Kit for children - I grow my own organic mushrooms - Radis et Capucine

This organic mushroom growing kit allows children to discover how button mushrooms grow. Simple and fun, this kit is perfect for learning and growing mushrooms at home in a few weeks. What a delight to be able to eat your own crops... and what's more, they are organic!

The button mushroom is a vegetable that grows not from a seed but from mycelium. The mycelium is the white powder that falls from old mushrooms that we forgot to collect. This mycelium is put in the straw (organic substrate fertilized with horse manure) but remains dormant, it will be awakened and activated only when we put the soil on top (to bring food) and that we water the kit (the mycelium is thirsty too!). This kit allows you to make 2 to 3 successive harvests of good organic Mushrooms Certified organic farming (ecocert).

Preparation:

1- Open the box and take out the bag of goblet soil (potting soil).

2- Empty the contents of the bag into a salad bowl and moisten well.

3- Stir to decompact and make sure everything is moist (but not soaking wet either).

4- Put aside.

5- Go back to the box and with a fork, scrape the top in all directions on 5 mm of depth to bring oxygen and facilitate the entry of water afterwards.

6- Pour the content of the bowl (wet soil) in the box, on the straw, in a uniform way on all the surface, without making a mass in the center.

7- Remove the lugs from the lid and carefully place the lid on the box, making it stand on the lugs. Put in an unheated room that remains in the dark (cellar, garage, closet,...). Water with a sprayer every 3/4 days. The surface will gradually become covered with a white veil and small white buttons will appear. Continue the culture until they measure 3 to 4 cm in diameter.

8- To harvest them, do not cut the mushrooms but take them out of the ground by turning them gently, to encourage the regrowth of a new crop. Indeed, if the child cuts the stalk and leaves it in place, the substrate will not have any oxygen supply for a new growth. A mushroom does not grow back, it is replaced by a new one that grows from underneath (a bit like a tooth...). The remaining straw can be put in the garden or at the foot of a rosebush as a 100% natural fertilized substrate.

Recommended age: from 5 years old