Tip No.6: Grow gourmet or Growing Mushrooms for Medicinal.
There are many different ways you can Growing Mushrooms where you live, and which method works best for you will depend on various factors, as with growing anything… your time, space, budget, climate and so on.
BUT as we all know; mushrooms will find a way. Nearly always. So, it’s just a matter of figuring out what techniques will work for you, and getting growing!
Mushroom Woodchip Garden
This method is perfect for that shady, damp spot that you can’t figure out what to plant there – maybe it’s under a fruit tree, or around the back, next to the laundry.
Wherever it is, as long as that spot doesn’t get a lot of daily foot traffic, a mushroom woodchip garden might be just the ticket.
Shiitake Logs
If you don’t have much space but can get hold of a few fresh logs, some shiitake spawn and a drill, shiitake logs might be a space-efficient way to get some home-grown mushrooms happening.
You can use just about any hardwood logs for this, though shiitake grows best on oak, poplar and beech logs. We use eucalypt logs because that’s what’s available where we live, and they work fine.
Bucket or Basket Mushroom Gardens
Then there’s the bucket growing option, another one of our favourite mushroom cultivation techniques for space and/or garden poor folks.
While most of this method doesn’t usually occur in a garden (although it can), we often put our fruiting buckets outside in the garden somewhere shady and damp to finish fruiting.
Integrated Gardens
One of our favourite ways to grow mushrooms is to tuck them in, here and there and everywhere around the garden.
A little bit here, a little bit there. Enokitake mushrooms love growing as the base of currant bushes, for example. Saffron milk caps are happiest (and only grow, infact) under pines.
There’s lots of ways to get things growing. You could mix up a slurry of porcini mushrooms (old ones that weren’t good enough to eat) and try inoculating a few local oaks, like our friend Speedy (or Paul Ward, as his Mum calls him) recently did.
Or you could make a mushroom garden bundle, which is a gorgeous way to bring new life to mushroomed corners of your patch…
There is always a demand for mushrooms to sell at local markets or mushroom growing packs can be made up and sold as well.
Another money maker is fresh unusual mushrooms for the local restaurants . Always very much in demand
