Four Stages of Cultivation

The resources on mushroom cultivation outline the essential techniques and methodologies required for growing most mushroom species. We have sectioned these techniques under the four stages of mushroom cultivation. Each of these stages requires a particular set of skills, materials, equipment and workspace. To improve your practice in mushroom cultivation it is beneficial to have experience in all four of these stages. However, it may be that you will not want to specialise in culturing strains and producing your own spawn and will prefer to concentrate on developing your skills in preparing and inoculating substrates, and fruiting and harvesting mushrooms. If this is the case we supply grain spawn of species more suitable for beginners and we are here to help, so please do get in touch with any questions you have.

Four Stages of Mushroom Cultivation

1. Inoculum: In order to grow a species of fungi you need to source the mycelium of a strain that will reliably fruit if grown in the right conditions. The mycelium has to be cultured in a form that can be worked with depending on the techniques involved. The standard practice of cultural fungi using sterile/aseptic culture techniques involve the preparation of agar media. Liquid culture techniques have become much more widely used and accessible in the past few years and has several advantages over agar media. For some species low tech methods of culturing fungi can be applied such as using cardboard, however this has limitations and is best to be considered as a method of creating spawn.
2. Spawn: To increase the amount inoculum in order to inoculate a fruiting substrate the mycelium needs to be expanded onto a growing medium that will allow for easy distribution in a fruiting substrate. This is what is known as spawn and usually involves the use of sterilised grain with rye grain being the most common cereal used. Depending on the species and substrate in question sawdust spawn is also common and in some cases a cheaper method of making spawn.
3. Fruiting Substrate: A wide variety of cellulose and lignin rich material can be utilised and growing media for mushroom cultivation, as well as composted organic matter and opportunities can be found for potential substrate in waste stream and by-products from businesses, industry and agriculture. The substrate will, more often than not, need to be treated in ways to reduce or eliminate competitor organisms to the fungi of choice. There are also ways to enhance yields with additives and amendments. Bulk processing of substrates can require a lot of space, labour, water and other resources. Maximising efficiency in this stage is the key to making a profitable income from mushroom cultivation and it is essential to understand the fungal needs in order to nurture the fungi through this vegetative stage of development.
4. Fruiting and Harvest: Bringing a substrate to fruition will require careful considerations of the space and infrastructure available with respect to the scale of the cultivation scheme. There are issues around energy use, pests and diseases, processing and storage of harvested fruit bodies as well post harvest processing of spent substrates. In general, there is a choice of outdoor cultivation which is more susceptible to seasonal climatic variations and pests; or indoor cultivation where the environmental factors can be controlled.