Food

Grow Porcini Mushrooms in Your Own Garden

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Porcini mushrooms are one of the most popular mushrooms on our menu. Year after year, their full aroma attracts many mushroom pickers to the neighboring forests. Even if such a walk in the forest offers not only full baskets but also relaxation, it would be great if we could also grow the popular porcini mushrooms at home.

Grow porcini mushrooms

The bad news first: while button mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, king oyster mushrooms and many other mushrooms can be grown easily at home or in your own garden, this is unfortunately not yet the case with porcini mushrooms.

Porcini mushrooms belong to the so-called mycorrhiza fungi, i.e. they absolutely need the community of living plants for the development of their fruiting bodies. Without this community, the underground mycelium will grow, but no fruit with the distinctive brown hat will be visible.

Mushroom mycelium and fruiting bodies

What we commonly refer to as a fungus is actually just the aboveground fruiting body of a huge underground network, the mycelium. These cells of the fungal mycelium, which can hardly be seen with the naked eye, extend over long distances like a net in the soil or, in the case of tree fungi, penetrate entire trunks of wood.

In breeding, mushrooms are provided with a suitable growth substrate. This can be soil, wood shavings or even coffee grounds. In mushroom growing kits, this substrate is already inoculated with the appropriate mushroom mycelium.

Mushroom growing in the garden

For mushroom cultivation in the garden, holes are often drilled into old trunks or blocks of wood into which wooden dowels inoculated with mycelium are inserted. Alternatively, in addition to the dowels, a suitable substrate is also supplied in mushroom growing sets, which enables cultivation on or in the ground. For ideal growth you should choose a shady and slightly damp location and then be patient. It can take three to six months for the mycelium to spread.

It’s faster with the mushroom growing sets for the home. Here the first mushrooms can sometimes be harvested after less than two weeks. However, since the breeding ground in the mushroom boxes is limited, this is the end after two to three harvests, while forest mushroom cultures can be expected to produce delicious mushrooms in the following year as well.

Growing porcini mushrooms in the garden

Even if there are no growing kits for porcini mushrooms, it is not ruled out to grow porcini mushrooms in your own garden. However, your garden should be more of a small oak or spruce forest so that there is even a chance of colonizing a porcini mycelium. As with truffle cultivation, you can try to inoculate the soil around living oaks and spruces with unwashed mushroom pieces that still contain enough spores. With a bit of luck and a lot of patience and the right weather conditions, there may be success in the years to come. If you don’t want to wait that long, you can at least console yourself with little namesakes – the stone mushrooms.

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