Growing
The only way to eat a mushroom with no identification risk at all.
You know what it is because you inoculated it. For anyone nervous about foraging, and everyone sensible is nervous about foraging, this is the answer rather than a hobby sideline. It also teaches you what healthy mycelium and a proper pinning cluster look like, which is knowledge that travels straight back into the woods.
Ready-to-fruit kit
Somebody else did the difficult part. You cut the bag, mist it twice a day and harvest in two weeks. Nothing here can go badly wrong and it is the right first step.
Anyone
Oyster mushrooms from a kit
Pleurotus ostreatus
- First harvest
- 10 to 16 days
- Keeps going
- Two or three flushes, then compost it
Humidity, and nothing else. A block that dries out stops pinning and never restarts. If the young pins are shrivelling or aborting, you are misting too little, every time.
Species sheet: Oyster mushroom
Anyone
Lion's mane from a kit
Hericium erinaceus
- First harvest
- 12 to 20 days
- Keeps going
- Two flushes typically
Harvest timing. Lion's mane goes from perfect to yellow and sour in about two days, and people wait because it is still visibly growing.
Species sheet: Lion's mane
Sawdust block
A sterilised block you colonise yourself from spawn. The step where sterile technique starts to matter, and where most first failures happen.
Some practice
King oyster on a sawdust block
Pleurotus eryngii
- First harvest
- 5 to 8 weeks
- Keeps going
- Usually one good flush, occasionally two
Sterile technique at inoculation, and a genuine pressure cooker. This is the step where hobby cultivation gets real, and contamination at inoculation is the single reason most first attempts fail.
Species sheet: King oyster
Some practice
Reishi on a block
Ganoderma species
- First harvest
- 8 to 14 weeks
- Keeps going
- One long fruiting
Carbon dioxide decides the shape, which is the most directly visible demonstration of environmental control in cultivation. It is also not food: reishi is corky and used as a bitter decoction.
Species sheet: Reishi, lingzhi
Hardwood logs
Slow and then generous. Drill, plug, wax, wait a year, and harvest from the same log for five or six. Almost no ongoing work and almost no contamination risk, because the log is not sterile and was never meant to be.
Outdoor bed
Spawn spread through wood chips or straw in a shaded corner of a garden. Fruits for years, needs nothing, and produces more than a household can eat.
Straw or coffee
Pasteurised rather than sterilised, which is far more forgiving than it sounds. The classic bucket-of-straw oyster grow, and spent coffee grounds work for the same reason.