Not for the gardening novice, mushrooms can be a difficult food to grow. Still, you can produce great crops of them with a little patience and attention to detail. They actually can make a fun indoor growing project if you want to experiment with something different.
What You Need: You’re going to need a box of “substrate”, or possibly even a log from a particular kind of tree. That will depend on the species of mushrooms you want to grow. A typical box of material might be straw, sawdust, shredded newspaper or aged manure. This will be your garden space.
A dark location that you can control the temperature is your next requirement. It will need to be warm, so a basement may not be suitable. Closets work very well as long as there is space to safely add a heater.
Next, you need mushroom seeds, or fine microscopic spores. They come imbedded in wooden plugs called spawn. Find them online or in a specialty store, most gardening stores won’t have them.
How to Grow Mushrooms: Fill up a box with about 12 inches of your substrate material and keep it damp. Press your spawn into the material. If you are growing mushrooms that need a wood substrate, you may need to drill holes in a log to hold the spawn plugs. Keep it in the dark, usually at a temperature around 70F to get things germinating. Check it out after a few weeks. Fine downy fibers should start spreading out from your spawn plugs. Your mushrooms have begun.
Drop the temperature down to 55F, and let them keep growing. You just need to keep the substrate damp and the lights off. There shouldn’t be any problems with insect pests, or any of the other usual issues with garden plants. Just watch the emerging mushrooms. They should look reasonably like the species you want, especially after a few weeks. If they look very different, dump the whole batch at that point and start over.
When your mushrooms are nice and mature, gently pluck them to harvest. If you leave the network of fibers undisturbed under the substrate, they will continue to produce more mushrooms for you.