Life

The Casual Gardener: A quick guide on how to grow mushrooms at home

Author of Grow Your Own Mushrooms Folko Kullmann outlines how to grow your own shiitake mushrooms

You can cultivate shiitake on logs in the garden or on ready-made substrates indoors
You can cultivate shiitake on logs in the garden or on ready-made substrates indoors You can cultivate shiitake on logs in the garden or on ready-made substrates indoors

MUSHROOMS are nutritious, rich in B vitamins, copper, potassium and selenium. They are also delicious, versatile and easy to grow. You can grow them almost

anywhere indoors or out. Even better, you can dry or bottle them to preserve them to enjoy all year round. So now it’s time to up your game and get growing. Grow Your Own Mushrooms will walk you through the process, step by step.

Growing and harvesting your own produce gives you a great feeling and the taste of homegrown, organic food is like nothing else. The best thing is, mushrooms

can be grown almost anywhere – indoors in the bathroom, on a windowsill, under the stairs or in a basement, and outdoors: in shady spots in your garden or

balcony.

There are so many varieties to choose from, but the ideal mushrooms for beginners are low-maintenance ones that grow quickly and are suitable for cooking in a variety of ways, like Shiitake, Oyster and the beautifully named Sheathed Woodtuft.

Shiitake are not only extremely flavoursome, they also have proven health benefits. The name 'shiitake' comes from Japanese and means “mushroom (take) that grows on the Castanopsis tree (shii)”. In the wild, this species grows on the dead trunks and branches of deciduous trees in the forests of China and Japan. It is the most widely grown edible variety after the button mushroom.

The light-to-dark-brown cap of the shiitake often bears white marks and can grow to a diameter of up to 10cm. The stem is firmer and up to 8cm long. The gills range from hues of white to cream. The flesh is flavoursome and maintains its firm texture even when cooked.

You can cultivate shiitake on logs in the garden, on ready-made substrates indoors, or in a basement or cellar. Depending on the type of wood used outdoors, you should be able to harvest the logs for several years. Only use logs from deciduous trees felled in the autumn or winter. Birch, poplar, willow, copper beech, hornbeam, oak and maple are ideal. The latter three last for a long time due to the hardness of their wood, and can produce yields for four to five years. Soft woods will be brittle and depleted after three years.

To inoculate the logs, you should insert the grain spawn into saw-cut surfaces or cut grooves, with three cuts or grooves for every metre of log (one cut for every foot). Alternatively, you can beat plugs into pre-drilled holes and then seal them with wax. In this case, 25–50 plugs are required per metre (8–16 plugs per foot) of log. A relatively new invention is the special mycelium patches that you simply place on to the cut surfaces.

For a ready-made substrate, mix sterilised wood shavings or sawdust from deciduous trees with grain spawn and transfer the mixture to plastic bags.

If you opt to cultivate the mushroom on logs, it will take about a year, and sometimes even two years, before you can harvest them for the first time. After that, you can harvest the log for up to five years. Shiitake logs can remain outside the whole year: simply cover over in winter. If you’re growing shiitake in a ready- made substrate, the first fruiting bodies will appear after just one or two weeks at a temperature of 10–22C .

Depending on the size and volume of the growing container, you will be able to harvest them in batches over the following four to five months.

:: Grow Your Own Mushrooms by Folko Kullmann is published by Green Books (greenbooks.co.uk).