Who doesn’t love the delicious and good for your body mushrooms? If you love the store-bought mushroom, why not grow your own mushrooms, also known as Fungiculture, for better flavor or hunt for wild edible mushrooms. 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 or hunt for the wild. 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 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 easy enough that any beginner who wants to give it a try should be able to find. It was a dark, cool and stormy night, a great place and time to grow 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.
Growing your own mushrooms at home is easy if you purchase a complete kit or just spawn and then inoculate your own substrate. Things get a little more difficult if you are making your own mushroom cultures and spawn, which require a sterile environment involving a pressure cooker or autoclave. However you start them, the question of when to harvest the mushrooms will inevitably come to pass.Read on to learn how to harvest mushrooms at home.
When to Harvest Mushrooms
If you buy a complete mushroom kit, the instructions will give a time frame for picking your mushroom harvest. This is really an estimate since, depending upon conditions, the mushrooms may be ready to pick a couple days earlier or later than the instructed date. Also, size is not an indicator of when to pick. Bigger isn’t always better.Best to take accurate notes and calendar when you started the mushroom kit and expected dates to spray and harvest the mushroom, plus the temperature of the mushroom growing area. This information will help you determine when your mushroom maybe ready to harvest. Yum! Yummy! Yummiest!
How to Harvest Mushrooms at Home
There is no great mystery to harvesting your mushrooms, although there is some debate amongst amateur mycologists or mushroom fans who hunt for outdoor species. The debate revolves around whether to cut the fruit or twist and pull the mushroom from the mycelium. Realistically, it makes no difference. Home growers can harvest in either manner, either plucking the fruit by hand or cutting it. In the case of the home mushroom kit however, there is no need to allow the mushrooms to drop spores, so if you see a white “dust” dropping onto the surface below the colony, harvest them. The white “dust” is spores and that means the fruit is mature. Picking mature mushroom fruit will definitely taste better!
When Foraging
Make sure to pick mushrooms that are mature to a point that they have distributed most of their spores so the species will continue to prosper. We want the mushroom species to prosper and continue to grow so that next year you can visit the same location and hunt and find the mushroom again. Maybe mark on a map or GPS, where you found the wild mushroom, so that next year’s time you can find that exact location again and hopefully find more wild mushrooms growing.
Home Growers
Home growers can harvest in either manner, either plucking the fruit by hand or cutting it. The general rule of thumb is to begin picking your mushroom harvest when the caps turn from convex to concave – turning down to turning up.
- Oyster mushroom harvesting should occur 3-5 days after you see the first mushrooms begin to form. You are looking for the cap of the largest mushroom in the group to go from turning down at the edges to turning up or flattening out at the edges.
- Once the edge of the caps of the Oyster mushroom starts to flatten out or turn upwards, it’s time to harvest before they begin dropping lots of spores.
- This can be difficult to judge the first time around, but you soon get a feel for it.
- A couple of tips: if you see them stop growing any bigger, starting to dry out, or dropping lots of spores just as the edge of the mushroom caps begin to flatten out. It is harvesting time! Get ready for mushroom yumminess! Pizza with mushrooms! Burgers topped with mushrooms! Potstickers with mushrooms!
- You can either twist them off with your hands or cut the cluster off with a knife.
- Shiitake mushrooms are grown on logs and that is how they’re sold as kits. You can establish a shitake garden by cutting your own logs during the mushroom’s dormant season and then inoculating them yourself. The latter option requires patience, since mushroom harvesting won’t take place for 6-12 months!
- If you purchase pre-inoculated Shiitake logs or sawdust blocks for your home, they should fruit right away. A couple of days after you see the first signs of growth, they will begin to cap. Three days later or so, you will have the first good sized shiitakes ready to harvest. Picking your shiitakes mushroom harvest will take place over time and, with proper care, shiitake logs can produce for 4-6 years, maybe even longer.
Harvesting Mushrooms at Home
After this, the temperature is kept steady at 18 degrees Celsius. Mushrooms grow best at this temperature; they will grow 3 cm (1 inch) in a week, which is the normal size for harvesting. In week 3 the first flush is harvested. Mushrooms destined for selling fresh are still harvested by hand; mushrooms destined for preserving are being picked and sorted mechanically. Although hand-picking is a lot of work, it offers the best guarantee that the mushrooms will be removed from the beds undamaged. On average, a picker can harvest between 18 and 30 kilos of mushrooms an hour. The mushrooms are picked from the beds with a rotating motion and sorted by the pickers based on quality, size and weight. Nine days after the first flush, the second flush will be harvested. The second flush often consists of larger, but fewer mushrooms than the first flush.
After the second flush of mushrooms has been picked, the cells need to be cleaned. First the cell is pasteurized with steam to kill any remaining fungus to ensure that there is no transfer from cycle to cycle. During steam-cleaning, the temperature in the cells reaches 70 degrees Celsius for eight hours. After steam-pasteurization, the compost is removed from the beds. The empty cell is thoroughly cleaned one more time and then it is ready to be filled again.
HOW TO HARVEST WILD MUSHROOMS – CUTTING V PICKING
There are two schools of thought among foragers on the best way to actually “pick” a mushroom. One asserts that fruit bodies should be cut off where they join the ground (or whatever they are growing from) so as not to damage the delicate mycelium below. The other prefers to twist and pull the mushroom from the mycelium. I have heard it argued that this stops the residual stump left by cutting from rotting and “infecting” the mycelium. This is clearly ridiculous as all fungi will rot away eventually if left to their own devices. Please remember to bring a sturdy backpack or duffle bag to transport your found wild mushrooms. If you find some large maitake mushrooms in your hunt, you might need an extra large duffle bag, because some hunters have found maitake mushrooms weighing over 25 pounds each.
Mushroom Cultivation is a true profession
Mushroom farms receive the spawn in the exact composition they requested. The same goes for the casing. However, this doesn’t mean that mushroom growers of today have an easy life. Mushroom cultivation is not just a matter of setting the climate control dials and waiting for the mushrooms to grow. Compost is and will always be a natural product, and no matter how hard compost factories try to deliver a constant quality, there will always be differences in each delivered truckload of compost. The structure might be a little coarser or finer, the humidity a little higher or lower. The grower has to determine the exact conditions of the compost (by smelling, feeling and looking) and adjust the growing process accordingly. Mushroom cultivation is a true profession, and the knowledge of the grower determines his success.
Congratulations on harvesting your mushrooms either through hunting wild mushrooms or growing your own! Either way of harvesting your mushrooms, a delicious adventure is about to begin!