Supplies for growing mushrooms are not like regular gardening materials.  Mushroom cultivation requires specific mushroom growing supplies that are not commonly used for other gardening.  They can be an excellent way to diversify the types of crop that you grow on your small-scale farm or even at home and improve your yields. You might be surprised to learn that people have been growing mushrooms indoors for centuries. Mushrooms are incredibly versatile and can be grown in all kinds of environments.

If you have always wanted to grow mushrooms at home, now is the right time to do it. Even if you live in a small apartment, you have sufficient space for growing your own nutritious and highly delicious mushrooms. Unlike conventional crops, you don’t have any messy soil to deal with. Which is why mushrooms are perfect for growing indoors.

You can grow mushrooms at home in two basic ways. You can start with sterile spores before nurturing them into mushrooms, which is the organism’s fruiting body, or you can start with a mushroom growing log that’s already inoculated with spores.  Some varieties of mushroom will grow more easily at home such as lions mane.

The mushroom supplies listed below will help your grow your mushrooms from spores. If you would like to start growing mushrooms commercially, on a larger scale, or simply love Do It Yourself (DIY) projects, this is the way to go.

Mushroom growing is not very difficult, but it requires some specific supplies and materials. Fortunately, most of the materials are cheap and easy to come by. Here are the top 7 mushroom cultivation and growing supplies:

Spawn is one of the most important supplies for mushroom cultivation if you want to grow high-yielding and high-quality mushrooms. It is advisable to only buy spawn that’s free of contaminants from a commercial operation.

If there’s any form of contamination in the spawn, it will be expanded once a new substrate is inoculated. Even just a tiny amount of contamination is the spawn source can lead to contamination of all the inoculated bags.

Sawdust and grain are two of the most common types of spawn used. Grain has several benefits, which include a higher nutrient content compared to sawdust as well as lower generation. Sawdust, on the other hand, has smaller inoculated points, which means that it is distributed more evenly in the inoculated medium.

Filter patch bags are used for ensuring that contaminants are kept out of the sterilized substrate. If there are no filter patch bags, it would be incredibly difficult to use a high-nutrient medium or even get high yields from exotic mushrooms such as lions mane, oyster, or shiitake. Filter patch bags are able to withstand atmospheric steaming and autoclaving to ensure the highest level of sterility.

Substrate refers to the material on which the mushrooms are grown. It plays a critical role in determining the nutrients that mycelium has access to. Growing high-quality mushrooms requires having the right substrate formula with the right water and nutrient content.

Wheat bran, soybean hulls, and sawdust are the 3 critical mushroom growing supplies when it comes to the substrate. All these can be commonly sourced from your local feed or farmer supply stores.

Proper sterilization is one of the most important aspects of successful mushroom cultivation. While a steamer might be better categorized as a piece of equipment rather than one of the essential mushroom growing supplies, it is still critical to successful cultivation of mushrooms.

Atmospheric steam is the cheapest and most accessible steaming method. Substrate can be heated using 3 to 9 KW steam generators to about 210 degrees and maintained for 16 hours. This is usually enough to effectively sterilize the substrate and prepare it for the desired mushroom mycelium.

A humidifier can be installed in the room where you are growing your mushrooms to control the level of humidity. If you don’t have a humidifier that has a fan, you should remember to open the windows several times a day to allow some fresh air to get inside.

One thing you will notice about ultrasonic humidifiers is that they produce a noticeable steam of vapor. A cool mist humidifier uses just a wick to draw up the water, but it isn’t so efficient. You should always remember to clean the humidifier regularly to ensure that impurities don’t grow inside.

A hygrometer is also one of the most important mushroom cultivation supplies. The use of a humidifier sometimes creates too much moisture. You should maintain at least 80 percent relative humidity most of the time. If you have a hygrometer, you can keep an eye out on the level of humidity to set up your humidifier properly.

To make high-quality mushroom blocks, you must have a working laminar flow hood. A flow hood simply refers to a fan that has a filter on it that rids the air of any unwanted fungi, bacteria, or viruses that attempt to grown on the substrate.

You should also inoculate the treated substrate in the clean air flow to ensure that the substrate has just the desired mushroom growing on it.

Mushroom growing can be a great way to make a little extra income and can be a lot of fun too. The great thing about it is that you can easily scale your operation depending on the amount of time you have available and the effort you are willing to put in.  If you’re just starting out and not excited about buying all of these supplies to grow your own mushrooms at home, you may want to start with a mushroom growing kit for beginners. Or, you can also find a local medicinal mushroom market nearby.

Otherwise, if you are serious about growing mushrooms at home, you now have the materials and supplies needed for successful mushroom cultivation. All you need to do now is buy the required supplies and start growing the mushrooms you love.