Mushrooms are delicious to eat on pizza and several other great meals and they are also very easy to grow at home without needing a big garden or even sunshine. I will show you the easiest and most effective ways to grow your mushrooms.
Seeds or no Seeds?
If you are thinking where to go get the seeds to start growing your mushrooms, let me clarify that these seeds do not exist. Mushrooms use spores to grow and they use grain, straw, wood, and sawdust, instead of soil.
Dark Farming
Now, since mushrooms are fungi, you might have guessed that they need darkness and cold to spawn, instead of sunshine and heat to grow. Moreover, you need to keep in mind that each type of mushroom will grow under a particular set of circumstances.
Getting a Kit
While you can get the spores from other mushrooms, this process might be a bit tricky for beginners and you could have better luck with a mushroom growing kit. These come with a growing medium where you will have the mushroom spawn already.
Rolling up Your Sleeves
The easiest mushrooms to grow and learn to take care of are the button mushrooms, which can be grown in compost. Go ahead and fill some trays with compost, but make sure they are as shallow as 6 inches before putting the spawn on it.
Heat Things Up
You will need a heating pad, as it is ideal to keep the compost’s temperature up to 70°F until you can see white growths that resemble threads. Then you can let the temperature go down by 10°F, to stay at 60°F and cover the spawn with soil that’s about an inch thick, which you need to keep moist with a damp cloth.
Harvesting Time
If you have done everything right, within the next month or so you should be getting your pretty button mushrooms. You are better off cutting them from the stem than pulling them out, once the caps open. Try to do it every day to keep your mushrooms growing constantly for as long as six months.
Use them ASAP
Once you have enough mushrooms in your stock, you should start getting creative or finding recipes online, given that these will not last very long even in the fridge.
My Favourite Recipes
Since you are now harvesting your mushrooms steadily, you have a valuable source of nutrients that you need to exploit in yummy recipes. If you love pasta, you can try making a classic Bolognese and adding mushrooms to the sauce. For my vegan readers, you can use the mushrooms instead of meat in this recipe.
There is also the option of sautéing them in olive oil with some onions, garlic, and spinach to spread on toast and have a nutritious breakfast with your harvest. If you are looking for something a bit more elaborate, you can get the biggest ones, remove the stems and use the caps as containers to cream cheese and garlic. Bake them and enjoy it.
There is no limit to the number of delicious recipes you can cook, once you start growing your mushrooms. Make sure you tell me all about how they turned out.