Growing mushrooms

[DBB]

Besides buying an expensive mushroom kit ($20-40), is there a simple and cheap way to grow your own mushrooms? The results I found using google were dismal. One website included instructions for growing mushrooms such as this "Boil a bale of hay in a 55 gallon drum". Well as fun and safe as that sounds, its a bit out of my gardening expertise. I do have access to used coffee grounds, which I read could be used as a substrate for mushrooms (I'm interested in growing button mushrooms).

Any advice is welcome

[Dick Adams]

For an excellent publication on mushroom produstion, see

[simy1]

well, you will have to boil a bale of hay in a 55 gallon drum, then spawn it. You can just wet a bale of hay, and grow bacteria instead. But you could also buy 1000 plugs and with them spawn a ton or so of freshly cut logs (not so freshly cut, you have to wait about one month so that their fungicides dissipate). Then for $20 you would have quite a bit of mushrooms for years to come. if you have stumps in the shade, you could inoculate those, and then you'd get mushrooms for many years, but I should warn you that my stumps never made it. About 50% of my logs do produce.