Where to Start?

I have never, ever grown a mushroom in my life.

I currently own 13.8 acres in zone 7. About 1/4 of it is mixed forest with a few areas that collect water naturally. The tree mix tends to lean more towards pine and juniper, although there are oak, maple, locust, and tulip trees scattered about. There is also a LOT of wild blackberry.

If you were going to add mushrooms for personal use and as a potential cash crop, where would you start? Something that's easy to do and doesn't take a lot of micromanaging ... remember I've never grown a mushroom.

Thanks for your help!

I just spent several hours tapping shiitake dowel plugs into oak logs this afternoon. This is one way you can start, but you should be thinking about what the logs need by way of environment, and what mushrooms will grow on what logs. And what time of year the logs should be cut and the mushroom spawn installed.

Mushroom growing can easily turn into a laboratory clean room kind of operation. You might want to look into some basics along those lines too, just to understand the life cycle. The first thing I did was oyster mushrooms cultured on agar in a petri dish (which really wasn't that hard), and then grown out on straw that had been through the pressure cooker. There are ways to grow oysters from supermarket oyster mushrooms on boiled cardboard. Maybe give that a try. The advantage to that is it's quick (a few weeks) and you learn a bit in the process.

I'm in the middle of writing a review for the new book Mycelial Mayhem which sounds perfect for you!