Once the spores are in, let this bucket sit for a day or two, and then pour outside in a suitable area. The sugar serves as nutrition to encourage mycelium to grow, and the salt helps to minimize bacterial growth.

If you still have the actual fruiting body, you can just shred it and add it to the bucket as well. This is done by scraping the spores from a spore print into a bucket of fresh non-chlorinated water, and adding some sugar and a pinch of salt. If you want to enjoy them, you’ll have to find them growing in the wild.īut… there is a way to encourage the growth of these mushrooms by inoculating a suitable area with a “spore slurry”.

Some species like Chanterelles, Boletes, and Morels have, for the most part, evaded all attempts at commercial cultivation. Since most people don’t have a spare microscope laying around, it’s generally not a great characteristic for casual identification. Spores can all sorts of shapes- oval, square, circular- as well as being vastly different sizes. This is usually done by making the spore print on a microscope slide. Other than color, most spore characteristics are not visible to the naked eye and need to be identified by looking at the spores under a microscope.

Amanita Species (Death Cap, Fly Agaric) – Usually White.

Button Mushrooms (Agaricus species) – Usually Brown.

Here are some examples of different mushrooms and their spore colors: Also, if you are taking a spore from a species and you have no idea what to expect, consider grabbing a few fruits and making multiple spore prints on different colors of paper. Sometimes it will be quite obvious, like white or purple- but how are you supposed to tell the difference between rusty-brown and orange-brown? White and cream?Įverybody sees and interprets colors a little differently, so be sure to have alternate ways of identifying species. Identification guides will often be quite vague in the description of spore color. That being said, some discretion definitely needs to be used and spore color alone should never be used to identify a species for consumption. The color of a mushroom spore print can be a key identification factor for many species.

Mushroom spore