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 actual price of the mushrooms in the shops. I find this an extremely unfair comparison and feel that it is wrong to simply compare the two with the quantity of mushrooms that they produce.

You can buy mushroom growing kits for just a few different species of mushroom – you can find button mushroom grow kits and you may get oyster mushroom grow kits. Both of these are the most common and may be purchased for the most part garden centres and usually on garden centre websites. However you can also grow other varieties from more specialist websites, enabling you to grow your own mushrooms like Shiitake, Portobello and much more. These kits usually cost around �5 to �10 and can probably offer you around �5 worth of mushrooms (if grown in the best possible environment, and with regards to 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 can to get the mushrooms themselves. A lot of the supermarket mushrooms are grown massively in bulk and are usually grown far away and imported across, where it is so much cheaper to allow them to grow them. Then theres Shrooms Candy that in a kit you get a box and get the substrate (compost or straw) in addition to a small bag of spawn. When you buy mushrooms from a shop you aren’t left with excellent compost for your garden (mushroom compost is probably the most expensive and nutritious forms of compost as the mushrooms break down and recycle many nutrients present in the substrate). And then there’s the fact that you’re growing mushrooms yourself – surely the excitement and fun factor are worth spending money on too.

In my opinion mushroom growing kits are an excellent way of growing your own mushrooms and even if sometimes they don’t offer amazing affordability when compared to the shop price become familiar with so much from carrying it out yourself and will probably take great pride in growing and then eating your own mushrooms. Maybe even once you’ve learned a bit more about cultivating mushrooms you can cut out the middleman and discover your personal substrate (straw, newspaper, manure) and buy or make your personal mushroom spawn. That’s where you can get real value for money too, growing hundreds of pounds worth of mushroom from literally a few pounds investm