How to grow mushrooms at home
Delicious 🍄 using just household waste, a container and no outside space
This essay is part of the You Can Do This series where I share empowering and practical how to guides that will hopefully help you acquire a new lifelong skill.
Hello! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
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I have a wonderful guest column for you this week that I think would make a really fun project during the strange but welcome liminal downtime between Christmas and New Year.
It’s another entry for my regular You Can Do This feature, where I share practical and self-empowering how to guides which link back to a piece I wrote called the power of self-reliance.
Some previous posts in this category include the easiest, quickest and most reliable way to grow basil and how to make a multi-plant granola.
Today’s post is all about how to very easily grow delicious mushrooms at home, from household waste! And you don’t need any outside space nor fancy equipment.
Lex Truax is co-founder of London's Fat Fox Mushrooms, an urban farm that shares the joy of mushroom cultivation through kits, supplements and workshops. They believe fungi play a key role in our future, from recycling by-products to healing our bodies and sustaining the planet.
I am already a customer of theirs having enjoyed daily doses of their Lion’s Mane extract for many weeks now. I have also tried growing mushrooms in this way before and it is fascinating. I left my fruits on for too long before I harvested them though, so they dried out. Lex’s advice has inspired me to give it another go!
Many thanks to Lex for sharing her insights by writing this piece and for all the images.
A gift idea
I also personally think a mushroom growing kit would make a pretty unique and thoughtful Christmas present for anyone who enjoys food and/or gardening and/or science (I might be biased as those are all my jams).
Growing mushrooms is a bit like an ongoing lab experiment that rewards you with something edible and delicious at the end — I love fermentation for the same reasons (have I mentioned I make my own wine?).
If anyone is interested in purchasing from Fat Fox, their cut off for any Christmas orders to be delivered by 24th December is midday Thursday 21st December.
Lex has also very kindly provided the A Day Well Spent community with an exclusive discount code for 15% off - you can find it at the end of this post.
Also, if this piece piques your interest about the incredible world of fungi, I highly recommend reading Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures by Merlin Sheldrake.
As always, thank you for being here and I hope you enjoy this post!
How to grow mushrooms at home
A guest column by Lex Truax
Growing mushrooms can be an exhilarating experience. From the first strands of fluffy white mycelium beginning to cover the surface of the growing medium, to the tiny pins that seem to develop into juicy caps before your very eyes, I often feel as if I'm watching nature in time-lapse.
Fungi are crucial to the ecosystem as the primary decomposers of wood and plant litter. Their mycelium – a network of microscopic strands of hyphae – winds its way around the insides of dead stumps or under layers of fallen leaves, digesting as it goes.
Evolutionarily speaking, fungi are more closely related to animals than plants, sharing a common ancestor around 800 million years ago.
They are similar to animals in several ways: they ‘breathe’ in oxygen, ‘breathe’ out carbon dioxide and acquire food through digestion. But unlike animals which digest food sources internally, mycelium gains energy through external digestion.
The mycelium grows into its food source and secretes powerful enzymes that break down organic matter – like lignin and cellulose – in order to gain energy. In fact, scientists postulate that by breaking down rocks and minerals to create soil, fungal decomposition made plant and animal life on Earth as we know it today possible.
Once mycelium has digested enough of its food source, it will sprout a fruiting body (the familiar mushrooms we see and eat) that will eventually produce spores, germinate into hyphae, knit into mycelium and begin the process again.
Taking it back to mushroom growing basics
As the owner of a mushroom farm, I spend most of my work day using specialised equipment to sterilise large batches of sawdust, or inoculating bags of growing medium in our purpose built lab. The further down the mushroom-growing rabbit hole you go, the more high-tech it becomes.
In my personal growing practice however, I love to take it back to basics.
As the world’s greatest recycler, mycelium can digest a variety of common household waste and produce beautiful mushrooms in the process. It doesn't require all of the bells and whistles and fancy equipment I use at work, it's just about choosing the right species and going slowly.
Oyster mushrooms are great for home cultivation
Oyster mushroom mycelium is particularly hardy and outcompete other fungi and microorganisms for food. These mushrooms are a versatile crop that can be grown year round, thanks to the diversity of species within the genus pleurotus.
Blue oyster mushrooms thrive in the cool temperatures of fall and winter, yellow oyster mushrooms prefer the warmer weather of late spring and pink oyster mushrooms (the main image) can even withstand the heat of summer.
Oyster mushrooms are not only delicious and easy to grow but they are also packed with health benefits. Like all mushrooms, they are the only natural non-animal source of Vitamin D. They are also an excellent source of lovastatin (a compound that helps lower cholesterol) and polysaccharides (that can help regulate the immune system).
Oyster mushrooms can be grown on a variety of organic materials, but it is important to pasteurise the growing medium to kill any harmful bacteria or mould spores.
All you need is household waste and a container. And spawn.
Spent coffee grounds, used tea bags and cardboard are all good growing mediums, as both tea bags and coffee grounds have already been pasteurised when you made your cuppa. Cardboard can be easily pasteurised with boiling water.
The trick to growing mushrooms at home on coffee, tea and cardboard waste is to start with a small amount of food and add more as the mycelium grows. I like to use a 1.5-3 litre clear container so I can watch the mycelium grow and spot any competing fungi, such as mould. A mason jar or a clear plastic takeaway container will work perfectly.
After you’ve found a suitable container, you need to get your hands on some spawn. Mushroom spawn is mycelium that has been specially grown for mushroom cultivation. It’s usually cultivated on grain such as millet, but can also be grown on sawdust or other substances. You can source spawn online or pick some up at your local mushroom farm.
For this project you’ll need 50-100g of spawn from your chosen oyster species.
Now you’re ready to start growing!