How to Grow Hydroponic Mushrooms

Hydroponic mushrooms are actually fungi rather than plants and if they are grown in this manner, they will have a great appearance and be of high quality.The word "hydroponic" means the cultivation of plants in a nutrient solution rather than in soil. If you are wondering how to grow hydroponic mushrooms yourself, here are some useful tips.

Types of Mushrooms Best for Hydroponic Growing

Popular hydroponics mushroom varieties include oyster, shiitake, nameko, button, lion's mane, cinnamon cap, maitake and enokitake.

Getting Started with growing mushroom in Hydroponic way

It is quite simple to grow mushrooms as long as you know what you are doing. As well as the improved flavor benefits, you will be able to grow a lot of mushrooms with ease, even if you don’t have a garden. The simplest way to grow hydroponic mushrooms is to use a mushroom growing kit. You will usually get a square block of compressed sawdust which is about 12 inches squared. This block will have been enriched and inoculated with mushroom seeds. You can also make your own sawdust or grain block.

A common way to grow hydroponic shrooms is to soak the block in cold, non-chlorinated water for several hours and then place it somewhere dark with a temperature somewhere between 60º and 75ºF. The cold water will encourage the mushrooms to grow and you will have plenty of edible mushrooms to eat after just a few days.

Harvesting Mushrooms

When you have harvested your first gourmet mushroom crop, you can rest the sawdust block for a week or so and then repeat the process. The next crop will be smaller and future crops will be smaller each time, with fewer mushrooms produced, until the nutrients in the growing medium have become depleted. You can then use the block for hardwood logs or to add to a garden compost pile.

How to Grow Hydroponic Mushroom without a Kit

You need to begin with some mycelium and grow it until it is big enough and has enough energy to support the mushroom reproductive cycle. You should use either a culture bought from a culture bank, a fresh mushroom or spores. You need to put small pieces of mushroom, culture or spores on a Petri dish for the mycelium to grow out.

After about 2 weeks, this is transferred to packed, sterilized grain, such as wheat, millet or rye. After 2 to 4 weeks, the mushrooms will colonize the grain. You can use this grain spawn to inoculate more grain. You need to do all this in a sterile environment because, if not, there will be contamination to your hydroponic mushrooms from bacteria and various molds. You need to sterilize your growing medium before using it, too. If you want to learn how to grow mushrooms in this way, you will need a clean room, a sterilizer and a High Efficiency Particulate (HEPA) filter.

If you want to know how to grow hydroponic mushrooms, the above guidelines should prove useful. Hydroponic mushrooms are great tasting and hardly take any time to grow. They are a great addition to salads, stir fries, stews and many other dishes.

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