How To Grow Mushrooms

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To grow mushrooms on wood, you need to start off choosing between one of two options: 

• Either pick out the species of mushrooms you want to grow and order yourself a mushroom growing log from a supplier. 
• Or if you live close to the woods and know what trees you have around your area that you can harvest logs from, then you can decide what mushrooms would be suitable candidates for growing on your logs.

A log should average 4 to 8 inches in diameter (could be more or less) and be roughly 3 feet long.  When you have your log you will need to the following:

• Drill holes into the log about 6 to 8 inches apart, working in rows, and 1 inch deep.  The bigger the log’s diameter, the more rows you will have.
• Place inoculated mushroom plugs into the drilled holes, which you can obtain from a supplier unless you make your own.
• Seal all the holes with the plugs in them using wax, either cheese or candle wax would be acceptable.  The purpose here is to protect the mycelium or spawn from insects and contaminants and to prevent it from drying out, effectively killing it as well.

Your log is now prepared.  From this point on, you will need to keep the log under favorable conditions to encourage the log to start fruiting.  The log should be kept in an area where it receives indirect light and should be kept moist.  Learning how to grow mushrooms can be a very rewarding experience.  Your log should fruit about every 5 to 7 weeks, enjoy the harvest!

If you’ve been attempting to grow your own mushrooms, you may have heard of or even used logs as growing mediums for your mushrooms.

Growing mushrooms on logs may require a little more knowledge in some areas compared to growing mushrooms using the more common soil and box methods.

To successfully grow mushrooms on logs you would need to know several things.

The first of these being, what species you intend to grow because not all species of mushrooms will grow on any medium you choose. Depending on the species you want, such as shiitake mushrooms, you would need a hardwood log or stump.

If you were planning to grow truffles, you would not be able to use a cut log, as truffles require a live tree and they grow near the base of a tree, not actually on it. And for mushrooms like chicken of the woods you would require softwood logs or stumps.

The preferred size (diameter) of the log or stump may also vary from species to species of the mushroom you want to grow so there is no definite answer. Also because you are growing mushrooms on a log or stump, there are different procedures to follow.

So before you try growing mushrooms on logs take some time to get to know your species and the methods to a successful harvest.

For many, the idea of growing mushrooms indoors rather than outdoors has an appeal.

One of the biggest reasons being it does not require you to do outside laboring and it enables better control of the growing environment such as temperature and humidity/moisture level.

For reasons like this, indoor mushroom growing is preferred to outside growing. One of these indoor methods is growing mushrooms in bags.

Assuming you know the basics of growing mushrooms already, we will skip ahead a bit. You will first need to have your bag of growing medium: wheat, rye, rice, soil, whatever it is you are using to grow your mushroom species. When you have the bag packed with the medium, you will need to throw in either a liquid spore mix or “cakes” which are usually bundles of sawdust or straw, fully colonized with mycelium.

At this point, shake the bag to mix around all the medium with your spores or cakes. You want to make sure everything is nicely distributed about as evenly as possible so break up the cakes into smaller pieces when mixing it. Once everything is mixed, just pack it tightly together by compressing it.

After everything is done, all that is left is to puncture the bag with holes to let it ventilate, and put the bag somewhere where it is cool and moist and maintain optimal conditions for growing your own mushrooms. Now you can sit back for a while and occasionally check in on the progress until your first flush of fresh mushrooms, enjoy!