I grew my first bunch of mushrooms with my mushroom grow kit. I was pretty impressed at how large they grew! I probably shouldn’t have let them get as big as they did but I was fascinated at seeing how they changed everyday. Here’s the pictures showing the growth for ten days:

We started with just a block of stuff that looked like spent beer grains, covered it with a moisture tent, kept it moist, and two days later a mushroom started popping out!

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5, I was surprised to see the mushrooms growing together instead of a lot of individual stalks. There were several that grew up like conjoined twins. I really don’t know how that happened.

Day 6

Day 8, I am not sure why the mushrooms only grew out of the top of the block either. I imagined that they would grow out all over the place… that’s what it looked like in my head anyway…

Day 9, The mushrooms were starting to get so big that they were starting to touch the moisture tent!

Day 10, I decided it was time to stop watching them grow and actually harvest them.

Here’s what the block looked like after I picked them all off. The instructions said to soak the block over night in water to “reactivate” it and more mushrooms will grow. I hope it works! The block feels a lot lighter and looks smaller than what I started with.

Here we are, 4 (or 5) pretty large shiitake mushrooms!

This one was bigger than my hand! It is also the one I ate first – I added it to some pho I ordered that night. It was yummy!

Well my first try at growing my own mushrooms was kind of a success. I really thought I would have mushrooms popping out all over the block. I wasn’t expecting only 4-5 to grow at once. I hope that more grow during the 2nd round of the block.

If it seems like the block is not producing any more mushrooms, I am going to try to put it in the back yard with some logs and hope that the spores spread. I might have a mushrooms garden in my backyard next spring!