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Photo Credit: Mary Moore

When my kit arrived, it had a wonderful fragrance. (I couldn’t wait to try it!)

I looked at mushroom-growing kits for years, wondering whether I could actually grow the fungus in my small kitchen or if it would turn into a science disaster. Recently, I decided it was time to give it the ol’ college try.

There were several options available, from kits for growing mushrooms indoors (which would produce mushrooms for several weeks) to plug spawn that gardeners can plant in logs or soil outside (which produce mushrooms at least once a year for several years). There were quite a variety of mushrooms available, too – including portabella, oyster and shitake.

Since this was my first foray into mushroom growing, I wanted to try a fairly easy kit to minimize my mistakes. I bought a shitake mushroom patch from a company called Fungi Perfecti. The Website said that the patch was made from a sterilized medium (substrate) in which the mushroom mycelium was growing. (While I wasn’t exactly sure what this meant at the time, it sounded good.)

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Photo Credit: Mary Moore

After refrigerating the mushroom patch, I soaked it in water for 24 hours to convince it that the rainy season had begun.

When the box arrived, the aroma of the mushroom patch was great. It had a woodsy kind of smell that I associate with leaves breaking down. The kit contained a detailed instruction book with a process map, but I needed some guidance and called the toll-free number on my instruction book. “Julia” from customer service explained to me that I needed to reproduce the shitake mushroom’s native environment to get them started. And if I wasn’t sure if the new mushrooms had started yet, I should refrigerate the bag for a few days to imitate cold weather. If I followed the refrigeration up with a good soak, I’d be able to imitate the rainy season. After that, the mycelium should start producing mushrooms, she said.

Julia also explained that shitake mushrooms are primary decomposers and like fresh, woody material to decompose. As I looked at my kit more closely, I saw that the mycelium on my shitake patch was a white to gray covering and that the patch looked like a solid block of sawdust. The mycelium would break down the sawdust for food and produce mushrooms. The first flush of mushrooms would be small, but by allowing the patch to dry for 2 weeks, then soaking it again, I would be allowing the mycelium to grow. Each flush would get larger until the mycelium was finished.

I couldn’t wait to get started.