The Wild Art of Cultivating Mushrooms
There is a little bit of a learning curve when moving from the garden to the mushroom grow bag. After a little practice and some new terminology, you'll be having fun witnessing the magic of growing your own food and medicine right on your kitchen counter.
Over here at Fungus Brothers we like to engage in the full process of beginning mycelial growth on an agar plate or liquid culture syringe, inoculating a growing substrate like milo or barley, expanding it into larger bags of grain spawn, and finally transferring it to a hardwood or straw substrate to colonize and fruit.
Here are a few terms defined to get you growing at warp speed.
Mycelium: the whispy filaments that are found under ground or colonizing on a grain or straw (the baby mushroom).
Fruiting Body: the part you find in the store or pick on your own. Basically the mushroom we all know and love.
Substrate: the growing medium that a species likes to colonize and eat before preparing its fruiting bodies.
FAE: fresh air exchange. Fresh air (and humidity are key to a successful crop).
Spawn: the fully colonized mycelium on the grain or substrate.
Spore: the infinitesimally small "seed" that will escape from the mushroom once it is fully grown.
LC: liquid culture. A spore syringe that can be easily used to inoculate any jar of growing medium.