Grow kit or buying spawn: which one suits you?

Anyone wanting to grow mushrooms for the first time finds two starting points in our shop: a ready-made grow kit, or a pouch of spawn to inoculate a substrate yourself. The spawn is cheaper and that is tempting, but cheaper is not always better. They are really two different hobbies, and this piece helps you decide which of the two you actually want.

What is the difference?

A grow kit is a block of substrate that has already been fully colonised by mycelium at our nursery. All the hard work, the sterilising, inoculating and weeks of colonising, is done. You cut open the plastic, mist, and harvest within one to two weeks. Spawn is the intermediate product: mycelium on a carrier that you mix through a substrate yourself. You have to make and pasteurise that substrate, and it then has to colonise at your home before there is anything to harvest.

Choose a grow kit if...

• you want to find out whether growing mushrooms is for you before investing time;
• you want results within two weeks, for a gift or with children, say;
• you have no appetite for pasteurising straw, buckets and a bit of mess;
• you want to try a species that is tricky on loose substrate, like lion's mane or maitake.

An XL block of just over three kilos gives two to four flushes. Expect a kilo or more of mushrooms in total, spread over a month or two. Certainty and convenience are the point: the chance of nothing appearing is small, and if it happens, we take a look with you.

Choose spawn if...

• you want to understand the process and enjoy building something from scratch;
• you have free substrate: coffee grounds from work, straw from a farmer, wood chips from the council;
• you want more volume than one block: a single pouch of spawn inoculates a whole bucket or several bags;
• you have already had a grow kit and want to take the next step.

Spawn is cheaper per kilo of harvest, but the bill also includes your own time and a higher risk. A bucket of straw you pasteurise yourself can fail, and it fails more often the first time than the second. If you see that as part of the hobby, no harm done. If you just wanted mushrooms, it stings.

How much work is spawn really?

For a bucket of oyster mushrooms on straw: an hour cutting straw and pasteurising it in hot water, half an hour draining, ten minutes mixing with spawn and packing it into the bucket. Then two to three weeks of waiting while it colonises, and misting until harvest. Coffee grounds are simpler (fresh from the machine they are practically pasteurised already) but also more erratic. It is not a big project, but it is a project.

And the combination?

Many customers start with a grow kit, get hooked at the first harvest and then move on to spawn for volume. That is exactly the right order. Doing it the other way round, starting with spawn, sometimes leaves people concluding after one failed bucket that growing is not for them, when it was simply a learning curve. Harvest with certainty first, learn afterwards, is our honest recommendation.

None of this applies to logs in the garden, by the way: there you want plug spawn, and we explained that choice earlier.