My mushroom growing attempt appears to have been successful. After about 48 hours in the airing cupboard, the little dots of white were larger fuzzier dots of white, and after 2 weeks all the straw was held together in a giant lump of white mushroomness.
I gave one of the smaller bags to my mum, and put the other small bag and the large bag on my windowsill, in hopes that the lower temp and bright light there would encourage fruiting. I opened the bags to allow more light and airflow. After a few days I started to worry because nothing seemed to be happening, and the top of the bags kept drying out…even though the radiators in the house aren’t on that much, it’s still fairly dry in here. So I decided to hedge my bets and try a couple of different methods. The large bag, I put in the greenhouse. It’s pretty warm in there, and pretty humid, so I figured that would help, but I wasn’t sure if it would get too cold for them at night. The small bag, I left on the windowsill, but put it in the propagator that my carnivorous plants live in, in a separate tray so it wasn’t sitting in water.
I don’t know if the moving to humid places helped, or if just waiting did the trick, but now, 9 days after taking out of the airing cupboard, I have baby mushrooms on both bags!!!
The greenhouse bag I had a look in the top, and was greeted with these:
Cute baby mushrooms! Then I carried on working in there, and noticed this huge clump growing out the side of the bag.
The indoor ones weren’t as big, but still growing in a few patches:
I moved them to their own propagator as the box to keep them out of the water wasn’t giving them much growing space.
I’m going to take some of the straw from one of the bags and mix with fresh straw, and see if i can get EVEN MORE mushroomy goodness to grow, so I can have them constantly and not have to worry about buying more spawn. Next time I might even just start them off in the prop so i can put it in the airing cupboard and just move it out with no messing around.
The greenhouse is doing well too now it’s warming up. The radish, spinach, and mixed leaves I planted the weekend before last are coming up.
And the rocket and other salad leaves we planted in the winter are really coming into their own now. We’ve eaten a few as part of the thinning out process, and I further thinned them today and put the extras into another pot.
I love my greenhouse so much!