Always wanted to try growing mushrooms at your place – delicious and medicinal varieties – using sustainable, low-waste techniques? Download this free ‘getting started’ guide first!

If you’ve never grown mushrooms before, the whole process can seem deeply mystifying. What equipment do you need? How long does it take? Do they go outside in the veggie patch, or do you need a dark cave?

Yet once you have the basic skills and principles, you can easily grow your favourite mushrooms at your place – promise!

So – in this guide, we answer all of those questions, so you understand the overall process and are ready to dive further into your mushroom growing journey.

Best of all, we’re going to show you our low-waste approach, honed over YEARS of growing mushrooms at our place.

Did you know most commercial mushroom cultivators rely heavily on disposable, single-use plastics? By contrast, mushroom growing at home can be practically zero waste. You can make use of pre-loved and repurposed materials, and reuse over them and over again. What a win!

Low-waste techniques for growing mushrooms in buckets, logs & gardens

We’ve been growing mushrooms since about 2011, and over that time we’ve honed our knowledge, skills, techniques and processes over thousands of grows. We have eaten a lot of home-grown mushrooms, read a lot of books and talked to many experts.

We have pioneered a bunch of low-waste, low-cost techniques that are deeply excellent for home-growing. And we shared this knowledge with 1,000+ students face-to-face, before creating our online Home Mushroom Cultivation course.

Thing is, different mushroom species need different things in order to thrive.

So in our free guide, to give you an idea of what’s involved for different types of mushrooms, we take a look at the overall basics of three very different approaches to growing mushrooms:

• Growing Oyster Mushrooms in Buckets
• Growing King Stropharia in the Garden
• Growing Shiitake on Logs

We focus on teaching how to grow mushrooms successfully with a low-waste, permaculture approach – which means more mushrooms for you, and better outcomes for our planet, too.

Growing mushrooms is a practical way to play with permaculture

Yes, that’s right – growing your own mushrooms is a wonderful way to turn ALL the permaculture principles into real-life lived experiences.

You can easily Obtain a Yield of delicious mushrooms while Producing No Waste. When you find yourself incubating mushrooms under your bed, or fruiting them in your bathroom, or down the shady side of your house where nothing else ever grows, you will discover that mushrooms really are the poster-child of Using Edges and Valuing the Margins.

And, one of our favourite things about growing mushrooms is the way they invite you to Observe and Interact: to tune into your home, notice the changing seasons, discover the shifting patterns of light and temperature, your climate, and the beautiful outdoors. It’s an absolute delight.

By the way, you can learn more about the 12 permaculture principles over here, if you like.

Ready to get your head around the steps required to start growing at your place?

Resources

Milkwood articles:

• Check out our 15+ years of mushroom resources and articles, in our ‘archive of useful things’: milkwood.net/category/mushrooms

Our favourite books on mushroom cultivation:

• The Mushroom chapter of Milkwood: Real Skills for Down-to-Earth Living, by us!
• Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Paul Stamets
• Radical Mycology by Peter McCoy
• Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation by Tradd Cotter
• Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets