Grow Your Own Mushrooms

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Hess grows wine caps among hostas in his Tennessee shade garden. Volk, in Wisconsin, recommends wine caps as the easiest mushrooms to grow in a pile of wood chips or compost, and in coastal Washington, Stamets has grown wine caps that weighed in at nearly 5 pounds!

Portobellos

You can grow your own button mushrooms indoors, including the common white buttons and the more flavorful portobello or criminis (baby portobellos), too. It’s fun and rewarding, and it lets you enjoy organically grown mushrooms (many commercial growers use pesticides to control insects and diseases) that taste succulent enough to make great roasting mushrooms. A good kit will yield its first crop three weeks after you start it, and will continue to fruit for eight more weeks. When the kit is done, you can use the spent compost to enrich your garden soil.

It’s possible that a mushroom or two eventually will pop up in your garden but it’s not likely because these mushrooms, which are all strains of Agaricus bisporus, need “live” compost (just over halfway decomposed) as their base of operations. Simoni says making a good batch of “live” compost is a labor-intensive, 30-day process, and he has posted his favorite recipe for it on his company’s Web site. “There is no easy way of bypassing the compost part,” he says, noting that if people knew of the large quantities required to get a good yield, they would better appreciate what they’re getting in a kit, as well as the price of good mushrooms in the store.

Mushrooms for Your Health

Mushrooms are surprisingly nutritious while being low in calories, with very little fat and cholesterol. An average serving of five small mushrooms contains 2 grams of protein, almost as much potassium as a banana and three important B vitamins. Mushrooms also are a valuable source of selenium, a nutrient found in meats that may be in short supply in vegetarian diets.

The same mushrooms you enjoy for dinner may have important medicinal properties, too. Several studies are now evaluating the effects mushrooms may have on breast cancer in postmenopausal women and on prostate cancer in men. Other studies are looking into the use of nutritional supplements made from shiitake, oyster and reishi mushrooms as a natural way to lower cholesterol.

Making a Living with Mushrooms

Let’s say you start small, learn the art of growing mushrooms and decide to try growing culinary mushrooms for profit. Gourmet mushrooms are definitely a high value crop, but the world will not beat a path to your door if you grow them. As with other crops that appeal to sophisticated palates, your mushrooms probably will interest only such buyers as chefs or upscale food markets; members of the general public usually do not appreciate why gourmet mushrooms cost more than $6 a pound. The Williamses did well selling shiitake from 2,000 logs to friends and neighbors, but they couldn’t find adequate markets when they added another 4,000 logs. “Doug wanted to grow something that was not harmful to the environment and that would help people,” Sondra says, “but he discovered he was not cut out for getting gussied up and selling to chefs.”

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