Thank you to North Spore for allowing us to be an affiliate partner. You can purchase super easy to grow substrate bags of Lion’s Mane, Shiitake, Oyster mushrooms, so on. This was how I first learned mushroom growing. Don’t cut the top of the bag off like I did!
You’d think that if you’ve grown one mushroom, you’ve grown them all. I was very lucky starting out because I pretty much fell into some of the easier-to-grow mushrooms like oysters and Lion’s Mane. Companies like North Spore list these two as their top sellers, not just because people like the taste, texture, or health benefits, but because they are relatively contamination-resistant and flexible enough to grow in different environments.
Note: If someone here just wants to know which mushroom is easiest to grow, go for Blue or Pink Oyster. They grow like weeds.
Moving on!
The world of mushroom cultivation methods is as varied as their looks. The question here is: What makes one mushroom easier to grow than another? I think the easiest way to answer this is to understand the five basic parameters you want to follow to grow mushrooms:
Growing Temperatures (if it’s too cold or too hot, mushrooms won’t grow. We need to set them out in a specific temperature range.
Humidity (mushrooms generally like high humidity, but there are times when humidity needs to be lowered to move on to the next growth phase)
Time Duration (on average, how many days it takes for each growth phase of a mushroom)
CO2 Thresholds (how much CO2 a mushroom wants (or doesn’t) before fruiting)
Fresh Air Exchange (how much fresh air a mushroom wants throughout its growth cycle)
I’m going to take a look at Shiitake, Lion’s Mane, Oysters, and Reishi to show the parameter ranges that different mushrooms need, and how some requirements make a mushroom more difficult to grow than others.
Shiitake mushrooms are definitely intermediate difficulty mushrooms because it needs much cooler temperatures during the second phase of its growth.
Once a substrate bag is colonized with shiitake mycelium, a grower can stick the bag into a fridge or outside in cold temperatures for a night, and then bring it back in, and then whack the bag pretty hard to encourage growth.
This is a cold and physical shock that’s supposed to imitate the shoulder seasons of winter, and a hardwood tree falling in the forest. It’s very unique to shiitake cultivation. Some Japanese growers even use a low voltage device to literally shock the substrate block into fruiting.
The extra steps it takes to successfully fruit a shiitake block adds to the difficulty, but it doesn’t help that it can take up to a couple months to fully colonize a block.
This extra time is important because growers with access to less effective ways of sterilization, like those using a bathroom sink or a still air box to mix the substrate, they can introduce contaminants that might only show themselves during those last couple weeks of colonizing.
On the other hand, I listed Pink Oyster mushrooms, which are the fastest colonizing species that I’ve seen so far. They grow so aggressively that people use them as art installations, like growing oysters inside a teddy bear for a terrifying effect. You can throw the grain spawn in the dirt somewhere with okay moisture levels and they’ll probably grow.
I think a lot of their survival success comes from being so fast at growing. I can usually move from a colonized grain jar to fruiting bodies in about 2-3 weeks. Compare this to 2-3 months for shiitake.
Pink Oysters might also be resistant to contamination because its growing temperatures are in the danger zones where molds like trichoderma flourishes, past 70 degrees. I can only assume that having to constantly compete with molds would help oysters adapt very well.
Despite Paul Stamets’ reference book claiming 70+ fahrenheit temperatures for fruiting, I’ve gotten away with fruiting between 65-70 degrees, which is perfect because I can grow them in the exact same conditions as Lion’s Mane, while reducing the risk of contamination with higher temperatures.
While Lion’s Mane is supposed to prefer cooler temperatures, as its mostly foraged during late summers through winters in the Southeast U.S., a consistent 68 degrees Fahrenheit has never let me down while growing it indoors.
It grows relatively quickly, fruiting in about 3-4 weeks from initial grain spawn mix.
It’s not as aggressive as Pink Oyster in colonizing, so it can be a bit more affected by contamination. But I’ve had very little instances of contamination during the substrate colonization process; its mostly just during grain jar propagations.
It’s great that such a useful medicinal mushroom is so easy to grow. Not only does it have the best medicinal effects (in my opinion), I can grow it at will, or even hand a colonized substrate bag to a friend and have them grow it.
Reishi is a different story. While it has consistent fruiting temperatures and humidity, it has vastly long colonization times, and can take 3-5 months to grow to maturity, which is a big factor if it’s taking up space in your grow tent—because if you take it out, it will dry out and stop growing.
Reishi’s CO2 requirements are very unique as well. Not only can it take a lot of CO2 build up during its early phases of growth, the structure of the fruiting body is determined by how much CO2 has been built up in the atmosphere. If you maintain very high levels, the fruiting body will be long and spindly, called an antler. If you leave it at relatively low CO2 levels, and cut the opening of the bag at the side, you’ll get the most traditional conk.
When I was growing Reishi, I thought I gave a lot of fresh air to the mushroom, expecting that conk structure, but I got the antlers anyway. Maybe it’s because I opened the bag from the top, where it will just naturally develop the antler. But I gave the bags two months to grow, and had to give up on growing it to maturity as I was growing a lot of Lion’s Mane and oyster at the time.
Ending Thoughts
It’s worth noting that during the fruiting body phase of the four species I’ve listed, some light is required. Light doesn’t provide the same energetic benefits to mushrooms as it does for plants, but it gives them a direction to grow. It’s pretty much simulating the fruiting body pushing out of the ground and growing toward the sun.
Of those I listed, only Reishi requires light before the mature fruiting phase, because the antler and conks that Reishi produces is already a very developed form of the fruiting body. The primordia of most mushrooms are commonly known as “pins” and are tiny, enough that they aren’t thinking about light yet.
To answer the question of what makes a mushroom easier to grow than others, I think the word “flexibility” sums it up well:
Oysters and Lion’s Mane have the most flexibility during cultivation. They can grow in a wide range of temperatures, don’t need humidity changes, are very quick to grow, meaning you can get rid of old bags quickly, leaving room for more new ones.
You can treat their CO2 and Fresh Air Exchange levels like a normal person, meaning you can just turn on a fan and they’ll be happy. And while they need some light, it’s the equivalent of what an LED bulb can provide.
Lion’s Mane and Oysters are truly “set it and forget it” types of mushrooms, whereas you’ll need more sensors and considerations when growing Shiitake and Reishi, with questions like, “Where can I cold shock the shiitake? When do I whack it? When should I lower CO2 levels to get conks from the Reishi? Where do I store these things for 5 months?”
We can also change the perspective on what “difficult” is. If you started growing Reishi from the start, you’d optimize to exactly what is needed for the Reishi. It wouldn’t be any harder than Oyster mushrooms. Your expectations are built from a different understanding.
On a similar note, a friend of mine is very active in growing psilocybin mushrooms, but has a lot of issues growing hardwood mushrooms like Lion’s Mane or oysters.
At the same time, I grow hardwood mushrooms like nothing, but have a lot of issues growing psilocybin. It all depends on where we started off in our mushroom journey, so maybe you might want to consider some of the more intermediate mushrooms first—if you’re willing to purchase the equipment to do it right.
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