Fun with fungi

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EDIBLE MUSHROOMS AND HOW TO GROW YOUR OWN

- Claire Bickle

As the homegrown movement gathers pace, mushroom growing is definitely on trend.

And with good reason. Mushrooms are easy to grow with a little knowhow. They’re quick to crop, cost effective, virtually pest and disease free, a super food to consume and, to top it off, take up very little room.

With no need for a garden or even sunlight for that matter to become a mushroom grower, you can grow them in a tiny apartment, laundry, cupboard, garage — anywhere that’s cool and humid with relatively low light or at least protection from the harshest of the sun’s rays as well as the other elements.

There are oodles of different types of mushrooms to choose from for your fungi-growing adventure but they can have quite different growing methods.

BIOLOGY OF MUSHROOMS

There are many different kinds of mushrooms, but most grow more or less in the same way and exist basically to produce spores. Most of the cells of the fungus actually stay underground and the mushrooms (the noticeable part) are the fruiting bodies, or spore-bearing fruit, of certain species of higher fungi.

The vegetative tissues of these fungi consist of huge lengths of microscopic thread-like hyphae and their aggregations, each known as a mycelium, that grow underground in surface soils, feeding on wooden logs, organic debris, decaying leaves and in association with plant roots.

It boggles the mind that these underground mycelia can live for thousands of years.

GROWING YOUR OWN

Mushrooms grow from the tiny dust-like spores that are produced by the fruiting bodies — but did you know that different mushrooms prefer different growing media in which to proliferate?