Mushrooms for Homesteaders and Gardeners

 

For homesteaders and gardeners, adding mushroom growing to your repertoire is probably the single easiest and most cost-effective way to really elevate your food-growing. You may already collect wild mushrooms on your property, and you are probably aware of growing shiitakes on logs, but you can also grow mushrooms much more quickly indoors. It doesn't take much space (a couple of square feet on a counter-top is enough), it doesn't take any additional equipment beyond what's already in your kitchen, it doesn't take much money investment (you can build a grow chamber for as little as $15-20, and DIY kits from The Fungal Network cost a fraction of price of fresh mushrooms), and you can grow your own fresh mushrooms year-round. Best of all, the time from deciding to start growing mushrooms to the time you are eating your first home-grown mushrooms can easily be under four weeks.

If you set up a schedule of inoculating one home mushroom growing DIY kit each week, you can end up with about 1.5 pounds of a variety of fresh mushrooms harvested each week. And if you have a few extra square feet of space to set up a mini greenhouse grow tent indoors, you can easily grow enough extra to barter or sell at a farmers market, produce stand, or in a CSA box. 

As a bonus, a byproduct of mushroom growing is "spent mushroom substrate," a valuable and highly sought after soil amendment. It can even be use in place of coir to start plants directly into. In a way, you are creating a circular bioeconomy by growing mushrooms on plant waste, then using the mushroom growing waste to aid the growth of more plants!