As a kid, I used to love any kind of whacky science experiment I could do over the school holidays.
In fact, I’d say I still do (you can ask my housemates, who are forever finding cuttings and things growing in jars).
One of the best and most rewarding projects I remember was when my dad brought home a kit to grow mushrooms in a box.
This project got our hands dirty, was fairly easy, and pretty much guaranteed more mushrooms than we knew what to do with, which was great in the season of soups and roasts.
Most gardening stores stock mushroom-growing kits, which usually consists of a box full of soil that has been inoculated with mycelium (the main body of the mushroom, which looks like a fibrous mat through the soil), and some compost to kick-start growth.
Generally the box will instruct you to add the compost and some moisture, and continue to give the soil and mycelium a light mist every few days.
Because mushrooms are a part of the enigmatic fungi family, they don’t photosynthesis like plants, and grow purely from absorbing organic matter through the mycelium.
In fact, because of that, they’re more closely related to humans than plants are.
As such, you should keep them in a dark or well-shaded, cool (15-25 degrees celcius) location.
After two or three weeks, depending on the variety of mushroom, you should begin to see your mushrooms “pin”, with little styrofoam-like protrusions emerging from the soil.
After that it all gets rather exciting, with the caps of the mushrooms billowing out from their stems.
The mushrooms we eat are actually the fruiting body of the mycelium, and the caps open up to release spores from the gills, not unlike seeds from a pod.
You can pick each mushroom off by twisting it out of the soil.
You know they’re ready to pick once the tissue connecting the cap to the stem tears to reveal the gills.
The mycelium will usually offer several flushes of mushrooms after the first round sprout, with each crop becoming smaller each time.
Once the mycelium is no longer producing crops, the contents of the box can be added to the garden as a nutritious compost.
My favorite way to cook mushrooms is to shallow-fry them with salt, pepper and garlic in the gills, sprinkled with parmesan once they’re done, but there are so many ways you can use up what should be, all things going well, a pretty vigorous crop of mushrooms.
