The fact that food in stores and restaurants is not always high quality drives people to cook their food at home. Also, ingredients in the market are somehow hard to predict as a bad effect of international trade. Therefore, they are looking for an alternative to growing their cooking ingredients at home.
In this article, we will show you how to grow portobello mushrooms at home. Get ready to kick in.
How To Grow Portobello Mushrooms At Home?
Now, let’s discover the three ultimate steps guiding how to grow portobello mushrooms at home.
Building The Planting Base
To start the main steps of how to grow portobello mushrooms, we need to make a planting base for the mushrooms. To build this planting bed, you have to prepare scrap wood, boards, nails, and a hamper.
You can easily find scrap wood in the lumberyard. Otherwise, there are wooden boards available at several home improvement stores. Once you have them with you, use the hamper to nail them together.
Based on the size of the planting tray you want, you can freely pick up your board with your preferred size. However, the most favorable measurement of this bed should be 25 cm deep and 20 cm long. This way, your mushrooms will have the best growing condition.
Our next materials write compost, soil, and peat in the guidance on how to grow portobello mushrooms. Any gardening center should easily provide you with those things. Once you’ve got them, fill the tray with the compost until it reaches 17-18 cm long so that you can add soil and peat to the compost later.
After that, sterilize the soil by covering the tray with cardboard and wrap them all using black plastic. Make sure that the plastic is tight to avoid direct contact with the wind. Then, take the tray out to the sunlight to kill the harmful bacteria.
Protecting And Watering The Plants
Let’s discover what to do next on our how to grow portobello mushrooms guideline.
Your tray should stay outdoors for about two weeks before you place it back in the dark areas, such as the basement, the closet, or anywhere suitable.
It would be best to keep the temperature of this storage ranging from 12 to 22 °C. Ensure the temperature in the daylight is not higher than 22 °C and the night temperature is not lower than 12 degrees Celsius.
Now, it’s time to mix the mushroom spores with the compost. You need to remove the cardboard from the tray before sprinkling the spores onto the mixture. Then, gently use your hand to mingle them in about 3 cm. Remember to push the compost down a bit once you’ve done the above steps.
Next, you should pour the peat moss on the top of the mixture (2cm) and use the newspaper to surround the moss. Using newspapers is to keep the tray moist all the time as the mushrooms grow best in a highly humid environment. It would be best to spray water on the tray once the newspaper is dry.
Harvesting The Mushroom
There are only a few steps to follow until we get the result. Keep reading to thoroughly understand the steps in how to grow portobello mushrooms.
It would help if you regularly observed your planting bed. If the mushrooms are growing well after two weeks, remove the newspaper from the planting bed.
To see whether the mushrooms are developing or not, you might notice some tiny little heads rising out of the peat moss. However, there are sometimes long white marks running in the soil, and they are mushroom roots. If this happens, you probably need to leave the newspaper there for another one week and water them every day.
As time goes by, now the mushroom is almost fully grown, turning into bigger mushroom heads. You can now harvest the mushrooms. Nevertheless, we would recommend digging up the mushroom’s heads when their caps measure about 5 to 6 cm in diameter.
Note that when some mushrooms have grown to their fullest, the others might lay dormant, waiting to bloom. Don’t forget to water the planting tray daily.
The Final Verdict
Hopefully, this article has provided you with detailed step-by-step guidance on how to grow portobello mushrooms at home.
The final reminder for you is that growing mushrooms is not a piece of cake. Once you are determined to grow this kind of plant, you need to prepare some needed tools and equipment.
Besides, moisture and temperature control also plays a big role. Always be patient and pay attention to your product will bring about the best result.
