Ever grow mushrooms or morels at home?

[Tomcat]

[junior mod hat ON] Please don't mention hallucinogenic mushrooms, we're talking about cooking boomers right now.[junior mod hat OFF]

After Mangetout's (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=187886) talk about providing food for the table, I started wondering about all the other things one can do- garden's, hunting, etc. Then I thought about mushrooms, which I dearly love to eat. I've been wondering about cultivating them myself and have done some googling and Amazon-ing (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580081754/ref=pd_pym_rvi_1/002-0657558-2322420) , but I was wondering if anyone here has actually grown mushrooms at home. I don't have space to do it now, but I think it would be neat and I'd love to be able to cook morels which are impossible to find here in the markets.

Thanks-
-Tcat

[Gatopescado]

Grew mushrooms by accidents once in college. I lived in the downstairs room of a house. My room was the only one with a private bathroom. The toilet tank leaked and pretty soon I had mushrooms growing right out of the carpet! :D

What was really frieghtning is that something killed them!

[neutron star]

I am going to mention psilocybe mushrooms here, but only because it's about past drug use/cultivation. I destroyed my small setup years ago and haven't eaten any 'shrooms since. I really hope that this is within board guidelines. If not, I humbly request that the mods modify or delete my post to remove offending content, rather than close the thread. Thanks. :)

Anyway, yeah, I grew mushrooms. My experience does, of course, deal only with the illegal stuff, but most of the basic concepts are the same. You don't need a big space to grow them, since all they need is enough light (very little) so they know to grow upwards, rather than at all kinds of weird angles. Different species require different substrates (growth mediums).

I found a couple of pages on indoor mushroom growing. When I Googled for them, I specified that the word "psilocybe" must not appear in any of the results, so these documents deal only with cultivation of legal species:

This (http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/mushroom.html) is a general site about mushroom growing, and here's one (http://www.mushroompeople.com/cat2000/morel.html) that deals with morels specifically.

You may even want to seek out guides on growing magic mushrooms, since there are a ton of different guides and techniques online. You may be able to modify these to suit your legal grow operation.

[ratatoskK]

I grew mushrooms at home a few times from a kit. The kit is basically a cardboard box with plastic lining, with special soil, and mushroom spores. They grew very easily and tasted good. I bought the kit from a horticultural aupply place. If you seearch around on the net I'm sure you can find some.

[Mangetout]

I grew oyster mushrooms twice; one time it was a large sack of compressed inoculated sawdust; you just slit holes in the side, wait a few days and out pop the mushrooms; it was supposed to crop several times, but after the first time, it went mouldy and smelly, so I threw it away.

The second time was a small bag of inoculated wheat grain (this was a bit odd) you take a full roll of unbleached toilet tissue, soak it in water, then stand it on a plate and tip the inoculated wheat into the cetral tube, then you bag the whole thing up and leave it in the airing cupboard(that's the closet where the hot water tank lives) for three weeks, then you take it out (it has transformed into a block of white fluff) and slit holes in the bag, after a few days, the oyster mushrooms pop out of the holes; it is supposed to crop several times, but after the first crop it went mouldy and... hey! there's a pattern emerging here.

[neutron star]

Hmm, see that's what I mean about modifying techniques developed by illegal growers. I got multiple flushes on my first attempt at growing 'shrooms, and so do most other growers. Of course, this could have something to do with either the species I used or my choice of substrate. I don't know. I'm certainly no mycologist. I did try to keep my enviroment as sterile as realistically possible. That could also be a factor.

Assuming some legal species are grown like the magic ones, you can save yourself some money on a kit and easily build your own terrarium dirt cheap with materials from Wal-Mart.

[BadBaby]

My biggest trouble was getting enough moisture. The humidity here is next to nothing, around 4 or 5% sometimes. I gave up and let my neighbor have the kit. He grew lovely mushrooms for a long time by setting it up in an old refrigerator. He could control evaporation better and rigged the lights up with advice from someone who'd done the same thing to grow pot. It's been too long for me to remember more than that, but the general idea might be useful. Or maybe not.

[Primaflora]

We buy bags of mushroom compost, open the top, water, put in dark place and harvest for weeks. Of course they were bogstandard mushies, nothing fancy but it was easy.

When they stopped, I put the compost on the garden.

[don't ask]

Yeah I've used the kits twice. Once for ordinary flats and once for little Japanese straw mushrooms. They cose very little, required no effort and took up virtually no room. Into the compost bin afterward.

[neutron star]

Originally posted by BadBaby
My biggest trouble was getting enough moisture. The humidity here is next to nothing, around 4 or 5% sometimes. I gave up and let my neighbor have the kit. He grew lovely mushrooms for a long time by setting it up in an old refrigerator. He could control evaporation better and rigged the lights up with advice from someone who'd done the same thing to grow pot. It's been too long for me to remember more than that, but the general idea might be useful. Or maybe not.

Even though I do live in a very humid climate (90% to 100% is the norm), it's not too humid in my apartment due to the air conditioning. I solved my problems with perlite. From a page about illegal growing that I can't link to:

Perlite is made of small pieces of extremely porous volcanic rock. If you look at it closely (microscopically) you'll see that it looks like swiss cheese with (relatively) huge holes. When water is added, it is wicked into these pores of the perlite. This porous structure then serves to slowly evaporate the water back into the air. The huge surface area in the micropores of the perlite helps the water evaporate forming a vapor of tiny droplets which tend to stay well in the air, as opposed to the bubbler and humidifier methods which have large droplets which tend to condense. This evaporation process takes a while, which is perfect for our purposes, since we want to prolong the evaporating process as long as possible.

Perlite is available at Wal-Mart in the gardening section. Or at least it was a few years ago when I was doing this stuff. It worked wonderfully - perhaps even too well! I had to vent my terrarium to let some of the moisture out.

[Miss Magic8ball]

My mom has mushroom kits that she buys. They make really good mushrooms, and they're huge.