Mushrooms need humidity, protection from heat and strong light, and a mild temperature to grow. Make sure the location you choose is out of direct sunlight, has a preferably higher humidity level, room temperature or lower, and is absent of strong drafts or breezes, but still is able to ventilate a little.

 To begin, place your mushroom grow bag in a room with gentle, ambient light, in a spot protected from breezes and direct sunlight. Place a plastic sheet under your grow bag, so that later, when the mushrooms drop spores, you can see them, and to keep your room clean. A clean, cut-open rubbish bag is suitable, preferably black. Try to pick a room that will not experience large temperature changes over the day. A garage or a sparkling clean bathroom is a good choice, but please avoid this if you have a toilet in your bathroom. We want those mushrooms clean and ready to eat!

Using a craft knife, shallowly cut the bag on the lines indicated. The goal is to cut the plastic only, with minimal disturbance of the mushroom growth media inside. Don’t worry if you nick it; mushrooms are strong and hardy, and will recover, but minimal disturbance prevents any delays in fruiting your mushrooms.

Squeeze the air out of the bag, fold the upper flap down the side of the bag, and either tape it, or hold it in place with a rubber band. This ensures your mushroom’s oxygen supply comes from the location where you made your cut, ensuring they will not grow inside the bag.

Now you can begin your daily routine to care for your mushrooms. The growth period has two phases:

Phase 1: Pinning

Baby mushrooms are called ‘Pins’, and so the first stage is called ‘Pinning’. To get your mushrooms to pin, you must provide them with a sufficiently moist environment, until they are strong enough to begin their Rapid Growth. For the first few days, use a spray bottle to spray the hole you cut with fresh, clean water, 3 or more times per day, to keep the surface moist. After a few days of this, pins will appear. They will look like tiny, round bumps, and may look like tiny mushroom heads.

Phase 2: Rapid Growth

When the pins have appeared, it is time to reduce the amount of spraying you are doing. Depending on how dry your room is, you can spray as little as once per day as the mushrooms begin their Rapid Growth phase. Now the mushrooms will accelerate their growth considerably. In a few more days, you should obtain a large bunch of delicious Gourmet Mushrooms!

A note on Harvesting:

The mushrooms should be harvested when they begin to sporulate (Drop spores). If you have placed a plastic sheet underneath your grow bag, you will, at some point, see a fine powder appearing on the sheet. These are spores. Depending on whether you purchased Grey Oyster or Pink Oyster, the spores could be either White, or Pink. When you see this, your mushrooms are mature, and it is time to harvest them.

When you harvest, carefully try to pull the entire mushroom bunch from the block, using a back and forth twisting motion, and a levering motion. The goal is to disturb as little of the media inside the bag as possible, as more damage will delay a further flush. If you damage the media, don’t worry! Just return to Phase 1, and stick it out, spraying at least 3 times a day until you see more pins!

Flushes

Each batch of mature mushrooms is called a ‘Flush’. Your Thor’s Spores Gourmet Mushrooms Grow Kit can flush up to 6 times, but this entirely depends on your initial results. The media inside the bag represents the total amount of food and water the mushrooms have. As the mushrooms grow, they will use up this food, and so each successive flush will be smaller than the one before it. A grow kit technically has the ability to provide up to 500g of mushrooms, but this largely depends on how dry the kit becomes in the process of growing, and your conditions for growing, primarily temperature and humidity. This is affected by how dry the room is, that you chose for your mushrooms to grow in. An excellent way to improve your results after the first harvest is to soak the block in clean water for several hours, using a weight to hold the block under the surface of the water. Drain off the excess, and then begin your daily maintenance routine once again.

Eventually, the block will be exhausted, and no more mushrooms will be able to grow. The block makes excellent compost (with the bag removed), and you may even see some mushrooms grow in your garden at some stage, breaking down dead material and providing fresh nutrients to your plants!