Growing Mushrooms Part 3 - Available Cultivated Mushrooms

The following is a list of commonly available mushrooms that you can grow at home along with some relevant information about them. I am sure there are others not listed here. Note that I am not including the various incarnations of Agaricus bisporus (button, crimini, portobello, etc.) because they are commonly known, commonly available, and difficult to grow.

Common Name: Oyster, Pearl Oyster
Scientific Name: Pleurotus ostreatus
Flavor Signature: mild
Preferred Growing Medium: hardwood chips or logs, straw, agriculture waste from the growing of sugarcane and cotton, coffee grounds, human hair, and much more
Ease of Growing: very easy
Bioneering Potential: A favorite mushroom of mycologist Paul Stamets, the potential of this mushroom has been widely explored. It has been used for cleaning up oil spills, reclaiming logging roads to forest, healing damaged ecosystems, filtering contaminated water and much more.
Notes: This is a very good mushroom for beginners as it is easy to grow and easy to propagate. It is also very productive and quite tasty. Just beware if you have sensitivity to fungal spores. Oyster mushrooms put out a huge volume of spores.

Common Name: Shiitake
Scientific Name: Lentinula edodes
Flavor Signature: mild
Preferred Growing Medium: hardwood chips or logs, prefers oak
Ease of Growing: easy
Bioneering Potential: none known to the author
Notes: This is one of the oldest cultivated mushrooms, as the Japanese have been growing it for centuries or longer. I don't mention this one much because I don't grow it. I don't like the texture. It is too spongy/chewy.

Common Name: Elm Oyster, Garden Oyster
Scientific Name: Hypsizygus ulmarius
Flavor Signature: mild
Preferred Growing Medium: hardwood chips or logs, straw in the garden. Prefers elm, but will grow on a wide variety of hardwoods
Ease of Growing: easy
Bioneering Potential: Good.
Notes: This mushroom is usually considered to be similar to the Pearl Oyster mushroom, but better tasting and produces fewer spores. This is a good mushroom to use in conjunction with plants as it seems to help plants it grows with. While it is primarily a saprophyte, it may also function to a lesser extent as a mycorrhizal fungus.

Common Name: Shaggy Mane
Scientific Name: Coprinus comatus
Flavor Signature: unknown to the author
Preferred Growing Medium: soil
Ease of Growing: medium
Bioneering Potential: good
Notes: This mushroom is difficult to grow indoors, requiring a well-composted substrate and a casing layer (a surface layer of low-nutrient soil that encourages the growth of mushrooms). Outdoors, it prefers fertile soil with a good organic content and will travel to find it. This is a good mushroom to naturalize in your yard or garden. Note that this mushroom will never be available in stores as the shelf life is 1-2 days. After that it turns into a black, inky mess.

Common Name: Enoki, Enokitake
Scientific Name: Flamulina velutipes
Flavor Signature: strong
Preferred Growing Medium: hardwood chips and logs
Ease of Growing: unknown to author, though I suspect it is easy
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This mushroom is one of the few readily available at many stores. It is usually long, thin and white and comes in a shrink-wrap package. The form you get at the store is induced by low light and high carbon dioxide, so if you grow them, they will look a little different. This mushroom will produce hundreds to thousands of little mushrooms.

Common Name: Lion’s Mane, Pom Pom
Scientific Name: Hericium erinaceus
Flavor Signature: strong
Preferred Growing Medium: hardwood chips or logs
Ease of Growing: easy
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This one supposedly tastes like lobster, though I don’t see it. It tasted like a strong-flavored mushroom to me. They are pretty and decidedly different looking than most mushrooms. They are white and roundish with white icicle-like spines coming off of them. Very pretty.

Common Name: Black Poplar, Pioppino
Scientific Name: Agrocybe aegerita
Flavor Signature: mild
Preferred Growing Medium: Hardwood chips or logs, prefers members of the poplar family such as poplar, cottonwood and aspen
Ease of Growing: medium
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This mushroom is by far my favorite so far, flavor-wise. Thus far my attempts to expand it onto another medium have all failed. I just tried again, though, so we’ll see.

Common Name: Brick Top, Cinnamon Cap
Scientific Name: Hypholoma sublateritium
Flavor Signature: strong
Preferred Growing Medium: hardwood stumps, logs and chips.
Ease of Growing: easy
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This is a good species for decomposing stumps. I have not personally tried to propagate it beyond the kit I got, but it seemed very hearty and aggressive. My particular kit somehow exceeded the theoretical maximum. A 5-pound kit should give a maximum of 2.5 pounds of mushrooms. Mine gave a full 3 pounds over 3 or 4 flushes. I didn’t like them sautéed in butter, but it made an amazing cream of mushroom soup.

Common Name: Nameko
Scientific Name: Pholiota nameko
Flavor Signature: unknown to author
Preferred Growing Medium: hardwood logs or chips
Ease of Growing: medium
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: I tried this one from a can I got at an Asian grocery store and they were amazing. I can only imagine what the fresh mushrooms would taste like. They are supposedly quite slimy, but the slime cooks off. Mushrooms require a very high humidity to form properly.

Common Name: Pink Oyster
Scientific Name: Pleurotus djamor
Flavor Signature: unknown
Preferred Growing Medium: hardwood logs and chips
Ease of Growing: unknown
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: I have read that these mushrooms are of marginal texture (tough) and flavor and are usually grown for their stunning pink color. This mushroom prefers hot conditions.

Common Name: Maitake, Hen of the Woods
Scientific Name: Grifola frondosa
Flavor Signature: mild
Preferred Growing Medium: oak stumps, can be grown on wood chips
Ease of Growing: difficult
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This is reportedly both a powerful medicinal mushroom and a very tasty gourmet mushroom. I have seen it at specialty grocery stores for as much as $30 a pound. This mushroom prefers to grow on stumps of dead or dying oak trees. A large tree can produce a cluster weighing up to 5 pounds or more 3 or 4 times a year for a century or so. I once saw a gardening show where the host showed what appeared to be a Hen of the Woods mushroom fruiting off of one his stately oak trees and bemoaned the fact that it would eventually kill the tree. I wanted to reach through the TV and smack him. The mushroom was probably worth 10 times what the tree was worth. Unfortunately, this mushroom is very difficult to grow and propagate if you don’t have a big oak stump to work with.

Common Name: Stone Mushroom
Scientific Name: Polyporus tuberaster
Flavor Signature: mild
Preferred Growing Medium: wood chips, possibly logs
Ease of Growing: unknown
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This is the only mushroom on the list that I don’t have some sort of growing guide for. I attempted once to propagate this onto a log, but it didn’t take. Someday I’ll try again. It is a mushroom that is well worth keeping around.

Common Name: Morel
Scientific Name: Morchella angusticeps
Flavor Signature: mild
Preferred Growing Medium: soil, preferably burned then flooded
Ease of Growing: very difficult
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This mushroom is a bit of an enigma. It seems to fruit best after a forest fire or flood or both, but attempts to recreate preferred conditions have met with mixed to no success. Only a few have succeeded in growing this mushroom commercially. It remains a favorite of mushroom hunters.

Common Name: King Stropharia
Scientific Name: Stropharia rugoso-annulata
Flavor Signature: unknown to author
Preferred Growing Medium: wood chip beds, soil
Ease of Growing: unknown
Bioneering Potential: good
Notes: I have tried to grow this mushroom outdoors twice now with no success. I suspect that it doesn’t like the heat here in northern Arizona. This mushroom is an active consumer of a wide variety of bacteria and actually won’t produce mushrooms when grown on sterile medium. It has been used to filter bacteria from runoff. Mushrooms produced are massive, reaching a foot or more tall and a foot or more across. Of course, they must be picked and eaten in the button stage, when they are much smaller.

Common Name: Chicken of the Woods
Scientific Name: Laetiporus sulphureus
Flavor Signature: unknown to author - supposedly tastes just like chicken
Preferred Growing Medium: hardwood or softwood stumps or partially buried logs
Ease of Growing: medium
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: Supposedly this bright yellow-orange mushroom tastes just like chicken. My attempt to grow this mushroom outdoors on logs failed.

Common Name: Conifer Coral
Scientific Name: Hericium abietis
Flavor Signature: unknown to author – probably has a strong flavor like its close relative the Lion’s Mane.
Preferred Growing Medium: pine or spruce logs or chips
Ease of Growing: unknown to author
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This is one of the few mushrooms that grows well on conifers. It is similar to Lion’s Mane in appearance except that instead of a tight ball with white cascading spines, it has a tightly branched structure with white cascading spines.

Common Name: Phoenix Fir
Scientific Name: Pleurotus pulmonarius
Flavor Signature: mild
Preferred Growing Medium: pine or spruce logs or wood chips
Ease of Growing: easy
Bioneering Potential: unknown, but probably good
Notes: This mushroom is a close relative to the Pearl Oyster mushroom, but prefers to grow on conifers. It is possible that a lot of the Oyster mushrooms available in the store are actually this variety.

Common Name: Reishi, Ling Chi
Scientific Name: Ganoderma lucidium
Flavor Signature: strong
Preferred Growing Medium: Hardwood logs or chips
Ease of Growing: easy
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This is not an edible mushroom, being too woody to chew. It is a strong medicinal mushroom and has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. It reportedly improves overall health and particularly strengthens the immune system. The mushroom is ground and then boiled to make a tea. The flavor is strong, but I have gotten used to it and rather enjoy it.

Common Name: Turkey Tail
Scientific Name: Trametes versicolor
Flavor Signature: mild
Preferred Growing Medium: wood logs – doesn’t seem to matter what kind
Ease of Growing: very easy
Bioneering Potential: unknown
Notes: This is another woody medicinal mushroom. It also reportedly strengthens the immune system and is supposedly particularly effective against cancer, being the source of a common anti-cancer drug. When boiled to make a tea, it has a light, almost sweet, mushroom flavor that is quite tasty. This mushroom will grow on just about any kind of wood and grows on at least 6 of the 7 continents (not sure if there is any wood on Antarctica to grow on).