Mushroom kits have actually had a fair amount of bad press in recent times with many critics claiming they provide very poor affordability when you compare the yields of the mushroom kits with the specific price of the mushrooms in the shops. I find this an extremely unfair comparison and believe that it is wrong to simply compare the two with the quantity of mushrooms that they produce.
You can purchase mushroom growing kits for only a few different species of mushroom – you will get button mushroom grow kits and you could get oyster mushroom grow kits. Both of these are the most common and will be purchased at most garden centres and usually on garden centre websites. However you can also grow other varieties from more specialist websites, enabling you to grow your personal mushrooms like Shiitake, Portobello and more. These kits usually cost around �5 to �10 and can probably provide you with around �5 worth of mushrooms (if grown in the perfect environment, and based on 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. The majority 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 point that in a kit you get a box and obtain the substrate (compost or straw) as well as a small bag of spawn. Once you buy mushrooms from a shop you aren’t left with excellent compost for the garden (mushroom compost is probably the most expensive and nutritious types of compost as the mushrooms break down 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 personal mushrooms and even if sometimes they don’t really offer amazing affordability when compared to the shop price become familiar with so much from doing it yourself and will probably take great pride in growing and then eating your own mushrooms. Maybe even once buy shroom online learned a little more about cultivating mushrooms you could cut out the middleman and find your personal substrate (straw, newspaper, manure) and buy or make your own mushroom spawn. That’s where you can get real affordability too, growing hundreds of pounds worth of mushroom from literally a couple of pounds investm