Mushrooms
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Main > Food and Agriculture > Controlled-environment growing
Though some mushrooms have defied the attempts of even the most expert mycologists to culture them outside of their wild environment, others grow quite readily when their spores are plugged into a suitable medium. Happily, this includes most of the tastier and more beneficial mushrooms. Mushrooms can fetch quite a high price compared to other foodstuffs, so their cultivation can be quite lucrative. Some edible mushrooms have shown impressive health benefits in studies.
Mushrooms do not like frost or very low temperatures, so they cannot be grown in winter (except perhaps in a heated indoor environment).
Types of mushrooms
- Oyster mushrooms. By far the easiest mushrooms to grow, and among the most nutritious, with 15-30% protein content. Can be grown in sterilized grain husks (an opportunity here for farms growing grains!) or in used coffee grounds (which are sterilized from when you boiled the coffee) or even in old shredded newspaper.
- Lion's Mane mushrooms.Research has found that they cause an increase in Nerve Growth Factor. Eating these literally gives you more brains.
- Reishi mushrooms.
- Turkey Tail mushrooms. Well-documented anticancer properties.
- Shiitake mushrooms. Typically grown on oak logs, but can be grown in wood chips. Has demonstrated anticancer, antibacterial and antiviral properties in trials and is also delicious.
- Maitake mushrooms. Evidence suggests that these lower blood glucose and have anticancer and immunostimulatory properties [1]
- Psilocybe genus. These are illegal to cultivate and sell in most countries. Spores are generally legal to possess, except in California, Georgia, Idaho and Germany [2]. They are harder to grow than most mushrooms, and are especially sensitive to contamination; you need to be very careful to keep the environment sterile.
Links
You can learn everything you need to know from these two websites -
- http://fungi.com/ - This site sells all kinds of mushroom growkits. They have developed a method of filling little wooden plugs with spores. 30-50 of these plugs ($3-5) can be stuck in a short log so that the mycelium completely colonize the log. Buy them at here. They also sell indoor growkits including shiitake, oyster, reishi, maitake and Lion's Mane mushrooms, all for about $26 - meaning you'd break even if you grew 4lbs
- http://www.shroomery.org/ is a great, very educational website, focused mostly, but not entirely, on psilocybin mushrooms. There is a thriving forum community full of people who know a thing or two about mushrooms. The forum includes a board on edible and medicinal mushrooms
- 12 gig torrent on permaculture, includes a folder of material from mushroom man Paul Stamets, and two instructional video series on growing mushrooms.
- Growing Gourmet And Medicinal Mushrooms and The Mushroom Cultivator books by Paul Stamets. Various techniques for cultivating different kinds of mushrooms.
- ArkFab have designed Spore v.0.1 "a draft prototype for a mushroom grow house that converts spent grain, spent coffee grounds, and other urban waste biomass into mushrooms and mushroom compost". Their design (page 40-52 of this pdf) costs less than $2000 in materials and is projected to grow 80lb (36kg) of mushrooms per week.