Benefits of growing your own mushrooms

I just harvested my first crop of shiitake mushrooms! Besides tasting delicious, mushrooms provide health benefits, and they can even devour plastic waste and possibly pests – I have a student doing a project on mushrooms as a pesticide. By growing your own mushrooms, you don’t have to worry about getting viruses from people touching them at the grocery store.

I used a kit from Far West Fungi to get started because it was so easy to do. They provide the substrate and the spores so all I had to do was open the bag, put in a few slits in the plastic bag, and watch them grow! This substrate will produce 4 batches of shiitake mushrooms over the next few months. I’m planning on growing mushrooms using spores put into tree branches next. Stay tuned for my next mushroom adventure!