Growing mushrooms at home looks mysterious from the outside and turns out to be four repeatable steps once you have done it once. You put a living culture into sterilised grain, the mycelium eats the grain, you mix that colonised grain through a bulk substrate, and when the substrate is colonised you give it humid, fresh air and it fruits. Every guide, kit and bag on this site is one of those four steps, and this page walks through them in order.

Step 0: pick a species that suits your room

Before you buy anything, pick what you want to eat and check it suits the room you will grow in. In Australia that mostly means temperature. Pink oysters love warmth and fly along at 24 to 30°C, which makes them a summer mushroom in Queensland and New South Wales and a heated-room mushroom in Melbourne. Blue oysters, lion's mane and shiitake prefer the cooler end, 12 to 22°C, so they are the winter and shoulder-season picks for most of the country. King oyster and reishi are a step up in patience.

• First grow, warm room: pink oyster or pearl oyster.
• First grow, cool room: blue oyster or lion's mane.
• Second grow: king oyster, shiitake or reishi on a hardwood block.

The beginner species guide goes deeper, and the seasonal guide says what suits each state right now.

Step 1: a culture

A culture is live mycelium of the species you chose, kept clean. The easy format is a liquid culture syringe: mycelium suspended in a sterile nutrient solution, ready to inject. The other format is a colonised agar plate, which is what growers use once they keep a library of strains. You need one or the other, and it needs to be clean, because everything downstream copies whatever is in the syringe. Our gourmet and medicinal cultures are grown in Australia and open soon; any clean gourmet liquid culture works with the bags below.

Step 2: grain

Mycelium needs a food it can colonise fast, in a form you can break up and spread. That is grain: hydrated, nutrient-enhanced, sterilised and sealed in a bag with a filter patch and an injection port. You inject 2 to 5 ml of liquid culture through the port, keep the bag warm and dark, and over one to three weeks the mycelium runs through every kernel. The result is grain spawn. Which grain? Wheat is the all-rounder; oats and milo shake apart easily; corn has big reserves. The grain guide compares them.

Step 3: substrate

Grain spawn is strong but small. To get a real flush you spread it through a bulk substrate: the material the mushrooms will actually fruit from. Oyster mushrooms and compost-loving species like a coco-coir based blend such as our CVA. Lion's mane, shiitake, king oyster and reishi are wood lovers and want the hardwood pellet substrate. Mix the spawn through at 1:2 to 1:4 by weight for coir, 1:4 to 1:5 for hardwood, pack a tub or keep it in the bag, and leave it in the dark until it is white. The grow builder works out how much grain you need for the tub you have.

Step 4: fruiting

A fully colonised block wants three changes to start producing: fresh air, light and humidity. Open the tub or cut the bag, keep the air around it at 85 to 95% humidity with a few mists a day, give it indirect daylight or a cheap LED on a timer, and make sure it gets fresh air several times a day. Pins appear within a week and double in size daily; oysters are ready when the cap edges begin to flatten, lion's mane before the spines yellow. The fruiting guide has the numbers per species, and the harvest guide covers picking and storing.

The one-bag version

An all-in-one grow bag does steps 2 and 3 inside a single sealed bag: grain on the bottom, substrate on top, one injection port. You inoculate, wait for the grain, knead it through the substrate without opening anything, wait again, then cut the bag and fruit. It removes the one step where beginners most often pick up a contaminant, which is why we recommend it for a first grow. The all-in-one instructions cover it stage by stage.

Keeping it clean

Mould spores are everywhere, and the only reason a bag of sterilised grain stays clean is that nothing gets in. Three habits do most of the work: wipe the injection port with 70% alcohol before every injection, flame the needle until it glows, and do any open-bag work inside a still air box (a clear tub with two arm holes) or in front of a flow hood. The contamination guide shows what the common intruders look like and what to do.

What it costs

A first grow from an all-in-one bag and a culture costs well under a hundred dollars and produces two flushes of mushrooms you cannot buy at that quality. A bulk grow from a 2kg grain bag and a 5kg substrate bag runs to roughly the same money for three to four times the harvest. The cost guide does the sums per kilo.

1. Pick a species for your room

   Pink oyster in the warm, blue oyster or lion's mane in the cool.

2. Get a culture

   A clean liquid culture syringe of that species.

3. Inoculate grain

   Or buy colonised spawn and skip the wait.

4. Spawn to substrate

   Coir for oysters, hardwood for the wood lovers.

5. Fruit

   Humidity, fresh air, light. Harvest in about a week.

Written by the Aus Myco Kingdom crew. Everything here is general growing information for gourmet and medicinal species; your room, your climate and your culture will have the final say.