- Here’s An Opinion On:
- 40 Foot Container
Submitted by: TJ Maiangowi
I would like to start by saying mushroom gardening can be both fun and lucrative, no matter how big or small the operation. Shroom cultivation needs growth medium. How to make commercial growth medium is easy enough, and can considerably cut your costs when growing mushrooms. However, creating it can be a reasonably lengthy process, and you need to think about whether you’ll actually be growing mushies on that large a scale. If you are, then making your own growth medium is just about the best thing that you can do. It depends on the quantity you wish to grow and on the amount of space you have available. If you’re just getting started and would like to study the process, I would suggest that you buy one of the mushroom starter kits. These starter kits usually provide you with a container to grow the mushrooms in, a growth medium, and of course the spores or spawns (mycelium). Generally speaking, growing shrooms from such a kit is extremely easy.
You can sometimes get a good many fruit bodies from a single batch of growth medium and spawn, and they can provide some very nutritious and tasty meals for your family. So a mushroom growing kit is a great idea if you like mushies, or even if you want to learn the basics of farming them. But if you want to grow them on a larger scale, you’re going to need more space. Of course they don’t take up too much space to begin with, but you still need the bare minimum.
You can either buy growing mixture and spawn, or you can make your own growing mixture and buy the spawn, just as you wish. After you go through the process, you will learn how to create your own spawn and keep it on hand for further growing. Making your own growing mixture is likely to lower your operating costs if you’re at all thinking of commercial mushroom growing.
So, if you’re going to be growing a lot of shrooms, but not necessarily on a commercial basis, then perhaps buying some growth medium when you need it is a better way to go. Remember that with mycology farming you can’t just use soil, because mushrooms are rich in protein, and so use up a lot of nitrogen. Well, in case you decide you want to go in for commercial mush growing, here’s how you go about preparing it.
Firstly, growth medium consists of a roughly equal quantity of manure and straw. These need to be mixed thoroughly in a large, flat container with holes in the bottom. As you mix these two ingredients, you need to keep adding a third in, which is gypsum. After the mixture is well mixed, all you need to do is to throw some burlap sacking over it. This sacking keeps the heat that the mixture generates inside. You need to check the temperature of this mixture at regular intervals – perhaps once every day.
The temperature will climb. When it touches about a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit, you should remove the sacking and remix the pile thoroughly. A meat thermometer works well for checking the internal temperature. Spray water on to the pile thoroughly while mixing it. Now you need to put the burlap sacking back on the pile and to wet it completely. Once again repeat the whole process, checking the temperature of the pile every day. When the temperature climbs as before, repeat the remixing process.
This process needs to be repeated at least four times. At some point the pile will not smell of ammonia any more. It will also take on a distinctive fluffy quality instead of looking sticky. Now it is almost ready to use. You now need to cover the manure with the burlap sacking and then wet the sacking thoroughly. After this, just leave it alone for a week. At this point the mushroom growing medium is ready, and just needs to be put into the containers for you to be able to plant your mushrooms in it (inoculation). If you can do that, you can have quite a few batches of shrooms set up and growing right at once. This will work for magic, morel, shiitake, oyster, and most other edible mushrooms. I wish you the best of luck with your organic gardening.
Materials mentioned in this article:
Option 1:
-Shroom growing kit (container to grow in, growth medium, spores or spawn)
Option 2:
-Growth medium (manure, straw, gypsum)
– Large, flat container with holes in the bottom
– Burlap sacking
– Meat thermomete
-Wate
-Spawn or spores
About the Author: Learn the secrets of how you can successfully farm shrooms at home with minimal costs. The good news is that if you manage to maintain the environment, and let’s face it, it isn’t that hard to do, mushroom gardening can be pretty effortless. So long as you get the environment right, you can be assured that your mushies will give you little or no trouble. And that’s what we like to focus on; homemade growing chambers or automated microclimates that mimic conditions that mushrooms experience in the wild. My name is TJ and I ve been studying different facts of mushroom cultivation since I was 23 years old. Get started with the fun today!
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