While some types of mushrooms cannot yet be systematically bred and propagated, other types of edible mushrooms such as button mushrooms and oyster mushrooms also offer beginners quick cultivation success.
Which mushrooms can you plant yourself and how do you do it?
Varieties such as brown and white mushrooms, shiitake, king oyster mushroom, brown cap and lime mushroom are suitable for planting mushrooms. You need a climatically suitable place, growing substrate and fungal spores or vaccination sticks. Mushrooms grow independently of light, but require appropriate temperatures and humidity.
Which varieties are suitable for growing in the garden and cellar?
The most important thing for growing mushrooms in your own garden or cellar is a place that offers the respective mushroom variety suitable conditions for its growth. Examples of suitable varieties for growing at home are:
- Brown mushrooms
- White mushrooms
- Shiitake
- Herb mushroom
- Browncaps
- Lime mushroom
While the lime mushroom is usually cultivated on a piece of wood or a tree trunk, mushrooms find their ideal home on soaked bales of straw or on coconut substrate.
What do you need to grow mushrooms?
In addition to the right place with a uniform microclimate and temperatures of around 15 to 20 degrees Celsius, you also need a suitable growing substrate and the spores for inoculating the material to grow mushrooms. You can purchase partially finished growing sets from specialist retailers (€33.00 on Amazon), in which the substrate has already been inoculated with fungal spores and only needs to be watered. However, you can also purchase spores in the form of rods, from which the fungal mycelium can spread through the bale of straw or the coconut substrate.
Do mushrooms need light to grow?
Fundamentally, fungi do not carry out photosynthesis, but rather obtain some of their energy to grow as mycorrhizal fungi from a symbiosis with various tree and plant species. This means that the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms develop independently of the light, although sunlight as a supply of heat can promote the growth of the mushrooms. Mushrooms can be grown just as well in a light greenhouse, although a dark cellar offers better conditions for growing mushrooms due to the more uniform temperature and humidity values.
Tips & Tricks
Mushrooms can usually only be settled in a desired location with suitable spore sets in the form of inoculation sticks. However, with a bit of luck you can also have success if you mix leftover unwashed and uncooked edible mushrooms with the soil in a shady and moist place in the garden. The attached fungal spores can cause the fungi to multiply under the right conditions.
