Last Sunday was Father’s Day here in the UK. In recent years I have found it increasingly easy to buy gifts for my father due to our shared love for all things self-sufficiency. Basically I look at things I’ve been thinking of getting for myself, and then pick one of them that he doesn’t already have. This year I opted to buy him a mushroom growing kit. I knew he’d love it. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for some time.

In their excellent Practical Self-Sufficiency book, Dick and James Strawbridge have a couple of suggestions for growing mushrooms. One that particularly intrigued me was planting plugs of spores into a log, which is then planted into a hole half as deep as the log is long. With half of the log in contact with the soil, moisture should be drawn up and the log should stay damp. I considered buying my dad some spore plugs so that he could try this in his garden. However, I feared that the spores might not take, which wouldn’t become apparent until after the gift was received. I’d love to try this, but probably in my own garden, not as a gift, just in case it didn’t work.

I needed something with more certainty. I’d previously looked at the mushroom kits that come in a plastic tub. Often these have already started growing before they are despatched, so there would be some crop visible when he opened it. I looked at these for my dad last Christmas, but they seemed either quite expensive, or reasonably priced but with mixed reviews. However, this time when I looked on Amazon, there were some with all good reviews that were reasonably priced. What’s more, there was a discount applied for orders of more than one pack at a time. So I treated myself too.

So I am now growing chestnut mushrooms. The instructions say that the size of the mushrooms depends upon the size of the previous crop. If I leave a crop to grow large mushrooms, I will get small mushrooms in the next. So it recommends not letting the first crop get too large, so that the second crop will be of a decent size too. When I opened mine there appeared to be a few small mushrooms forming just under the surface of the soil. At the time of writing (Thursday), I already have several small mushrooms just about ready to eat. When dad opened his on Sunday, he already had one mushroom very visible. He was very pleased with his gift.

The mushroom kit on Sunday – small mushrooms under the surface

The mushroom kit today (Thursday) – several mushrooms just about ready to eat