushrooms a darker, more cool and stable temperature for growing.
• Or a couple of shallow Tupperware bins that can stack in your closet or garage
• Some good manure, because that’s what mushrooms grow best in. Don’t worry, you can pick up a couple bags of manure at your nearest garden center.
• Spray bottle for watering.
• Space with nice, even temperatures and humidity, which is another topic altogether.

Of course, there’s a little more to it than this. My point is you don’t need much equipment to get started and keep the whole process going.

What Types of Mushrooms Can You Grow?

These are just a few of the types of mushrooms you might like for home use. Of course, there are many more.

• Oyster Mushrooms
• Morels
• Chantrelles
• Shittake Mushrooms
• Elm Oyster
• Blue Oyster
• Reishi
• Pink Oyster
• White Oyster

 

One of the best things about mushroom growing is how little time and fussing they take. Truly they are a food source worth setting up for yourself and your family.

There are a variety of reliable books and courses out there, but there’s one course I recommend for learning the ins and outs of mushroom growing, and that is Jake White’s course, Growing Mushrooms for You. For starters, it is 100% refundable in 60 days, if you find it isn’t for you. But the best part is that you have lifetime access to the course with videos and instructions.