Three Ways to Grow Mushrooms in Your Backyard
Why Grow Mushrooms
Mushrooms are rapidly becoming a go-to food source for those wishing to eat a nutrient-dense diet that has low environmental impact. Mushrooms are high enough in protein to be a significant part of a plant-based diet. They are also full of nutrients and medicinal compounds, allowing us to stack the functions of food and medicine.
Mushrooms are also surprisingly easy and low-cost to grow. Many people tell us they feel intimidated by the idea of growing mushrooms, even though they’ve been growing vegetables for years. There’s an idea out there that only experts can grow mushrooms. And while certain aspects of the mushroom cultivation process can be tricky, there are plenty of ways for beginners to have easy success.
That’s why we tend to focus our teaching on low-tech mushroom cultivation methods that you can do at home. These methods use materials often considered “waste” from other agricultural or garden projects and so contribute not only food and medicine but also recycling of carbonaceous matter.
Below are three of our favorite and most often used low-tech methods for growing mushrooms at home. We cover all of these in our weekend workshop Backyard Mushrooms.
Growing on Logs
This is the method most people are familiar with. It is very popular and for good reason. Growing on logs gives you maximum production rates. One log (depending on species and size) can often produce mushrooms regularly for 7 to 10 years. You do the work once and then literally let it sit around in the forest and just go harvest your crop from time to time.
This incredible longevity comes from the density of the substrate - the wood. It takes a long time for the mycelium you introduce into the log to eat through all of that cellulose and lignin. Many species of mushroom grow naturally on wood in various states of decay. When we grow on logs we are mimicking this natural process so it takes very little human intervention. This is also the reason it can take up to a year to see your first flush of fruiting bodies. If you are in a hurry, this probably isn’t the method for you, in which case we suggest you try straw (see below).
If you have some shade in your yard (or space on the north side of your house where the logs will get rained on) then you can use this method. If you don’t have much shade or you don’t plan to be in the same location 7 years from now then one of the other methods may be better for you.
Shiitakes growing in our forest on two year old oak logs
If you have access to logs then this is a great method for you, especially if you have a chainsaw and can cut them to the right length. We never cut live trees in order to grow mushrooms - there is enough cutting going on that usually we can find logs that have been cut recently for other reasons.
In order to grow mushrooms on logs you need to first make sure you have the correct species of wood for the mushrooms you want to grow, then cut them to the right size. Don’t work with the logs within the first 2 weeks of cutting as the tree’s natural anti-fungal chemicals are still circulating. Do make sure to inoculate them before 8 weeks; after that time too many other wild fungi will have inhabited the log, making it much harder for the species you want to introduce to get a hold.
After ensuring you have the correct wood species and that your log is within the proper time frame, drill holes into the logs and introduce mushroom mycelium in the form of either wooden plugs or sawdust spawn.
The next step is to seal the hole over with wax to stop little critters getting in and eating it. Then you put them out in the forest to get wet.
In the Southern Appalachians that is all we need to do. In drier areas you may have to soak the logs before putting them out and spray them with water if it hasn’t rained in the last two weeks.
Using this method, we’re able to grow Shiitakes, Lion’s Mane, Reishi, Oysters, Chicken-of-the-Woods and Maitake on logs regularly.
Growing on Straw
The primary advantage of growing on straw is speed. You can have mushrooms within the first 3-4 weeks in the right conditions. But you will only get 2, maybe 3 flushes of mushrooms before the substrate (the straw in this case) is spent. It’s a very different time cycle than growing on logs, but we use it to fill in the gaps between log-grown harvests.
The other advantage of growing on straw is that straw is essentially a waste product of larger agricultural practices. By using it to grow mushrooms, we are recycling those waste nutrients back into human food and medicine. At the end of the mushroom cycle there’s still plenty of straw to use as garden compost.
We tend to grow various types of Oyster mushrooms on straw because a) they grow easily on straw and b) they neutralize any petrochemicals present on the straw. This second reason is very important for bigger picture ecological health. Most commercially available straw is not organic certified and has likely been sprayed with chemicals. If the straw is used for mulch or animal bedding those harmful chemicals remain in the environment. If we run it through oyster mycelium first those chemicals are reduced to harmless carbon and hydrogen molecules. The best part is that the Oyster mushrooms you harvest don’t contain anything harmful either!
Blue Oysters just starting to fruit off straw in our grow room
The process is fairly simple. Firstly, we pasteurize the straw to remove most competitive pathogens. Then we inoculate the straw with sawdust spawn and stuff it into plastic bags. we seal the bags at either end and puncture tiny holes in them for air exchange.
In the summer these bags can sit outside in the shade. In cooler temperatures then can be bought into a basement or garage. We put them in our climate controlled grow room.
Within 2-3 weeks you will start to see the mycelium run (see photo) then you can cut larger slits in the bag to let the fruiting bodies grow out into the fresh air.
Oysters are delicious and also carry bountiful medicinal qualities.
Growing on Wood Chips
If you find yourself with a pile of wood chips after a yard project then this is a great option. It can take 6-12 months for you to get mushrooms from wood chips depending on species and climate, but once you have a patch established you can keep expanding it to get more and more mushrooms.
Our favorite species to grow on wood chips is King Stropharia (Wine Caps). They are delicious and grow easily in our region. Blewits are another easy one to grow on wood chips.
King Stropharia just harvested from a wood chip patch in the forest
To grow your mushrooms on wood chips, get a good bag full of mature wood chips and inoculate with sawdust spawn. Let them sit for a couple of weeks then add them to a larger bed of fresh wood chips (about 100 sq ft) in the shade. Leave them to do their thing.
In a few weeks, go poke around under the surface and you should see white strands of mycelium starting to run. Cover them back up and let them be. The following fall or spring you will start to see delicious mushrooms popping up. Get to them before the slugs do!
To expand the patch or start a patch in a new location, take some of the already inoculated wood chips and mix them with an approximately equal quantity of fresh wood chips, then let them rest.
This is a great way to edge your shady pathways so you can harvest mushrooms as you walk around the forest!
We teach these methods frequently. If you want to learn how to use all of these methods at home, consider joining us for the next Backyard Mushrooms Workshop and Campout (camping optional!) on the farm.