Mushroom kits have actually had a good amount of bad press recently with many critics claiming that they provide very poor affordability when comparing the yields of the mushroom kits with the specific price of the mushrooms in the shops. polka dot mushroom bar find this an extremely unfair comparison and feel that it is wrong to simply compare the two with the amount of mushrooms that they produce.
You can buy mushroom growing kits for just a few different species of mushroom – you can obtain button mushroom grow kits and you could get oyster mushroom grow kits. These two are the most common and can be purchased for the most part garden centres and usually on garden centre websites. Nevertheless, you may also grow other varieties from more specialist websites, allowing you to grow your own mushrooms like Shiitake, Portobello and much more. These kits usually cost around �5 to �10 and will probably give you around �5 worth of mushrooms (if grown in the best possible environment, and depending on the variety as some mushrooms cost more then others in the shops).
I hardly understand why people moan when it costs more to buy a mushroom growing kit then it can to buy the mushrooms themselves. A lot of the supermarket mushrooms are grown massively in bulk and so are usually grown in other countries and imported across, where it really is so much cheaper for them to grow them. Then theres the truth that in a kit you obtain a box and get the substrate (compost or straw) in addition to a small bag of spawn. Once you buy mushrooms from a shop you aren’t left over with excellent compost for the garden (mushroom compost is probably the most expensive and nutritious forms of compost as the mushrooms break down and recycle many nutrients present in the substrate). And there’s the fact that you are growing mushrooms yourself – surely the excitement and fun factor are worth paying for too.
For me mushroom growing kits are an effective way of growing your own mushrooms and even if sometimes they don’t really offer amazing affordability when compared to the shop price you will learn so much from doing it yourself and can probably take great pride in growing and eating your personal mushrooms. Maybe even once you have learned a bit more about cultivating mushrooms you could cut out the middleman and discover your personal substrate (straw, newspaper, manure) and purchase or make your own mushroom spawn. That’s where you can get real value for money too, growing a huge selection of pounds worth of mushroom from literally a few pounds investm