General information

Mushroom Growing 101:

Back when I first started growing mushrooms in early 2010 the information available was hard to find and often full of mistakes, conflicting information or just plain wrong. Now days things are much easier with better quality information and techniques widely available. In saying that I still frequently see techniques or protocols with unnecessary steps or involving pseudoscience nonsense. Here on this page I wanted to give a general overview to the whole process. This is based on my personal experience as a home grower as well as my academic experience in Biology and Microbiology. What follows is a brief overview of mushroom growing general information. You can find more specific information about growing on straw, logs or sawdust at these links as well as other cultivation information.

Section one: The living fungus

The three main forms the fungus comes in are: grown on an agar plate, grown in a liquid culture or grown on grains. Grain spawn is what most growers will useas it's fairly easy to use and highly effective for large scale production. Agar plates and liquid cultures are usually used in earlier phases where you are isolating a culture from a wild specimen or from spores.

Section two: Nurturing the fungus

Once you have your fungus, you need to give it food. This always involves sterilizing or pasteurizing the food in some way and then carefully introducing your fungus. This again usually involves using grain spawn as it's an effective method to introduce your fungus into large bulk food sources, like straw or sawdust. If all goes well the fungus will happily colonize the food you've given it.

Section three: Fruiting the fungus

The final step is where things can get tricky and species dependent. It is time to get your fungus to produce mushrooms. In scientific terminology these are known as fruit bodies. This step is therefore called the Fruiting Step, or initiating Fruiting. For some mushrooms like the Phoenix Oyster you simply wait and it will produce mushrooms happily here in Aotearoa. Others, like Pekepekekiore, need lots and lots of fresh air but also humidity in the range of 90% R/H! This can be extremely tricky to manage as every time you give the fungus fresh air it strips away the humidity. However, there are are number of methods that have been developed to help create this unique environment. These range froma simple plastic tub through to fully automated systems that carefully monitor and control the environment.