Mushroom kits have actually had a good 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. I find this a very unfair comparison and feel that it is wrong to simply compare both with the amount of mushrooms that they produce.
You can purchase mushroom growing kits for only a few different species of mushroom – you can find button mushroom grow kits and you will get oyster mushroom grow kits. Both of these are the most common and can be purchased for the most part garden centres and usually on garden centre websites. Nevertheless, you may also grow other varieties from more specialist websites, letting you grow your own mushrooms like Shiitake, Portobello and more. These kits usually cost around �5 to �10 and can probably present you with around �5 worth of mushrooms (if grown in the best possible environment, and based on the variety as some mushrooms cost more then others in the shops).
I hardly understand why people moan when it costs more to buy a mushroom growing kit then it does to get the mushrooms themselves. A lot of the supermarket mushrooms are grown massively in bulk and so are usually grown far away and imported across, where it really is so much cheaper for them to grow them. Then theres the fact that in a kit you get a box and get the substrate (compost or straw) as well as a small bag of spawn. Once you buy mushrooms from the shop you aren’t left with excellent compost for your garden (mushroom compost is among the most expensive and nutritious forms of compost as the mushrooms break down and recycle many nutrients present in the substrate). And there’s the fact that you are growing mushrooms yourself – surely the excitement and fun factor are worth spending money on too.
For me mushroom growing kits are an excellent way of growing your own mushrooms and even if sometimes they don’t offer amazing value for money when compared to the shop price become familiar with so much from doing it yourself and can probably take great pride in growing and eating your own mushrooms. Maybe even once polkadot mushroom chocolate learned a bit more about cultivating mushrooms you can cut out the middleman and find your own substrate (straw, newspaper, manure) and purchase or make your own mushroom spawn. That’s where you can get real value for money too, growing a huge selection of pounds worth of mushroom from literally a couple of pounds investm