Comfort For Mushrooms

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

They go to the forest for mushrooms after a rain. People know that not all weather is suitable for the appearance of tempting hats, cunningly peeping out of the grass, luring and beckoning. To tame mushrooms in a summer cottage requires the creation of a certain comfort for them, so that mushrooms are comfortable to live and reproduce, and people can admire the fruits created by nature and their own labor and care

Variety of the mushroom kingdom

The world of mushrooms, like any other living world, is very diverse.

Among them there are parasites that annoy gardeners with their forays. For example, a parasitic fungus named "late blight", which loves to eat tomatoes and potatoes. You will not meet such a guest with "due respect" and you will be left without a harvest of basic vegetables.

Sometimes, in the spring, you will be surprised to find an edible family of gnomes-morels under the rubble, who have arrived from nowhere. They will please them for a year or two, and they will disappear as suddenly as they appeared, in a direction known only to them.

But such mushrooms as champignons, oyster mushrooms, people have learned to tame, growing in greenhouses, basements, and even in the garden, creating conditions suitable for life for them.

Accommodations

Mushrooms are representatives of the living world, and therefore, their successful development and active growth are influenced by the same factors that help or harm the life of plants, animals and humans. These are the well-known parameters of the state of our environment: air temperature and humidity, illumination of the place of residence. To get decent harvests of mushrooms right at your summer cottage, you need to take care of creating favorable conditions for the life of the mushroom kingdom.

Nutrient medium

Mushrooms have the properties of both animals and plants. Like animals, fungi feed on organic matter from plants. But they do not have a mouth and other digestive organs, therefore, they do not swallow food or chew, but, like plants, absorb it.

For this, the mushroom has a branched web, which, in fact, is a mushroom. What we used to put in a basket, calling it a mushroom, is a fruiting mushroom body responsible for the continuation of the genus.

In order for the living mushroom web to grow and bear fruit, it is necessary to create a nutrient medium for it. For this, people have invented several options for creating a "kitchen" for mushrooms. One option is to use the stumps of cut trees. The best food is provided by the stumps of deciduous trees.

One of the "Asienda" shared her personal experience of growing oyster mushrooms -

Air temperature

The optimum air temperature for the formation of fruiting mushroom bodies is in the range from 15 to 18 degrees.

Higher temperatures stimulate growth but spoil the quality of the mushrooms. They become light, hollow, which has a bad effect on their further storage.

The lower temperature inhibits growth and makes the mushroom pulp tough.

Humidity

Mushrooms are moisture lovers. But, unlike animals and plants, nature has not provided them with protective tissues that regulate the process of evaporation. Therefore, nature itself or man has to take care of the high humidity (up to 85-100%) of their environment.

Moreover, it is necessary to find that "golden mean" when both the grown mushroom is at ease, and the competitors-lovers of moisture do not try to win back nutritious plantations.

Lighting

Although mushrooms in nature hide in thickets, windbreaks, under the crown of trees, they, like all life on Earth, need lighting. When growing mushrooms in a dimly lit room, additional lighting with neon lamps is installed. Moreover, the blue spectrum contributes to the better growth of fruit bodies.

Oxygen

When growing mushrooms indoors, you should periodically ventilate it to ensure the flow of oxygen needed by all living things, including mushrooms.