Grow Your Own Mushrooms

Grow delicious edible mushrooms indoors or outdoors, in your garden or on your balcony, and enjoy them fresh throughout the year. This practical book explains how to grow fungi, with easy-to-understand instructions:

• Methods and growing-media for indoors and out
• Getting your mushrooms started and caring for them
• How to harvest, store, and preserve your mushrooms all year round
• In-depth descriptions of the most popular varieties

This beautifully designed book is the perfect introduction to mushrooms. In it, Folko Kullmann explains what fungi are, how they grow, their history and medicinal properties. It outlines every step of how to grow mushrooms at home, with lots of photographs throughout.

Grow Your Own Mushrooms includes a 12-month plan and a list of the best mushrooms to grow at home. In the garden, mushrooms thrive in areas too shady for vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Whether you grow them on logs, straw bales, or ready-mixed growing media, with the right care you're sure of a rich crop of delicious and unusual mushrooms.

Mushrooms are completely at home on balconies, where you can grow them in the shade in pots or containers and many are in their element indoors - in the kitchen or bathroom, on a windowsill, in a dark corner, or in the basement. Best of all, indoors you can grow them all year round!

Growing your own mushrooms is fun and can give you a great harvest. These mushrooms, described in detail in the book, are ideal for beginners, as they are low-maintenance, grow quickly and are suitable for cooking in a variety of ways:

• Shiitake has great taste and is packed with nutritional value. It grows on wood or special growing media, indoors or out.
• Oyster mushrooms come in such a wide variety, some fruiting in spring and autumn, some in summer, so you can have fresh, delicious mushrooms almost all year round.
• King oyster mushrooms taste very similar to porcini, and form their first fruiting bodies in just a few weeks, so perfect for an impatient beginner.
• Sheathed Woodtuft mushrooms grow quickly and almost anywhere and are so easy to dry, they are perfect for the store cupboard.
• Wine cap mushrooms are tasty mushrooms that fruit twice a year.

And, while mushrooms are versatile in your kitchen, this book also shows how easy they are to preserve, so if you have too many, you don't have to use them right away.