Tony Fawcett: How to grow your own mushrooms at home

It’s mushroom season, and for an outlay of less than $50 for a kit you can have an abundance of them.

DON’T you love those stories of kids who latch on to a home business idea and become millionaires in their teens?

I do.

In fact, that’s what got me into mushroom growing at 14.

I thought raising mushrooms seemed dead easy and with a little perseverance I would be a mushroom millionaire in no time.

It made so much sense. All our friends loved them, so there was an obvious demand.

I threw my heart and soul into it, building up beds of manure and straw in the dark of my parents’ old shed, introducing mushroom spawn bought bottled via mail order, taking daily temperature readings of the mix, watering religiously and maintaining operating theatre-like sterile conditions.

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When masses of lush mushies began popping up I was mentally counting my millions.

Sadly, millionaire-dom evaded me.

I had neglected one important aspect: marketing. And while I dallied on that, my good-natured Mum, bless her soul, thought she might well offer FREE brown paper bags of my mushies to any friends who visited.

Hordes availed themselves.

In quick time my business went out the door, literally.

Picture Yuri Kouzmin

I was devastated. But looking back today I recognise that growing those mushrooms was one of the greatest satisfactions of my gardening life.

For those wanting to do similar, the joys are still there, although now it’s a lot easier.

You can do it my way, of course, but for the average family you need little more than an off-the-shelf mushroom growing kit.

These boxed kits, which cost less than $50, come with compost and the fungal organism mycelium from which mushrooms grow.

All you need do is water and within a few weeks homegrown mushrooms are yours.

Back then I was growing the common field type mushroom beloved by autumn mushroom foragers, but these days the choice is wide.

Available from specialist growers are grow bags or boxes to produce all manner of luscious fungi, including gourmet oyster and shiitake mushrooms in colours including yellows, pinks, whites, greys, pearl and tan.

Grow kits contain a compost/straw mix and spawn, or grain inoculated with mycelium, the vegetative part of fungus from which mushrooms grow.

I grew a couple of these kits in our bathroom and found them a cinch.

About the only problem was the mushrooms were so prolific there was no way we could eat them all.

In fact they grew so quickly that for a time our bathroom resembled science fiction thriller The Day of the Triffids, in which an aggressive plant species starts taking over the world.

Thankfully, we didn’t quite reach that diabolical stage.

So do be warned. Plan ahead and line up a few mushroom lovers to share your bounty.

There are kits for outdoor growing, and ones like ours that are best grown indoors with indirect sunlight.

Of course, there’s still the option of picking your own from the fields and forests. We’ve already had edible mushrooms on our property northwest of Melbourne, with the season running to late May.

I recall years ago returning home soon after we bought to find our paddock, comprising an old Pinus radiata plantation, filled with head-bowed fossickers of generally European extraction.

Not knowing what was going on, I approached and demanded to know what they were doing on our land.

“Picking orange mushrooms,” they told me.

After politely suggesting it might have been polite to first seek permission, one fellow apologised and promised to return with a jar of his pickings.

True to his word, he was back a week later, proffering a jar of glowing orange saffron milk cap or pine mushrooms (Lactarius delicious), advising they would be sensational in a pasta.

He wasn’t wrong.

WARNING: Australia has many toxic fungi so never eat any if not 100 per cent certain they are edible.