How to grow porcini mushrooms at home or in a summer cottage?

Self-cultivation of porcini mushrooms at home seems like a very attractive idea to many. After all, the porcini mushroom (or, as it is also called, boletus) is almost the most famous and widespread edible mushroom growing on the territory of the Russian Federation. It looks simple, but expressive - a thick white leg and a fleshy brown hat. Porcini mushrooms are used today to make sauces, soups and many other delicious dishes. One of the features of the porcini mushroom is that it does not change its color during heat treatment.

Under natural conditions, boletus grow in moderately humid places with different levels of illumination, under deciduous (oak, birch, beech) or coniferous (pine and spruce) trees.

Self-cultivation of porcini mushrooms requires the creation of conditions that will be as similar to natural as possible. It is not so easy, it takes some effort and some patience to achieve the result. Let's say oyster mushrooms to grow much easier - many do it even on the balcony.

Boletus mushrooms can be grown in two main ways:

1. outdoors (for example, at your summer cottage or personal plot);
2. in the premises.

The second method, which involves the creation of a completely artificial environment, requires more significant investments. However, with the right approach, they can certainly pay off.

Seed preparation

Whichever method of these two is chosen, first you need to prepare a special seed. And here you need to know a lot of subtleties. Fruit bodies of ordinary boletus mushrooms are suitable as raw materials. Moreover, if you want to grow them on a personal plot under an oak tree, then you need to take those porcini mushrooms that grow under the oak tree. The need for such accuracy is due to the fact that the boletus closely interact with the trees next to which they are.

In the collected fruiting bodies, all the legs are separated from the caps. In the future, we only need hats, and even dried and wormy ones can be put into action. They need to be placed in a bowl of cold water (by the way, alcohol can be added to the water at the rate of 3 cups per 10 liters, this will further stimulate the germination of spores). In addition, add 1 gram of potassium permanganate here and leave for a couple of hours.

Then sugar should be added to this bowl - 15-20 teaspoons per 10 liters of water. This is practically all - the mixture only needs to be infused in some heated room (if it's winter outside). The result is a liquid containing a large number of boletus spores.

Buying ready-made mycelium for growing

You can take an easier path and buy ready-made mycelium of porcini mushrooms in gardening stores. Foreign products are considered the best in this market, but in any case, you should first buy a small trial batch.

When buying, be sure to specify:

• strain and variety;
• the rate of fouling;
• resistance of this mycelium to mold;
• shelf life.

In addition, it does not hurt to talk to gardeners who have already grown boletus on their site - they will certainly give useful recommendations.

A good, high-quality mycelium should have a rich red color with small patches of yellow. If there are green and black spots on the mycelium, and a nasty ammonia smell emanates from the package, then the product is spoiled and cannot be used.

Advice

Purchased mycelium can be stored in the refrigerator at a temperature not higher than +4 degrees Celsius. Here he can be kept for up to three months without any problems.

Correct preparation of substrates

Another important stage is the preparation of the substrate, that is, the mixture in which the porcini mushroom can grow. This substrate consists of sunflower husks, straw, deciduous sawdust, buckwheat, etc. But it should not contain mold and rotten pieces at all, otherwise it will not be possible to grow your own boletus crop on the site.

The substrate must be saturated with moisture before placing mycelium or spores into it. There are two methods for this - steaming and boiling. Regardless of the selected processing technology, the substrate must retain such a property as air permeability. During processing, the material can be left directly in plastic bags.

How to grow boletus in open spaces

Now let's figure out how porcini mushrooms are grown on a personal plot. Of course, there must be a suitable tree (or trees) in this area. And within a radius of one meter from this tree, the first step is to remove a layer of earth about 15 centimeters thick. Pour seed with spores onto the roots (which must not be damaged under any circumstances!). For every 25 square centimeters, you need about 350 milliliters of seed. Then you need to fill everything back with earth and pour several buckets of water (it is better to pour along the trunk, carefully so as not to dilute the spores). The optimal sowing time when choosing this method is from mid-August to mid-September.

The mycelium (mycelium) must be planted differently on the site. For this, a pit 30 centimeters deep and 1.5 square meters wide is pulled out. A substrate is placed in it in layers of 10 centimeters - it is alternated with the ground in such a way that a bed of 20 centimeters high is formed. It is worth, by the way, to provide it with sloping edges, this will allow moisture to drain and not stagnate.

In this case, it is necessary to plant myceliums in a checkerboard pattern, and the distance between them should be 30 centimeters or more. Then the garden must be watered and covered with foliage.

Advice

The optimal time for planting mycelium is the end of summer or the beginning of September, but it must be borne in mind that the harvest in this case will not be in the same, but only next year. And as soon as next summer comes, you need to remember about the mushroom bed and start watering it at least once every seven days.

Growing porcini mushrooms from mycelium on site is more difficult than growing from spores, but ultimately yields a higher yield per tree.

How to grow boletus indoors

The difficulty here lies in the fact that for planting it is necessary to prepare not only the substrate and seed, but also the room itself. This can be a basement of a house, a special greenhouse or, for example, an ordinary barn.

The substrate material for planting mushrooms indoors must be boiled for 60-80 minutes without putting it out of standard plastic bags. Then you need to drain the water (for example, by making several holes in the bag) and put the substrate under something heavy. After cooling, it can already be taken to the room where the mycelium was prepared for planting (it is the purchased mycelium that is needed here, and not the self-prepared planting mixture) and where the mushrooms will subsequently grow. This room should be sterile, for which it should be treated with 1% chlorine solution.

When mixing mycelium and substrates, ventilation, if any, should be turned off so that the spores do not scatter. This procedure takes place as follows: mycelium and substrate are placed on a disinfected clean table and manually mixed. The weight of the planting material should be 3-5% of the weight of the substrate.

Then the already grafted substrate must be folded into whole bags - from 5 to 15 kilograms each.Moreover, the substrate should be tamped as tightly as possible. Then you need to make a few neat holes with a blade. Cuts are best done at a 45-degree angle, and each cut should be no more than 5 millimeters.

These bags must then be placed on the prepared incubation shelves. There should be ventilation holes around the edges of each shelf. Air should circulate freely here, but only after the incubation period of the mycelium, which lasts three weeks.

In addition, there must be a distance of at least 5 centimeters between the bags. A comfortable temperature for growing boletus mushrooms is about +25 degrees. If the temperature exceeds +30, then the mushrooms can get heatstroke and not germinate.

Plus, the room should have high humidity (85 to 95 percent). And so that mold does not start in such conditions, every day you need to clean the room with a chlorine solution. Such difficulties, of course, scare off many potential breeders, and they prefer to either plant mushrooms on the site, or not plant at all. But in fact, the possible result may well more than recoup the effort expended, and many people have already turned indoor mushroom cultivation into a good business.

Porcini mushrooms will begin to bear fruit for the first time about a month after planting.

Advice

To make the mushrooms dense and not watery, it is worth pouring water on the bags with a spray bottle once a day. And this water should have a temperature in the range from +10 to +25 degrees. To prevent moisture from stagnating, the room must be ventilated after watering.

The second fruiting time will come in another couple of weeks. In general, with proper care, porcini mushrooms grown in an enclosed space will produce a crop for six months continuously. Of course, some bags can get moldy, and they need to be taken out of the room on time, but throwing them out is not always important - they can be a good organic fertilizer.

So, the cultivation of porcini mushrooms can be carried out in several ways, each of which has its own difficulties and characteristics. You need to choose, of course, the one that will be easier for you to implement. Note that mushroom cultivation on a personal plot or in a basement can be not only a pleasant hobby, but also a completely successful business. At least there is a demand for porcini mushrooms among the population.