Mushrooms are nutritious food that consists of high content of protein and have beneficial medicinal properties as well. Either sautéed or in a salad, mushrooms are super delicious and you can eat them in any form to treat your taste buds. Moreover, it’s easy to grow them as well. So, don’t aim to always purchase a pack of your favorite button mushrooms to satisfy your cravings for a delicious mushroom dish. Rather, it’s much more amazing to grow them in your backyard, pluck them fresh, and enjoy eating!
All that it requires is a small piece of land and some basic equipment, and that’s it. There are various companies that sell the necessary things that you need for mushroom cultivation at great prices. For example, Maxyield grain prices are quite less and you don’t have to break your bank to kick start your mushroom farming with them.
What’s more, mushroom cultivation is a great income-generating business as well because it leads to great yields without a lot of specific requirements. Mushrooms are very easy to grow, they don’t require a lot of sunlight, high-quality organic feed, and extremely fertile soil. When doing the mushroom identification experiment, it is important to find a species that has not been studied by scientists. This helps to ensure that you are identifying correctly and not misinterpreting any signs. The next step is to make sure that you are completely familiar with how mushrooms work in terms of medicinal benefits. Many people use medicinal mushrooms for their ability to increase serotonin levels, but there are many other ways in which mushrooms can be used medically.
So, how to start with mushroom cultivation?
Read on
Choose Your Desired Mushroom Type
The production cost of mushroom cultivation depends on the type of mushroom you have chosen to grow. You need to decide on a budget depending on the fund available to you and also the investment benefit out of it in the long run. Button, Oyster, and Paddy Straw are the three most commonly grown mushrooms. For beginners, a good variety of mushrooms that you can start growing is the Oyster mushroom. Other easy-to-grow ones that you can think of are Shiitake, White Button, Portobello, Lions Mane, etc. So, choose the one that you like and fits your budget, and start farming!
Get the Environment Ready
In mushroom farming, it’s very important to consider the right environmental conditions. Different varieties of mushrooms need different parameters of environmental conditions to grow properly. For instance, if you want to grow Oyster mushrooms, you will need to take care of some basic environmental requirements like the temperature should be 15 to 20 degrees Celsius, the humidity has to be 80 to 90%, there must be good ventilation of hair, proper light, and highly sanitized land.
Get the Spawn Ready
You should have spawns to start making the culture for inoculation. Either you can produce spawns on your own by making sure that the culture is sterile or you can simply buy the readymade spawns from suppliers that are available commercially.
Prepare the Substrate and Pack the Bags
There is a wide variety of agro-waste that prove to be a great substrate for mushroom cultivation. The substrate that has cellulose and lignin should be used. This kind of substrate helps in more enzyme production which causes better yield. Some of the best materials to select as the substrate for mushroom farming are paddy straw, leaves of cotton, sawdust, dry grass, etc.
After you are done preparing the substrate, you need to start with the bag-making process. It involves composting the substrate, filling the bags with that material, spawning, and then incubating in the right environmental conditions to let the mushrooms grow till they are matured.
Harvest
You should decide when harvesting needs to be done by checking the shape and size of the fruit body. The mushrooms should be always harvested before they release the spores. We recommend plucking all the mushrooms at a time from one cube.
Ready to get started?
Take all the steps properly and start cultivating your favorite mushroom!
