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This is part one of a three part series. In this part I'll talk about what you can expect from this hobby and some basics of mycology.
Part two: Sterility in mushroom cultivation
Part three: An overview of mushroom cultivation techniques
Around here, supermarkets usually carry only very few species of fresh mushroom. You'll find the button mushroom and sometimes oyster, king oyster or shiitake. Asian supermarkets occasionally also carry enokitake, but that's about it. Besides the button mushroom, they are often quite pricey and because they don't have a long shelf life, they are rarely very fresh.
A good way to get your hands on some fresh specimen of more species, is to learn about mushroom identification and foraging for them. If, however, you don't have access to a suitable habitat or the mushroom of your desire is just not in season right now, mushroom cultivation might be an interesting option for you.
We haven't yet figured out how to cultivate every mushroom, but there is already a lot we can grow, even as hobbyists: Different variants of oyster mushrooms, shiitake and lion's mane are usually recommended for beginners, as they are robust and grow quickly.
After getting confident with the basics, a lot more species can be grown as well. Those include pioppino, maitake, enokitake, chestnut mushroom (pholiota adiposa) or even medicinal ones like reishi and turkey tail.
If you are after quick results, you can buy a "grow kit", that you just need to cut open and place in the right conditions to get mature mushrooms within two weeks or so.
If you want to get more hands on and create your own grow bags, spawn or even germinate some spores yourself, you will need some patience. Two to three months is a realistic time frame for that.
Until now, I've been talking about "mushrooms", but mushrooms are just the part of the organism, that is used for propagation and which we harvest. They are often also called "fruit bodies". The whole organism is called "fungus" (plural: fungi). To cultivate mushroom, we need to understand how fungi live. Only then can we grow a fungus and persuade it to produce mushrooms for us.
The life of a fungus begins with spores. Once spores come into contact with nutrients under the right conditions, they will germinate. This means that they will become mycelium, which will expand to consume all nutrients it can find.
Mycelium is the white, often thread-like "core" of every fungus. You might have noticed it before on dead wood, old food, or when turning around fallen leaves in the forest. Sometimes it colonizes only a single strawberry, sometimes it colonizes acres of forest floor.
Once the mycelium has grown to a sufficient size and environmental factors, like temperature, carbon dioxide levels and humidity, signal the right conditions to the fungus, it will produce fruit bodies in order to produce and spread new spores.
Before we can start growing fungi, we need to take a brief detour into sterility: