Tips for Growing Your Own Cremini Mushrooms
Who doesn’t love the delicious and good for your body Cremini mushrooms? If you love the store-bought Cremini mushroom, why not grow your own Cremini mushroom for better flavor. Since the food supply chain is suffering, why not grow your own gourmet mushrooms and become more independent. Who needs to go to the store to pick up that mushroom when you can harvest fresh in your home. Do you remember when the grocery store shelves were picked clean in 2020, with no end in sight, you can begin to grow your own Cremini mushroom and take care of yourself, your family and your neighborhood. Save time, save gas, save money, eat better, and improve your health. But it’s definitely still comfortable enough that any beginner who wants to give it a try should be able to find success.
1. Get a Growing Medium for your Cremini Mushrooms
To produce Cremini mushrooms a growing medium is needed. Because Cremini mushrooms are not green, this means that they do not have chlorophyll like plants. The Cremini mushroom gets all of their nutrients out of the medium they’re growing in. This means a nutrient-rich growing medium is necessary.
But on the bright side, you do not need to worry about sunlight or artificial light with Cremini mushrooms like you would with plants or microgreens. The Cremini mushroom does not employ photosynthesis and you save money on your electric bill.
The recommended growing medium for cremini mushrooms is compost made with dried poultry waste, straw, gypsum, water, and canola meal. The ingredients are blended together and placed into “tunnels” where air is forced through the material. Temperatures and oxygen levels are closely managed until the compost is ready for pasteurizing. The use of tunnels to prepare compost is new technology in North America.
The compost is then pasteurized to kill off any bacteria or other types of fungal spores that may already be present in the medium.
2. Adding Cremini Mushroom Spawn
Cremini mushroom spawn is grain that has been colonized with a pure culture of mushroom fungus. Cremini spawn is a concentrated culture of mycelium that has been colonized over the period of several weeks. The spawn is mixed evenly into the compost. Over the next two weeks, under carefully managed conditions of temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide, the thread-like mushroom fungus, called mycelium, begins to grow through the compost.
For the next few weeks, proper humidity, temperature, and CO2 levels are essential for the spawn and compost to allow the mycelium to fully develop throughout the compost.
Once the compost looks fully colonized with mycelium, to help provide extra water for the developing mushrooms, a damp layer of peat moss is added over the top like a blanket for a sleeping baby. This layer is a moisture-rich growing soil consisting of peat moss, sugar beet lime and water, and provides a water reservoir for the growing mushrooms.
3. Cremini Mushroom Formation
After several more weeks, the mushrooms will begin to form. Most induced mushrooms are grown at Commercial Farms to reduce grow time and produce a high yield.
Called pinning, to trigger the mycelium into starting to produce fruit bodies, the temperature, oxygen, CO2 and humidity levels in the grow room are adjusted.
In a little more than a week, small itty bitty mushroom pinheads pop up on the soil. Once the mushrooms have pinned, they grow rapidly. by day twelve the mushrooms are mature enough to pick. Every 24 hours, the cremini mushrooms will nearly double in size. They should reach the cremini stage and be mature enough to pick in just over 4 more days.
4. Picking and Harvesting Cremini Mushrooms
Picking mushrooms is still done by hand. In large operations, picking and packing might take place every day of the year. To cleanly harvest mature cremini mushrooms, a sharp and clean knife is best, with cutting the Cremini mushroom at the stem.
Avoid yanking and pulling up your mushrooms, as you may damage the mycelium as well as surrounding mushrooms that are still developing.
If you’re growing mushrooms at home, I recommend waiting until just before you need to use them to harvest.
5. Cremini Mushroom Kits
If the idea of inoculating your own growing medium and dealing with the risk of contamination seems like too much to deal with, you can buy pre-inoculated mushroom kits that are ready to go.
This is a great choice if you’re a hobbyist just looking to try growing mushrooms for the first time.
Mushroom Grow Kits allow you to skip right up to the mushroom formation step.
Often all you need to do is cut a small hole in the bag and gently mist the growing medium with water each day, and you should start to see mushrooms begin to develop after a week or so.
Sometimes if you are growing the Cremini mushrooms in the colder months, you can help the mushrooms grow faster by using a heating pad underneath the soil to try to raise the soil temperature to around 70 F.
6. Growing Cremini Mushrooms from store-bought stems! SAVE Time & Money!
It was a dark, cool and stormy night, a great place and time to grow Cremini mushrooms! Mushroom growing at home requires a cool, dark, damp place. Just remember to warn your housemates and family, so there are no surprises when they open the door to the closet, cabinet or go down to the basement.
Typically, this will be in a basement, but an unused cabinet or closet will also work — anywhere you can create near darkness and control temperature and humidity.
When growing mushrooms from store bought stems, the process is quicker because you don’t need to rely on spores and can use the mycelium already on the fungi.
Store bought mushroom propagation is quite easy, but you should choose fungi from organic sources. Propagating store bought mushrooms from the ends just requires a good fruiting medium, moisture and the proper growing environment.
You have probably seen mycelium in an overly moist compost bed or even just when digging up soil. The mycelium “fruits” and produces the fungi. Mycelium bunches up into primordia, which forms mushrooms. The primordia and mycelia are still found in harvested mushrooms at the stem where it once grew in contact with soil. This can be used to produce clones of the mushroom. Simply propagating store bought mushrooms should produce edible copies of the parent fungi.
For our purposes, we will use straw as our bedding. Soak the straw for a couple of days and then pull it out of the container. You can use any moistened cellulose material for the bedding, such as hamster bedding or even shredded cardboard.
Now you need a couple of fat and healthy cremini mushrooms.
- Separate the ends from the tops. The ends are where the fuzzy, white mycelium is located. Cut the ends into small pieces. The best size for growing mushrooms from store bought stems is ¼ inch (6 mm.).
- You can use a cardboard box, paper bags or even a plastic bin to layer your medium. Place some of the straw or other moist material at the bottom and add mushroom end pieces. Do another layer until the container is full. The idea is to keep all the medium and mycelium damp and in the dark where temperatures are 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (18-23 C.).
- To this end, add a layer of plastic with holes poked in it over the box. If you used a plastic container, top with a lid and poke holes in that for air flow. Mist the medium if it looks like it is getting dry. After about 2 to 4 weeks, the mycelium should be ready to fruit. Tent plastic over the medium to preserve moisture but allow the fungi to form. In about 19 days, you should be harvesting your very own mushrooms.
- Place the growing medium in a pan and raise the temperature of the area to about 70 F. (21 C.). A heating pad works well. Place the spawn on the growing medium. In about three weeks, the spawn will have “rooted”, meaning the filaments will have spread into the growing medium. Once this occurs, drop the temperature to between 55 and 60 F. (13-16 C.). This is the best temperature for growing mushrooms. Then, cover the spawn with an inch (2.5 cm.) or so of potting soil. Cover the soil and pan with a damp cloth and spray the cloth with water as it dries.
- Spritz the soil with water when it is dry to the touch. In three to four weeks, you should see small mushrooms appear.
- Mushrooms are ready for harvesting when the cap has fully opened and has separated from the stem.
Many mushroom growers agree that mushroom growing at home produces a better flavored mushroom than what you’ll ever find at the store. Enjoy your own gourmet grown mushrooms!
