Better Living through Shrooms

  Did you know you can grow your own mushrooms at home?



  There are countless tutorials about cultivation from spore and isolation on agar, and for those practiced at microbiology, or just bored, this is actually a very good idea. For the beginner, however, something very, very lazy is suggested, and mushroom cloning may be the idea to get you started.

  Fungus tends to eat... cellulose, which means that any sawdust, cardboard, grain, or grain husks is perfectly good food for it. Dry grass is considered an excellent medium. Boil the heck out of it to make it sterile.

  The container it is in will also have to be sterilized, and a bit of bleach can help. One technique involves cutting the top off a two-litre bottle, putting it back on upside down, and stuffing a cloth plug where the lid used to be to allow airflow while keeping contamination out, filling it of course with sterile growth medium, usually boiled dry grass.

  Cloning a mushroom involves cutting a piece out of the inside flesh out of the inside of the mushroom, and tossing it in. Since it comes from the inside, it is sterile, which saves quite a bit of work isolating a strain of mycellium in a petri dish.

  When it begins to form very small mushrooms ("pinning"), one usually increases humidity and airflow; the wasteful "spawn bag" technique just cuts holes in the bag at this time, while other systems stand them up in a sterile bin with pumice underlain with a little water and an aquarium bubbler.

  It is exceedingly simple to grow thousands of dollars a month worth of crimini and portabello, or other store-bought strain, and you can clone the mushrooms which come from the grocery store.


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