Mushroom Cultivation

VI or eatchicago or somebody posted an article about composting elsewhere, and I was excited to read that coffee grounds are apparently an excellent medium for growing mushrooms - I hate throwing my coffee grounds away (right now, they're feeding some worms we're keeping for fishing, and I toss them on our garden patch, but I worry a bit about the acidity they're adding to the soil)

I'd love to cultivate my own mushrooms, but it seems like the home-gardener versions create the proverbial $64 tomato: kits are a minimum of $20 each, fruit a lot three times and then they're done. Seems like I'd be paying $10/lb for more mushrooms than I can deal with at one time, but less mushroooms than I want over time. I prefer meatier mushrooms. While I prefer meaty mushrooms, apparently boletes are out of the question for cultivation - but I'd settle for plain old crimini.

I find it difficult to believe that mushroom spawn is such a complicated and expensive thing to deal with; the idea of mushroom composting sounds significantly easier to do indoors than worm composting (after all, I regularly buy mushroom compost for the garden.)

I know there are many amateur mycologists on this board (and probably some professional ones.) I was wondering: can you create mushroom spawn from grocery-store mushrooms? How do you do so? Is there a less expensive way of growing mushrooms on a smaller scale?

I'm actually interested in this as well. I love all varieties of mushrooms, and I'd love to try cultivating my own. I mean, how hard can it be? It's a fungus for Goodness sake!

Hi,

At Illinois Mycological Association, we had a mycologist named Betty Ivanovich who actively cultivated mushrooms. She grew mushrooms in her garden like many do flowers.

Her son had a business located near those two horse tracks on the southside. They grew oyster mushrooms in bundles of hay in yellow, pink, white and pearl grey tones.
They had mounds of horse manure composting outside. In the middle of summer or winter, there was steam rising from this pile. They used this for cultivating button mushrooms in old truck trailers.

I would be surprised if you could collect spores from supermarket mushrooms. Once they have been chilled, they tend not to drop spores any longer. If you want to try anyway, portabellas are mature cousins of the button mushroom.

We once had a club member who was developing a shiitake farm in Missouri. I bought a half dozen oak logs with innoculated with shiitake. If I kept up with wateriing, there was a regular flourish. A friend has an indoor pool, she kept her shiitake logs in there. She had shiitakes all year long, though they tasted like chlorine.

There are books on mushroom cultivation. The skill is replicating environmental conditions for the mycelium to thrive and occasionally sprout a mushroom.

Regards,