How To Grow Mushrooms

If you’ve been growing your own mushrooms from scratch then you know how troublesome and also how expensive sterilizing and/or pasteurizing substrate for your mushrooms can be.

Luckily for you, there is a method that can be used in growing your own mushrooms that can simplify and speed up the process.  This method is growing mushrooms with hydrogen peroxide

While using hydrogen peroxide has some limitations, it has obvious advantages.  The first being you would not need to sterilize your substrate for hours or days at a time if you instead add a low concentration of hydrogen peroxide to your mix.  This in turn means you do not require expensive pressure cookers and it also means the amount of substrate you can produce is not limited to any size, as would be the case if you used a pressure cooker (you can only make as much as it can hold).

Using hydrogen peroxide you are able to work in a non-sterile, non-laboratory like environment because hydrogen peroxide will help keep the mushroom cultures bacteria and contaminant-free.

The basic idea behind using a low concentration of hydrogen peroxide is that it helps promote healthy mushroom growth, while, at the same time, it keeps other possible fungi and contaminants from growing.  A low concentration of peroxide will not damage or hurt mushrooms.

Eventually the peroxide will be used by the mushrooms, turning it into nothing more than water and oxygen promoting a healthy growing environment.  So what are you waiting for?  Go grow your own mushrooms with the peroxide method.

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Two more extra news and stories about growing mushrooms:

• A fun day with some fungi – I went on a CUESA-organized farm tour last Sunday to Monterey County, about 2 hours south of San Francisco (Jen Maiser was also on the tour and wrote about it at Bay Area Bites). Our first stop was Far West Fungi in Moss Landing, …
• Netherlands to ban psychedielic mushrooms | Finland for Thought – The Dutch government said Friday that it will ban the sale of hallucinatory mushrooms, rolling back one element of the country’s permissive drug policy after a series of high-profile negative incidents. [...] Psilocybin, the main active …

As far as variety goes, you probably won’t find a larger category of mushrooms than LBMs or Little Brown Mushrooms as they are known.

Not all LBMs fall under types of poisonous mushrooms, but because of the difficulty in identifying LBMs it is probably best for you to do so.

They are very hard to identify by only appearance and unless you are an expert in identifying them it is advisable to just stay away from them completely.  To truly identify all LBMs that you come across requires microscopic analysis.

LBMs range from very small to medium in size.  Their spore prints come in all colors and they grow just about everywhere.  They grow on trees, on soil and appear practically anywhere as well: you can find them in forests, pasture fields or even on your lawn during the spring, summer and fall seasons.

What more could be said?  This group is a hard bunch to completely understand and even the experts cannot identify them all.  Instead, avoid them all and just grow your own mushrooms.

Because there are poisonous and non-poisonous variants of all shapes and sizes, with spore prints that have more colors than the rainbow it is just not advisable to try your luck on these guys.