There’s no secret to growing mushrooms! Any gardener can do it if he has access to a dark room or cellar where temperature and ventilation can be controlled.
Mushroom culture is fun and a little different from regular gardening. There’s a big thrill in harvesting the pure white gems that add an extra zest to meals.
Methods of Starting Mushroom Venture
There are two ways of starting on a mushroom venture: you can buy specially prepared trays that need only the proper warmth and moisture to produce a crop, or you can prepare your trays or beds, filling them with your compost.
Mushroom Trays and Permanent Beds
Trays are constructed in the same manner as seed flats. They should be 6” inches deep and of a size that can easily be managed; prepared trays are approximately 14 by 16 inches.
Permanent beds are quite similar to greenhouse benches but are usually tiered, about a foot above one another.
Composting Manure For Mushroom Growth
If you decide to do it all yourself, you’ll find fresh, strawy horse manure is still the best medium for growing mushrooms.
To make the manure suitable for mushroom culture, it must be properly composted or fermented.
Composting is accomplished by turning the manure every four or five days until it reaches the proper stage of decomposition.
Turning can be done by hand or machine, but the important feature is that the manure must be well shaken out and watered each time. The compost must be kept moist but not too wet.
After three or four turns, the compost should be ready for use. Suitable compost has turned a dark brown color, has lost its undesirable odor present only during the early stages, and the straw shears off readily when twisted by hand. A greasy type of fermentation results when it is kept too wet.
The prepared compost is then placed in trays or beds, depending upon the system being followed.
The compost then goes through a final heating or “sweating out” when it reaches temperatures as high as 130° to 140° degrees Fahrenheit.
Planting Spawn and Temperature Control
When the compost temperature drops to 80° degrees Fahrenheit (in about a week), the spawn is planted. In purchasing spawn, only active-growing, pure culture spawn should be used; avoid brick or flake spawn.
A unit of spawn costs about 50 cents and will plant an area of approximately 50 square feet.
The spawn is planted by breaking it into pieces about the size of a golf ball and placing it about 8″ to 10″ inches apart each way and 21″ inches deep.
The room should be kept as dark as possible and fairly warm (72° to 75° Fahrenheit) during the following three weeks to facilitate a good spawn run (growth). When the white, threadlike filaments (mycelia) growing from adjacent spawn pieces meet.
The temperature of the room should be dropped to 55° to 60° degrees Fahrenheit, and the beds should be covered with about 1 ¼” inches of good garden soil. This is known as “casing.”
The beds or trays may now be slightly watered with a fine, gentle spray until the soil is moist but crumbly.
In about ten days, the first mushrooms will appear, and the beds will continue to crop for a period of three to six months.
During cropping, the beds must be watered about once a week to maintain the desired moist but crumbly condition. During this period, all light should be excluded.
Cleaning Beds
It is important to clean the beds after each “flush” or “break” of mushrooms has been harvested. Remove all debris such as old mushroom ends, undeveloped “pinheads,” or diseased mushrooms.
If the tray system is used, the sweating out process and spawn-growing period may be carried out in a warm, well-ventilated room, after which the trays may be moved to the cropping (growing) room or cellar, where a temperature of 50° to 60° degrees Fahrenheit is satisfactory.
Controlling Flies
Also, during the spawn-growing and cropping periods, it will be necessary to control flies.
A good dusting or spraying with DDT before the spawn is planted will give control for a considerable length of time.
Scheduling Mushroom Growth
Mushrooms are not usually produced during the summer months because of the difficulty of keeping the temperature below 60° degrees Fahrenheit.
Hence, a good schedule would be to prepare the compost in the fall, crop the beds throughout the winter, and dump the compost in the spring.
44659 by Leo G. Klein