Growing Mushrooms In Bags
- Image by Binks via Flickr
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!