Pounland Mushroom boxs?

I often thought about growing mushrooms (due to the price at my local shop), but the starter kit in with the seed stand was about £5 so did'nt bother last year as I'm far to tight incase they fail lolz, but I noticed little mushroom kits in poundland last week so went for a £1 gamble.

It seems simple, add water, and cover with lid supplied in the box, leave in a warm for 6 days, then remove lid and place in a cool dark room, and await your crop!!!

I started mine last Sat and it is growing white threads on th surface at the moment, so its alive and moving in the right direction.

has anyone tried these kits and did they get many mushrooms for their pound?

Fingers crossed, Plant Potty.

 

Hi PP,

Not done the kits, but have grown 6 large polytunnels full of mushrooms. If you can increase the humidity you'll get a better crop, we used to keep it at 98%. Don't know about the cool room bit, kept the tunnels heated all the time.

Did they supply you with a casing mixture to put ontop of the spawn?

 

Hi Ziggy, happy 2012 (better late than never lol) yes, the kit had skanky moldy looking straw in the bottom, and a plastic bag of casing mixture to cover, then a placky lid to cover for the first six days, I can see mycelium forming so its deffo alive, I put the pen in for scale....



The packet says 6 days in a warm, dry place at 20~24C, then take off lid and place in a cold dark draft free place at 16~20C, keep damp with a mist spray, mushrooms should start to appear after several days bla bla bla

Then it says that you can restart it once they finish by bringing it back up to 20~24C for 24hrs, then back out into the cold, a rinse repeat type thing, but it does say it will decrease each crop, thing is a little punet is £1.10 over at my Londis (just across the road so I often get robbed in there) so its seems like a good gamble, or at least worth a try, I'll post up a photo of what I get for £1

Plant Potty.

 

And a happy March to you too

Cool, when you mist it, you just want as fine a spray as you can get, any water droplets puddling on the spawn can cause other fungus to rot it. Another way to keep the humidity up is to have a tray of water underneath, not so it can get into the spawn though, maybe a tray, with a brick & then the mycellium on top.

We used to get 3 to 4 crops from a tunnel. They will come up like mad on the full moon.

 

forgot to say, our spawn came in bags of fresh orse poo, which heated up the mycellium as it rotted, as well as the gas heating for the tunnels, we had 2 x 57kg calor gas bottles on each tunnel.

One weekend, the gypsies decided they wanted the gas bottles for the (then) deposit on them.

Imagine turning up for work on a monday morning to find thousands of pounds worth of mushrooms dead, all for the sake of a few quid deposit

 

Gutted

 

must be something about horse poo!
we used to collect field mushrooms from a field that hadn't been ploughed since the war,just grazed by cows and horses.Every September if i remember right,about as big as a tea plate they were!

 

I love fresh little mushrooms - I eat them raw in salads or just as a snack, Yum yum!
Have often grown my own in those kits but never got a huge amount out of them.

 

Me too, I've put it down to buying them from Sheds and them hanging about there, in extreme hot and cold, before sale. Have just bought one mail-order in the hope it would be fresh enough to work better, if not this is the last one I will buy!