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There are a some choices you have when it comes to growing mushrooms at home. Some people want to grow mushrooms at home for gourmet, cooking purposes. There are a lot of delicious mushrooms out there to grow. Others are interested in growing mushrooms for their supplemental health purposes. So, what are the easiest mushrooms to grow?
Given different people’s preferences on why they want to grow mushrooms, we have 3 of the easiest mushrooms you can grow at home in this guide. All of these are tasty, nutritious mushrooms that anyone can grow at home.
Before we get into the top 3, let’s cover whether it’s easy to grow mushrooms at home or not.
Is it easy to grow mushrooms?
The simple answer is: Yes, it’s quite easy to grow mushrooms at home. If you are someone who already loves gardening at home, you will find mushroom growing to be easy.
There are a few key things you have to keep in mind and be careful of when it comes to mushroom growing. Firstly, there is a different set of supplies you need to grow mushrooms at home as opposed to growing plants in a garden. Since mushroom growers usually grow mushrooms indoors in controlled conditions, you will need the proper equipment.
There are a few ways to get started. You can either choose a mushroom growing kit, which is great for newcomers, or you can choose a more manual method.
If you want to grow mushrooms yourself without using a mushroom grow kit, you will need to acquire some mushroom growing substrate, different containers to store the substrate, and most importantly mushroom spores.
The good news is, all supplies for growing mushrooms are readily available on Amazon.
We cover the equipment and special steps required to grow mushrooms at home in these guides:
We also have a section of our website dedicated to mushroom growing supplies here.
The hard parts of growing mushrooms at home
There are 2 hard parts about growing mushrooms that we will point out now. The first is that it’s necessary to work in sterile conditions. When growing mushrooms from scratch, they are very susceptible to mold in the beginning. Mold will kill your mushrooms, and ruin your work.
The second difficult part of growing mushrooms is that they require a consistent misting schedule. In the fruiting phase, your mushroom spawn must be misted usually twice daily. This consistency is important, and can be hard for busy growers.
Read the above guides to understand how to grow your mushrooms in sterile conditions and how to mist your mushrooms properly.
Top 3 easiest mushrooms to grow
#1: Oyster mushrooms
Oyster mushrooms represent one of the easiest mushrooms to grow at home. Growing oyster mushrooms at home is very common, and it’s one of the best for new beginners, also.
There are a wide variety of oyster mushrooms to choose from, and all of them are just as easy.
Conditions for growing oyster mushrooms
Oyster mushrooms grow in many different types of conditions and substrates. You can grow oyster mushrooms in compost with manure, straw, and grain-based mediums. These are some of the most popular substrates, so you can find these easily online.
Secondly, oyster mushrooms aren’t picky about the conditions they grow in. You can grow oyster mushrooms in a room-temperature area quite easily.
Third, oyster mushrooms are reliable and fast. They don’t take very long to colonize the substrate you choose to grow them in. They also are very resilient, meaning if you don’t have the best habits with growing mushrooms, your oysters should still succeed.
Supplies for growing oyster mushrooms
Lastly, the equipment required to grow oyster mushrooms is abundant online. As we said above, you can find the substrates that are best for growing oyster mushrooms very easily on Amazon, such as composted soil with manure or grain.
One of the easiest ways to get started growing oyster mushrooms is to simply buy a spawn bag and blue oyster mushroom spores.
You will inoculate (inject) the grow bag with the oyster mushroom spores and simply let it grow! Once it’s time to fruit the mushrooms, you will mist them occasionally and then you have perfect oyster mushrooms.
We have a complete guide on growing king oyster mushrooms on our site here.
#2: Wine Cap Mushrooms
Wine cap mushrooms are one of the most resilient mushrooms you can grow. They grow very well outdoors, which is how we recommend you go about it.
The best part about growing wine cap mushrooms is that they can fruit time and time again. This means that you only have to build and set up your wine caps one time, and it will produce wine cap mushrooms in multiple rounds.
Conditions for wine cap mushrooms
Since wine caps grow so well outdoors, we will explain the outdoor conditions here. If you want to grow wine cap mushrooms indoors, follow the same steps but create your indoor growing conditions to support the light and moisture levels of outside.
We recommend growing wine cap mushrooms outside in the spring time, depending on your location. This is because the even temperatures of spring time will keep your mushrooms from freezing while also giving them the optimal warmth to grow well.
Wine caps grow best in woodchips. We recommend using soft hardwood chips, as the wine caps will be able to consume this wood easily.
You can simply fill a tub outside with wood chips, add sufficient water, then add your wine cap spores and they will slowly grow! As the growing process happens, make sure to keep on misting the wood chips and adding small amounts of water.
If you are growing mushrooms of any kind outside in the sun, the sun will evaporate the water quicker, so you will need to water more often.
Since wine caps are so cheap and resilient to grow, if your first try fails, just fine-tune the setup and try again!
Supplies for growing wine cap mushrooms
The basic supplies for growing wine cap mushrooms is a short list. You will need some type of large tub to hold the woodchips you plan to spawn the wine caps in.
You will also need woodchips to spawn the wine caps in. Wood chips are very easy to find at a local wood processing business and online on websites like Craigslist or Facebook marketplace. It’s ok if the wood chips are old. This drying and aging will actually help the wine caps to use the wood as nutrition to grow.
Lastly, you will need wine cap mushroom spores. You can find these here on Amazon. Amazon is a great place to find mushroom spores of all kinds!
To conclude, Because of their resiliency and strength to regrow multiple times, wine caps are one of the easiest mushrooms to grow.
#3: Enoki Mushrooms
Enoki mushrooms grow quite similarly to wine cap mushrooms. They grow very well on sawdust/wood chip mixtures, and they can be very resilient.
Enoki (or Enokitake) mushrooms are a very popular gourmet mushroom, but they’re also very easy to grow and produce! This is why we included them in this guide.
Conditions for enoki mushrooms
Firstly, Enoki mushrooms prefer a sterile growing medium. You will want to take a substrate of sawdust/wood chips mixture and add a small amount of water. Then, once you have your substrate mixture, you will want to seal it in a mason jar and steam-sterilize the jar.
Once you have a sterilized sawdust/water mixture, you can add your enoki spores and then loosely cover the jar with newspaper or foil, then let them grow!
We have a complete guide on growing enoki mushrooms here.
Enokis are mushrooms that grow very well in the dark. If you grow enoki mushrooms with light, it will actually change the way they fruit a little bit. Enoki mushrooms are commonly grow in commercial setups in mostly darkness in order to maintain an evenly grown mushroom.
Because enoki mushrooms do best with a sterile growing setup, it will be harder to grow them outside. We recommend going the route of sterilizing your substrate and growing your enokis that way inside. This will increase your chances of success greatly.
Enoki mushrooms also grow plentifully when you are successful. They will grow many fruit bodies, and they make for a great, healthy addition to soups!
Supplies for growing enoki mushrooms
From the above description, it’s easy to decipher what supplies you will need to grow enoki mushrooms.
You will need:
- Sawdust/light woodchip mixture
- Some mason jars to store the substrate
- Sterilization method such as a pressure cooker, and some spores.
All of these factors make enoki mushrooms an easy type of mushroom to grow.
We have a complete article on growing enoki mushrooms in more detail here.
What is the easiest way to grow mushrooms?
We shared the easiest mushrooms to grow at home in this post. But, what is the easiest method for growing mushrooms?
Growing with mushroom grow kits
The easiest way to grow mushrooms first off is using a pre-inoculated mushroom grow kit. You can find these on Amazon.
These are very easy, but they offer a limited amount of mushrooms and it gets old fast.
These can be great for beginners or families who just want to dip their toes in the mushroom growing experience.
Easy-to-grow mushroom spawn bags
If you want to do a more manual process that’s still easy but offers a lot more mushrooms, we recommend buying a mushroom spawn bag, which are also available on Amazon. Once you have a mushroom spawn bag, you will inject it with the mushroom spore of your choice.
The only difficulty in this process is making sure the mushroom you want to grow will grow properly inside the substrate you choose.
If you want to do the mushroom spawn bag method, refer to our instructions on this guide here.
Conclusion
We’ve covered a few basics in this article on the easiest mushrooms to grow and the best avenues to take when growing these mushrooms.
As always, we recommend researching these specific mushrooms on websites like Wikipedia and other websites. There are a lot of nuances, and sometimes mushrooms can be very specific in what they prefer!
Also check out our other articles on this site to truly hone your craft!
