"Gill Smith" wrote in message
o.uk...
is it possible?

Possible, as mushrooms grow naturally in the wild.
Effectively, to produce a good crop out of a small area of ground, not so
sure.

Field mushrooms grow under grassland and will pop up if the conditions are
right but they don't seem to do this very often (at least, not in my
previous back garden).
I do have memories of reading about a mushroom picking industry in the 18C -
19C where wild field mushrooms were picked in the fields outside London then
shipped in to the markets, but Google is not being my friend at the moment.

A lot of mushrooms grow slowly in the damp shade of woods on or under
rotting trees.
Unless you have a lot of woodland this doesn't seem cost effective, and the
cropping doesn't seem to be that high.

Also, if you provide good conditions for mushrooms outside, you have to know
your mushrooms when it comes to weeding out unwanted varieties and picking
safe varieties.

So probably you could, but given that you can produce far more mushrooms far
more quickly and consistently in a dark, warm, moist place using
commercially supplied compost and spawn most people would use this method.

Interesting piece on CountryFile yesterday on commercial mushroom growing.
Someone was growing Shitake mushrooms commercially.
He had two shipping containers, one set for permanent summer as in hot and
moist and the other set for permanent autumn as in cool and moist.
He put special sealed packs of sterilised oak compost and mushroom spawn in
'summer' until the mycelia had grown through the compost and then removed
the outer plastic and racked them up in 'autumn' where they started to
develope the fruiting bodies.
So if he was doing this outside he would have one crop a year because the
fruiting is seasonal.
Assuming of course that he could maintain optimum conditions and that his
Shitake mushrooms outperformed all other wild types.

HTH

Dave R