Gardeners often are great at growing plants, but rarely do you see them also growing mushrooms on their homesteads. Mushrooms are decidedly not plants and have their own weird and wacky requirements. Unlike plants, mushrooms are eat decaying organic matter and don’t photosynthesize. Mushrooms also don’t play nice with everything, some mushrooms will grow near plants while others will refuse to grow without the most pristine conditions. Knowing all this you may think it’s silly to add mushrooms to your gardens, but in actuality, mushrooms can be a great benefit to your farm.
Why Grow Mushrooms In The Garden?
Mushrooms in the garden are a great source of protein. Being fungi they create a large mycelial network and the mushrooms are their reproductive organs that poke above the ground to spread spores. These mushrooms are packed with nutrients and flavor. So right off the bat, they add a functional value as food.
That’s not the only benefit that mushrooms offer though. Mushrooms eat decaying matter and are part of the process that breaks down the tougher substances like wood into available nutrients that your plants can eat. In this way certain fungi in the garden are part of a healthy ecosystem that can add value back to your soil.
Furthermore, mushrooms that work well in gardens (there are not many) are something you keep out of the way. Often mushrooms are spread as spore mixtures between walkways and plant rows directly on mulch or other ground cover. The spores take hold and break down the materials to produce their mycelium and eventually sprout edible mushrooms you can harvest. Depending on how your garden is tended you may be able to harvest mushrooms from the same organism year after year.
Types of Mushrooms That Work In The Garden
There are a few main types of mushrooms you can add to your garden. Wine caps, oyster, and shiitake are the easiest, but Morels can also be grown at home with a bit more work.
Wine Cap Mushrooms
Wine caps are the easiest to grow in a garden as these will pop right up out of the ground and can be planted simply by spreading bits from a spawn bag around your garden under wood chips and leaves. Once these take hold you’ll find delicious mushrooms growing periodically between beds and in your rows.
Oyster Mushrooms
Oyster mushrooms can grow on logs and wood chips. They don’t grow straight up like wine caps do (unless you grow king oyster) so you often need to add these to vertical logs or slabs. You can actually plant these in a few ways, but usually you’ll mix the spawn into a large batch of wood chips before adding the wood chips around your garden. Unlike wine caps oysters need the lignin to live and will not grow on all types of organic matter.
If you have log piles for bugs and beneficial animals (like snakes) you can drill holes into the logs and tap in pieces of wood infected with oyster spawn. This will form a plug that the oyster mushroom can grow from and over time you’ll get blooms of mushrooms coming from the wood.
Shiitake Mushrooms
Shiitake need to be plug planted into logs, at least as far as we know. Mushroom farming is getting more and more attention every year and new methods are always being developed, but shiitake can be set just like the plugs from oyster mushrooms can. You can even buy dowel ends that have been infected with shiitake spawn and then you simply tap those into logs and set them aside in the garden. If you have untreated or natural wood raised beds (log beds), you can tap the mushrooms right into those. Sure the wood will decay faster, but natural wood beds aren’t made to last anyway.
Morel Mushrooms
Morels are a tricky subject when it comes to gardening. They are a delicacy and conventional wisdom tells us they cannot be farmed. This is untrue, but the truth in it is that we just don’t fully understand how they grow well enough to farm them consistently. It is believed that morels need several types of symbiotic relationships to grow their fruiting bodies, so people often have mixed results when they try and add them to their garden. Worse still, if you till your soil every year you are essentially destroying the fungal networks that you are trying to build, so you’ll be starting from scratch each time.
If you do decide to try morels the things we’ve seen work best are by mixing morel spawn with ground wood chips or clean sawdust, a sugar mix like maple sap, and blending with water. From there you’ve made a culture broth of sorts that you can spray a misting of onto the areas of your garden you are not farming. Typically this means garden paths, mulched rows, and any area you’re not using for plants. Sometimes this works out well and you can harvest a ton of morels. Other times the condition aren’t right and you effectively wasted a whole spawn bag. If you get it to work well, you likely have the right conditions for them to grow and can keep harvesting them for years.
Can You Grow Other Mushrooms In Your Garden?
Yes, you can grow other mushrooms in your garden too, but besides the ones listed here the requirements to grow them are much more stringent. Farming other types of mushrooms typically involves indoor setups, clean rooms, and careful inoculation procedures. So while it is possible, it is much harder.
If you are outside of the US there are region specific mushrooms you can grow. Southeastern Asian countries have their own varieties that grow well right along side their crops. In northern Europe there are mushrooms that can withstand the huge amounts of moisture and are better suited to the rainy summer gardens there.
Mushrooms Safety In The Garden
When you decide to grow mushrooms in your garden you need to be sure you know what you’re harvesting. Anything you plant, you should be able to identify in your area. If there are local look alike mushrooms you need to know, because making a mistake in that regard can be fatal! We’re not trying to scare you off of mushrooms, but just like with your plants you need to know what parts are safe to eat. You wouldn’t eat the leaves off of rhubarb or the fruits off a potato plant, so don’t eat mushrooms you don’t know about either.
A Worthy Garden Challenge
Mushrooms are a great and challenging addition to a garden. If you’ve got a well established garden or even if you’re starting fresh, mushrooms can add a depth of flavor and a bit of excitement. Sure they’re not as well understood as plants and can be far more finicky, but the rewards are there and once you master growing mushrooms along side your plants, you’ll find yourself with a bounty unlike any you’ve considered before. Happy Homesteading!