How to grow porcini mushrooms on a windowsill

Picking mushrooms in the forest is not only purely utilitarian in nature, but also emotional. That's why so many people go mushroom hunting, or at least dream about it. But it is no less interesting and useful to grow these either plants or semi-living creatures on your site or even in your house on the windowsill. This is especially important for city residents.

Preparatory stage

First, you still need to visit the forest and try to find a couple of ripe porcini mushrooms there, the spores of which will serve to propagate these plants at home.

We must try to ensure that the mushrooms found are not worm-free, healthy and have a good brown cap, because they contain the seeds - mushroom spores, and in huge quantities.

We break mushrooms collected in the forest at home with our hands and pass them through an ordinary manual meat grinder, excluding the stems, since they do not contain spores. You can also chop the mushroom caps using a kitchen knife.

Fill the mass that comes out of the meat grinder with natural water (river, well, or preferably rain) with the addition of nutritional yeast.

Pour the resulting mushroom crumble, diluted with natural water, into a larger container (a five-liter plastic container with the top cut off will do). If you cannot find natural water, you can use tap water after keeping it in an open container for at least one day.
Add crushed 50 grams of yeast used for baking to the contents of a plastic container.

We dilute it with water to increase the mass of the contents in the container.

Mix the entire resulting mixture thoroughly with a wooden spoon, first in one direction, then in the other, and cover with a cloth napkin or towel so that nothing gets into the container, and the gases formed in it come out of it without hindrance.

Then we place the container with all the contents, covered with a napkin, in a warm and dark place for one and a half to two weeks, so that all the necessary activation processes take place in it, and the spores awaken.

After the specified time has expired, mix the contents of the container again and pour one cup of the mixture into a two-liter bottle of rainwater and shake it thoroughly.

Now we pour the solution with the awakened spores into the pots of flowers and, above all, lilies, since it is believed that they promote the growth of fungi. The soil in the pots should be watered generously. Now all that remains is to wait a few months for the spores to germinate and sprouts of porcini mushrooms to appear.

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Collecting mushrooms on the windowsill and analyzing the results

Let's see what the results are. Fungi have appeared under the oak tree and the palm tree, although the palm tree itself is in a dormant state. But under the lily there was not a single mushroom sprout, but the plant itself began to grow powerfully.


Mushrooms can be removed after they emerge from the soil in about 6 days, when they have grown to at least 10-12 cm.
The fact that it’s time to pick mushrooms is signaled by the edges of the caps curling up. The experiment showed that the mushrooms under the oak tree are larger than those under the palm tree. Probably their native soil is more favorable for them.

When growing in pots on a windowsill, mushrooms also require certain and regular care. It is necessary to periodically loosen the soil, pull out weeds and water the plants.

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