I've been growing mushrooms on logs outside my house in the Pacific Northwest for a few years now. While tons of people do this successfully, I generally do it poorly, because while mushrooms are mostly hands off, you do have to make sure they get enough moisture and keep them out of the way in a spot with dappled sunlight, which means I often forget about them. I've had much better luck growing them inside, with an assist from smart home automation.
Indoor mushroom kits have become popular generally, and Johnnys Selected Seeds recently started selling kits from North Spore, the place I’ve sourced the mushroom spawn for my logs. They sent me a few indoor kits to try out. They don’t require a lot of hand holding—just spraying the box three times a day with a light water mist. Because I can’t even remember to water myself three times a day, I turned to smart automations for help.
Like all mushrooms, the kits prefer a space out of direct sunlight. My seed growing station, not currently in use, was the perfect spot. The purpose of regularly spraying the mushrooms is just to keep them slightly moist, so I set up a humidifier in front of them. This humidifier has two functions that made it perfect for this use. First, it’s mechanical; if the power is on, the humidifier is on, without the need to activate it via a digital button. Second, the humidifier shipped with a long, flexible tube that attaches to the main unit to direct the moisture. (I have one of these units in my cheese cave.)
I set up the hose directly in front of the mushrooms, put the humidifier on a smart plug, and set an automation to turn the plug on for 30 seconds, three times a day. (Through testing, I determined that once it comes on, it takes about 15 seconds for the humidifier to build enough steam for the moisture to start leaving the tube, and 15 seconds of mist seems to provide the equivalent of a few direct sprays of water.)
Because I knew I’d forget about the kit, I set up a few failsafes. First, I put a humidity sensor in the room and placed the probe in the mushroom fruiting medium so I could track how moist it was, and set up notifications if it got too wet or dry. Next, I put a water sensor on the pad the humidifier and mushrooms sat on, just in case it got too wet, so I’d be notified of that too.
The last thing was the bit that saved me: I also set up one of my indoor cameras in front of the mushrooms, and once a day, had it send me a snapshot of the mushrooms. This is how I was alerted to my burgeoning success when, a few days in, the box began fruiting giant puffs of white mushrooms.
Smart home devices I used:
Meross smart plug $26 for a pack of two
Reptile fogger humidifier $49.97
Wyze indoor camera $25.99
Aqara water leak sensor $18.99
By day ten, I had gigantic lion’s mane mushrooms ready to harvest, and allowed the box to re-fruit. Since I’d used so little water each day, the humidifier tank only needed to be refilled when I harvested mushrooms.
I test smart products, so I have a ton of sensors and cameras around, and throwing a few of them at this problem was easy. Not every part is essential, so you can use what you have around to avoid spending a lot of money. The boxes of mushrooms aren’t particularly inexpensive, either—my kit was $30.00—so I wanted to ensure success.
This was a good test case, since plenty of people grow mushrooms inside, absent a kit, on their own. You can purchase the substrate and the mushroom spawn and set up a humidity tent, allowing you to DIY what the spray and grow kits accomplish. This would allow you to carry on 'shroom farming in a more affordable, sustainable way. But since I’m not going to become a mushroom farmer, I wanted to add a benefit to my home without adding a lot more work, and automation accomplished that.
There’s a growing number of smart mushroom kits out there, including Mella, Boomr Bin from North Spore (who make the spray and grow kits I used), and Terrashroom. While kits tend to focus on fancy mushrooms, for what it’s worth, with even button mushrooms routinely $6 a pound in stores now, so I’m not sure that growing your own is more expensive. If nothing else, growing indoors is a great new hobby for springtime.