Mushroom kits have actually had a good amount of bad press in recent times with many critics claiming that 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 really is wrong to simply compare both with the amount of mushrooms that they produce.

You can purchase mushroom growing kits for just 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 can be purchased at most garden centres and usually on garden centre websites. However you may also grow other varieties from more specialist websites, enabling you to grow your personal mushrooms like Shiitake, Portobello and much more. These kits usually cost around �5 to �10 and will probably give 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 does to buy 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 really is so much cheaper for them to grow them. Then theres the fact that in a kit you obtain a box and get the substrate (compost or straw) in addition to 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 forms of compost as the mushrooms breakdown and recycle many nutrients present in the substrate). And there’s How to buy shrooms that you’re 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 own mushrooms and even if sometimes they don’t offer amazing value for money when compared to the shop price become familiar with so much from doing it yourself and will probably take great pride in growing and eating your personal mushrooms. Maybe even once you have learned a bit more about cultivating mushrooms you can cut out the middleman and discover your own substrate (straw, newspaper, manure) and buy or make your own 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