You Can Grow Mushrooms Indoors With Smart Home Automation
I’ve been growing mushrooms in logs near my home in the Pacific Northwest for several years. While many people do this successfully, I tend to do it poorly because although the mushrooms are mostly kept out of hand, you still need to make sure they get enough moisture and keep them away from a sun-spotted area light, which means I often forget about them. I’ve had much better luck growing them at home using a smart home automation system.
Kits for growing homemade mushrooms have become generally popular, and Johnnys Selected Seeds recently started selling kits from North Spore , the place where I sourced mushroom spawn for my logs. They sent me several home kits to try. They don’t need much handling – just mist the box three times a day with a light mist of water. Since I can’t even remember to water myself three times a day, I turned to smart automation for help.
Like all mushrooms, the babies prefer a place protected from direct sunlight. My seed growing station , which is currently unused, turned out to be the perfect location. The purpose of misting the mushrooms regularly is simply to keep them slightly moist, so I installed a humidifier in front of them. This humidifier has two features that make it ideal for this use. First, it is mechanical; If the power is on, the humidifier is on, without the need to activate it using the number button. Secondly, the humidifier comes with a long flexible tube that attaches to the main unit and directs the moisture. (I have one of these units in my cheese cave. )
I installed a hose directly in front of the mushrooms, connected the humidifier to the smart plug and set the automation to turn on the plug for 30 seconds three times a day. (In testing, I determined that once turned on, the humidifier takes about 15 seconds to create enough steam for moisture to start coming out of the tube, and 15 seconds of mist seems to be equivalent to several straight streams of water.)
Since I knew I would forget about this kit, I installed some fuses. First, I installed a humidity sensor in the room and placed the probe in the mushroom growing medium so I could monitor how wet it was and set alerts if it got too wet or dry. I then placed a water sensor on the pad that had the humidifier and mushrooms on it in case it got too wet so I would be notified as well.
The last thing that saved me: I also installed one of my indoor cameras in front of the mushrooms, and once a day it sent me a photo of the mushrooms. That’s how I learned of my growing success when, after a few days, giant balls of porcini mushrooms began to bear fruit in the box.
Smart home devices I’ve used:
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Meross Smart Plug – $26 for a pack of two.
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Reptile Mist Humidifier $49.97
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Wyze Indoor Camera $25.99
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Aqara Water Leak Sensor $18.99
By the tenth day I had giant lion’s mane mushrooms ready to harvest and I allowed the pod to bear fruit again. Since I used very little water each day, the humidifier reservoir only needed to be refilled when I was picking mushrooms.
I test smart products, so I have a ton of sensors and cameras, and using a few of them to solve this problem was easy. Not every detail is important, so you can use what you have to avoid spending a lot of money. Boxes of mushrooms aren’t cheap either—mine was $30—so I wanted to ensure success.
This was a good test case since many people grow mushrooms indoors, without a special kit, on their own. You can buy substrate and mushroom spawn and set up a wet tent, allowing you to DIY what spray and grow kits do. This will allow you to grow mushrooms in a more affordable and sustainable way. But since I have no intention of becoming a mushroom grower, I wanted to add value to my home without adding a lot of work, and automation allowed me to do that.
There are a growing number of smart mushroom kits coming out, including Mella , Boomr Bin from North Spore (who make the sprays and grow kits I used) and Terrashroom . While the kits tend to focus on fancy mushrooms, whatever they cost, even button mushrooms are now commonly sold in stores for $6 a pound, so I’m not sure growing your own is any more expensive. At the very least, growing indoors is a great new spring hobby.