Mushroom kits have actually had a fair amount of bad press recently with many critics claiming that they provide very poor value for money when comparing the yields of the mushroom kits with the actual price of the mushrooms in the shops. psilocybe cubensis find this an extremely unfair comparison and believe that it is wrong to simply compare the two with the amount of mushrooms that they produce.
You can buy mushroom growing kits for only a few different species of mushroom – you can aquire button mushroom grow kits and you can get oyster mushroom grow kits. Both of these are the most common and may be purchased for the most part garden centres and usually on garden centre websites. However you may also grow other varieties from more specialist websites, allowing you to grow your own mushrooms like Shiitake, Portobello and more. These kits usually cost around �5 to �10 and will probably give you around �5 worth of mushrooms (if grown in the best possible environment, and with regards to the variety as some mushrooms cost more then others in the shops).
I don’t understand why people moan when it costs more to get a mushroom growing kit then it does to buy the mushrooms themselves. Almost all of the supermarket mushrooms are grown massively in bulk and so are usually grown far away and imported across, where it is so much cheaper to allow them to grow them. Then theres the fact that in a kit you obtain a box and obtain the substrate (compost or straw) in addition to a small bag of spawn. When you buy mushrooms from a shop you aren’t left with excellent compost for the garden (mushroom compost is among the most expensive and nutritious forms of compost as the mushrooms breakdown and recycle many nutrients present in the substrate). And then there’s the fact that you are growing mushrooms yourself – surely the excitement and fun factor are worth paying for too.
For me mushroom growing kits are an effective way of growing your own mushrooms and even if sometimes they don’t offer amazing value for money when compared to the shop price you will learn so much from carrying it out yourself and can probably take great pride in growing and eating your personal mushrooms. Maybe even once you’ve learned a little more about cultivating mushrooms you could cut out the middleman and find your own substrate (straw, newspaper, manure) and purchase or make your personal mushroom spawn. This is where you can get real value for money too, growing hundreds of pounds worth of mushroom from literally a few pounds investm