This section is intended to give you some recommended reading if you’re serious about growing mushrooms at home. Check out the following books and see if any are the right fit for you.
The Essential Guide to Cultivating Mushrooms
This book is exactly what it says it is. Packed full of tips and easy step by step instructions on how to get your own mushroom farms setup at home.
This book focuses specifically on four types of mushrooms: Oyster, Shiitake, Lion’s Mane, and Maitake. All of the setups are designed around growing mushrooms in controlled indoor environments. Some of the setups are simple, but it also contains a great deal of information on advanced setups and topics. This is a must have book for anyone starting out with a serious mindset for cultivating mushrooms at home.
Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation
While the Essential Guide to Mushroom Cultivation was a no nonsense guide, this book takes a different route in the information it presents. Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation is all about the ecology of mushrooms and takes a much more holistic approach to cultivating them.
Not only does this book look at how to grow mushrooms, it also takes a stance on why we should. The book highlights ways that mushrooms can become a part of a wider sustainable farming practice. This book also has important information for both indoor and outdoor cultivation which makes it a valuable resource if you plan on tackling both.
Mushroom Cultivation
This book is the most direct in it’s title. If you want a step by step guide, this is it. The book does explain the advantages of growing your own mushrooms, but this is almost exclusively instructional. If you are looking to get more education on fungi in general and the ecological importance of mushrooms, I’d recommend you start with either book above. However, you can’t go wrong with good step by step instructions.
The Complete Mushroom Hunter
This book is your entry level guide to foraging for wild mushrooms. I include it here because invariably people will ask for a guide. This is no substitute for the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, but it does a better job about teaching you the basics of foraging and and identification.
