The specialty mushroom market is expanding, and it isn’t limited to commercial farmers: An increasing number of people are growing fungi at home. It’s an easier prospect than ever, with companies catering to beginners with “spray-and-grow” boxes of lion’s mane and oyster mushroom spawn, kits for growing shiitakes on pieces of oak and bags of inoculated sawdust to sprinkle into pots.
In short, forget the countertop hydroponic herb garden; the mushroom log is having a moment.
“We say mushrooms are having a movement,” said Lori Harrison, vice president of communications at the American Mushroom Institute. Edible mushrooms are already a billion-dollar industry in the United States, and according to market research firm The Insight Partners, that’s projected to grow to almost $20 billion in the next five years.
People are eager for cheaper, more accessible meat substitutes, Harrison said, and more unusual mushroom varieties are appearing at farmers markets and on restaurant menus. The Agriculture Department reported that specialty mushroom sales in the 2021-2022 growing season rose 32 percent over the previous year.
Matt McInnis is the co-founder of North Spore, a Portland, Maine-based operation that sells kits, spawn and accessories for growing frilly oysters, stocky trumpets, vibrant chicken of the woods and more. Since the kits became the business’s focus in 2020, McInnis said, sales have nearly doubled each year.
“People are starting to wake up to the breadth of the diversity that exists in the world of mushrooms,” he said. “And we’re demystifying the experience of growing them.”
North Spore’s spray-and-grow box varieties include blue, pink and golden oyster mushrooms, plus the puffy white lion’s mane.
“We chose those specifically because they’re basically foolproof,” McInnis said. “If you bought one of those kits and neglected it for six months, you’d probably have mushrooms growing on top of it.”
Anneliesse Gormley, an artist and woodworker living near Asheville, N.C., compared the mushroom kit experience to watching a Chia Pet erupt with sprouts. Gormley, 34, began growing fungi at home during the pandemic, using kits from North Spore and other companies, including San Francisco Bay Area-based Far West Fungi.
“I just remember thinking, ‘This is a little plastic bag of dirt in a box. This doesn’t make sense that this could happen, but let’s see if it works,’” she said. “It can give you instant gratification. I mean, you can watch it day by day and see a colonization happening. And then you start to see little fruiting bodies. It just feels like this really exciting thing.”
The kits, McInnis said, are “the jumping off point for a much deeper exploration of mushroom growing.” Most customers come back for more, like bread loaf-sized “fruiting block” kits — plastic covered blocks of sawdust that grow even larger flushes of mushrooms. Many start to experiment with inoculating their own growing material, like straw or mulch, using sawdust spawn or liquid cultures, and setting up growing chambers, tubs and tents to control light and humidity.
It’s a short jump, McInnis said, from misting a box on your counter twice a day to drilling holes in a log to insert shiitake spawn-soaked plugs.
Gormley has graduated from boxes to buckets. She boils straw to kill any bacteria, then layers it with sawdust spawn in pails with holes drilled in them where the mushrooms will emerge.
“I just have these five-gallon buckets stacked in our spare bathroom-slash-mushroom-growing operation,” she said. “It just looks like a lot of really weird, holey buckets. In a matter of two weeks, it’s like this incredible little jungle.”
Gormley grows a number of varieties, both for culinary use and for inclusion in her art. She carves kitchen utensils and cutting boards from wood and resin, often drying and encapsulating the fungi inside. Her favorite mushroom, from an aesthetic standpoint, is the ruffled pink oyster.
“They’re one of my favorite things, not only to grow, but to eat and to look at,” she said. “I just think it’s amazing that nature can produce a color like that.”
Gormley’s bathroom fungi bucket totem is an example of how versatile mushroom growing can be, said McInnis, and the fact that anyone can do it.
“Even for people who live in urban settings, who might not have access to a garden, we have indoor grow tents or tubs,” he said. “There are small-scale, at-home ways of having mushroom cultivation year-round indoors.”
Mushroom gardening at home also offers educational benefits, adds Harrison, for people with little knowledge of how they’re grown. The American Mushroom Institute is headquartered in Chester County, Pa., often called the mushroom capital of the world. More than half of the nation’s commercially-grown mushrooms are produced in the county’s southeastern corner. And yet, Harrison said, passersby often have no idea they’re driving through fungus country.
“They’re done in these sort of nondescript cinder block buildings, and you probably don’t pay attention to them,” she said. “Comparatively, you drive through any piece of land, basically anywhere in the U.S., and you can see corn growing. You can see apple trees, so you kind of make that connection. There’s a mystique around mushrooms; they just show up in the grocery store.”
Having a spray-and-grow box or a mushroom log at home, Harrison added, helps increase awareness and appreciation, and makes people more likely to experiment with new varieties and recipes. It’s also a way to taste more esoteric types without the time, effort and risk of foraging them in the wild. And mushroom growers have a tendency to share their bounty, which only helps the market grow.
Gormley’s always eager to get new people excited about specialty fungi. “Somebody sees this thing and they think it looks wild and extraterrestrial,” she said, “but it’s a pink oyster mushroom that cooks beautifully into something that tastes like barbecue pork.” Often, that first taste is the entry point to a new hobby. “Now you have this exciting, new adventure you can take. It just feels it feels like a very endless, slippery slope that I want to slide down.”
Kate Morgan is a freelance writer in Richland, Pa.
