Mushroom kits have actually had a good amount of bad press recently with many critics claiming that they provide very poor affordability 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 believe that it really is wrong to simply compare both with the quantity of mushrooms that they produce.

You can buy mushroom growing kits for only a few different species of mushroom – you will get button mushroom grow kits and you will get oyster mushroom grow kits. Both of these are the most common and will be purchased for the most part garden centres and usually on garden centre websites. However you may also grow other varieties from more specialist websites, allowing you to grow your personal mushrooms like Shiitake, Portobello and much more. These kits usually cost around �5 to �10 and can probably give you 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 buy a mushroom growing kit then it can to buy the mushrooms themselves. A lot of the supermarket mushrooms are grown massively in bulk and so are usually grown in other countries and imported across, where it really is so much cheaper to allow them to grow them. Then theres the fact that in a kit you get a box and obtain the substrate (compost or straw) as well as a small bag of spawn. When you buy mushrooms from a shop you aren’t left over with excellent compost for your garden (mushroom compost is probably the most expensive and nutritious forms of compost as the mushrooms breakdown and recycle many nutrients within 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.

In pearl oyster mushroom growing kits are an effective way of growing your own mushrooms and also if sometimes they don’t really offer amazing value for money in comparison with the shop price you will learn so much from carrying it out yourself and will probably take great pride in growing and eating your personal mushrooms. Maybe even once you’ve learned a bit more about cultivating mushrooms you can cut out the middleman and find your personal substrate (straw, newspaper, manure) and purchase or make your own mushroom spawn. This is where you can get real value for money too, growing a huge selection of pounds worth of mushroom from literally a few pounds investm