Grow Your Own Mushrooms

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This all sounds quite straightforward and simple, and it is, but it’s best to start small — with a kit — and see how the shiitake do in your conditions before progressing to a more ambitious enterprise.

You can exclude wild contaminant fungi if you inoculate heavily enough with the right strain, but there is much to the art of growing shiitake. “We read everything, visited successful growers, and still it took us years to learn how to grow shiitake right,” says Sondra Williams, who with her husband, Doug, owns Lost Creek Mushroom Farm in Perkins, Okla. Among the challenges for the Williamses were the length of the incubation period (15 months in Oklahoma), finding the proper tools and learning how to grow the mushrooms in their hot, dry summers.

To help shorten the learning curve, Mushroompeople rents and sells videos on various aspects of shiitake culture, including how to grow them in such extreme climates as Florida and as they are traditionally grown in China and Japan.

Finally, keep in mind that oysters and several other types of “wood loving” mushroom such as lion’s mane (Hericium) and hen-of-the-woods (Grifola) can be grown just like shiitake, and logs are not the only game in town. If you keep a home woodlot, you can cut stumps high and then inoculate them with shiitake, oyster or other wood mushroom spawn. Or, if you have huge, fresh hardwood logs that are simply too big to heft into a soaking tank, cut them into 6-inch “wafers” and stack them into a totem, with sawdust spawn in between the layers. Wet it down, cover the whole thing with a plastic bag to retain moisture and, with a little luck, you’ll eventually get mushrooms.

Wine caps

You can grow the fascinating and delicate-tasting wine cap stropharia (Stropharia rugoso-annulata) right in your garden, just like a regular food crop. Also known as king stropharia, garden giants and several other folk names, these edibles grow on many types of decaying organic matter, from garden soil to piles of wood chips and even compost heaps. Young wine caps grown in shade boast pretty wine-red caps, which quickly change to beige in higher light. Vigorous and persistent in a wide range of climates, these mushrooms fruit lightly in spring, heavily in fall and intermittently through the summer in cool, moist climates.

To establish wine caps in your garden, order a kit or patch in late winter and give it a head start indoors, the same way you might grow tomatoes from seed. Follow the directions included with your kit or patch, and let the mycelium grow at room temperature for a few weeks. Robert Hess, who sells wine cap kits through Spore Works in Knoxville, Tenn., says to “plant” chunks of mycelium wherever you want the mushrooms to grow anytime after the soil temperature has reached 50 to 60 degrees. “It won’t be hard to see the mycelium taking off, because it develops into stringy strands, almost like plant roots,” Hess says. If you want to establish multiple colonies in different parts of your landscape, simply dig a chunk of soil (or compost or wood chips) that’s nicely marbled with white mycelium, and “plant” it where you want a new batch to grow. Be sure to harvest these mushrooms early, when they are still young buttons, to preclude having to share them with insects.

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