Learn to grow mushrooms at home
A PREMADE KIT SIMPLIFIES THE PROCESS: JUST ADD WATER. THE ‘SHROOM BOOM’ IS REAL — AND ADDICTIVE
S AN AVID GARDENER and(very)amateur cook, learning how to grow edible mushrooms at home seemed like a no-brainer. Little did I know how little I knew. I ordered fungi guru Paul Stamets’ definitive book, “Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms,” expecting a slim volume with lots of photos and tips. Instead, I received a tome as thick and detailed as a biology textbook.
And there I learned my first mind-blowing truth — mushrooms aren’t plants at all. They are actually more like a fruit or flower — the reproductive part of a root-like branching organism known as mycelium. So that’s the plant, right? Wrong again. Mycelium, like yeast, molds and toadstools, are neither animals nor plants. Back in the 1960s, scientists decided that mycelium and their fruits are actually part of a separate kingdom — the fungi kingdom — in large part because of the way they eat, said environmental biologist Rudy Diaz, resident mycologist for the Los Angeles Mycological Society.
“Animals acquire nutrition through ingesting other organic and sometimes inorganic materials, and plants acquire nutrition through photosynthesis — they basically produce their own food,” Diaz said. “But fungi are unique in that they use an absorptive mode of nutrition.”
In fact, some researchers say fungi are actually more closely related to animals than to plants, but before you start embracing your inner mycelium, know that this familial connection split many millions of years ago, when both fungi and animals were single-cell creatures, said Diaz.
“People have taken this information and gone running in the wrong direction,” said Diaz, “saying things like, ‘We are from mushrooms,’ when ‘we’ (humans and other animals) didn’t even exist yet.”
But that’s part of the passionate, almost religious zeal around mushrooms these days. It surged during the pandemic, fueled by new research (and claims) about the culinary, medicinal and psychological benefits of some mushrooms — and the ability of other fungi to clean and rebuild depleted and/or toxic soils.
Diaz, 25, said membership in L.A.'s Mycology Society has more than doubled to around 600 people since he joined the group in 2017. “In the last two or three years there’s been an explosion of interest,” he said.
“The ‘Shroom Boom’ is real,” said Sam Shoemaker, an L.A. artist and Los Angeles Mycological Society (LAMS) member who grows and preserves a variety of sculptural mushrooms to use in his unusual art.
“I got interested in mushrooms in 2015 because it was an excuse to not be around art people all the time,” Shoemaker said. “Eight years later, it’s become my entire life . ... When you go to an art opening, you don’t hear people talk about art the way people talk about mushrooms at the Mycological Society meetings.”
Shoemaker, 31, used to sell mushrooms, but he now focuses on his art and workshops in mushroom cultivation that are currently sold out. He also makes and sells tinctures from lion’s mane, a shaggy, brainshaped mushroom, and reishi mushrooms, which grow like colorful half-plates off logs or like antlers with suction cups.
If you’re eager to grow mushrooms in L.A., this is where things get tricky. Experts can’t even seem to agree on how many species of mushrooms exist in the world, with numbers ranging from at least 10,000 to several million. Suffice to say, mushrooms come in many shapes, colors and digestibility levels, and they require different media or substrate in which to grow. It’s not like you can buy a bag of potting soil and a packet of seeds. Some varieties prefer to grow in manure, others like living trees and still others flourish on decaying hardwoods like oak logs.
You can go into the woods and find good edible mushrooms, collect their spores and try growing mycelium at home, but this requires at least a minimal laboratory with sterile conditions and a pasteurized substrate to remove contaminants like bacteria that would compete with mushroom growth.
Or you can forget the lab and purchase a mushroom “kit,” usually a mycelium-infused substrate like shredded straw or wood pellets packed into a plastic bag.
Some kits grow just as they come — all you need to do is open the box, add a few holes in the bags and keep misting until the mushrooms pop out a few weeks later.
Or you can take the kit and mix it with a pasteurized substrate to create multiple kits, a relatively simple way to get the biggest bang for your buck, said Eric Mueller, a mushroom cultivator in central San Diego County who has been growing and selling mushrooms for more than 20 years.
Mueller’s Mushrooms is one of just a few Southern California businesses that sell mushroom kits. Others include Long Beach Mushrooms, Fungi Valley in Los Angeles and Smallhold, a New York-based company that expanded to Los Angeles in 2022. Other California-based companies include Mushroom Adventures, in Marysville, north of Sacramento; Far West Fungi, in the San Francisco area; Forest Origins, in Windsor, north of San Francisco; Gourmet Mushroom Products in Sonoma County; and Fungaia Farm in Eureka.
Wherever you decide to buy, Mueller recommends that beginners start with blue oyster mushrooms because:
• They’re delicious but hard to find in stores because they’re fragile and wilt with too much handling.
• They cost about $4 to $5 per pound at farmers markets.
• They grow more quickly than other varieties. Shiitake, for instance, another yummy mushroom, takes many months to “flush” (i.e., produce a crop), whereas you should get a flush of oyster mushrooms within two to three weeks, and at least one or two subsequent flushes after that.
Mueller, 41, was a budding entrepreneur and Alpine high school student when he came up with the idea of selling locally produced mushrooms to local restaurants. He found wild oyster mushrooms growing in a creek near his home, so with his family’s support and help from Stamets’ book, he built a small lab outside his home and began growing.
Today, Mueller’s Mushrooms operates out of a warehouse in Guatay, in the Cleveland National Forest. He grows many varieties and still sells at local farmers markets, but his mainstays these days are making tasty jerky, from dried shiitake and oyster mushrooms, and medicinal tinctures, using lion’s mane and reishi. He also expects to offer mushroom growing classes in the spring.