Growing mushrooms is watching nothing happen for weeks and then suddenly they emerge and grow overnight doubling in size in days. That’s what happened with our Mushroom Adventure Grow Edible Mushrooms kit from Gardeners. We bought this kit for our spring nature study, but really had intended to buy when we did our Botany Main Lesson Block to accompany the lesson on fungi.

It took about 4-6 weeks for both crops of mushrooms to grow and be harvested. We sauteed the first batch of mushrooms, made spore prints with a smaller mid crop and dried out the final crop of mushrooms to be used in future dishes.

Making spore prints turned out to be a really easy educational project that has creative potential. You want to harvest or use mature mushrooms. You may choose to remove the cap or keep it in place. We did both with varying results. To keep the spore prints from being scattered by air drafts, you can cover them with a cup.

We left our spore prints for two days and that was too much time. We could have removed the mushroom caps after two hours and moved the caps to another part of the paper to collect more. I find the finer prints to be more beautiful and easier to observe under a microscope.

Check out the haul video where we purchased this mushroom growing kit and other supplies for our main lesson blocks and unit studies.

Check out the rest of our Botany Main Lesson block lessons, activities and projects for more ideas on how you can bring this subject area to life.

Check out some of my food tutorials to find recipes we’ve used in our home and homeschool:

This kit was $45 and we purchased it from Gardners.com