Grow Your Own Mushrooms

Are you crazy about fresh mushrooms, but find picking them in the wild a little tricky? Especially for the kitchen-counter farmers among us, various grow kits are now available that let you grow fresh mushrooms at home. And you really don’t need to have green fingers for that.

Reading the Coffee Grounds

With Rotterzwam’s grow kit, you can grow oyster mushrooms at home on coffee grounds. Simply on your kitchen counter, windowsill or balcony. You can use leftover coffee from a percolator, espresso machine or drip coffee maker. Even Senseo pods do the trick. Coffee grounds are packed with nutrients, making them an easy and fertile soil for your home-grown mushrooms.

Oyster Mushrooms

The kit consists of a bucket with small holes through which the oyster mushrooms can grow, a lid and a little spawn. Spawn is the part of the oyster mushroom that lies underground (or, in this case, in the coffee grounds). It is an ingenious network of fungal threads from which oyster mushrooms grow towards the light like flowers. You can see what that looks like here. The only other thing you need is a little patience.

You can harvest several times with this grow kit, so after harvesting the first mushrooms, simply leave the bucket standing until no more oyster mushrooms appear. Enthusiastic? Then you don’t have to order another entire bucket, just a bag of spawn. Do empty the bucket before starting the next growing cycle with fresh coffee grounds.

Shiitake Log

Going for the true forest-ranger experience? Then try a small growing log for shiitakes. Submerge the growing log thoroughly in water a few times and place it upright in the garden or on the balcony in a shady spot from May through early November. Don’t throw it away after picking the first shiitakes, because you can harvest several times from this one too. You can get such a cute little log, for example, from the IVN online shop or at the Rotterdam city shop STEK.

Rather Lazy Than Tired?

Not in the mood for the mess and hassle of logs and coffee grounds? With the ready-to-use growing kits from Minichamp, everything is already taken care of: the spawn, the growing medium, and convenient packaging. And you can choose from lots of varieties and sizes. From white or brown button mushrooms to yellow, grey or king oyster mushrooms and shiitakes. In 3-, 5- and 15-litre packages.

Image: Rotterzwam