06/29/2026
Growing Mushrooms in Buckets 🍄
An easy, high-value garden project that fits any space—from a full farm to a tiny backyard.
A single 5-gallon bucket in good humidity conditions can easily yield up to $50 market value worth of edible mushrooms, and a $30 sawdust spawn bag from North Spore can make six to eight buckets. That’s great value for a low effort and low space and quick growing project. You can even cultivate your own spawn from what grows to reuse indefinitely.
While NorthSpore offers a great detailed tutorial on bucket/container growing (worth a read!), we’ve had consistent success with this simplified method—no lime, no pH testing, just simple steps while staying mindful of keeping things as sterile as possible.
Just make sure the spawn you choose is suited to your climate—some species prefer cool weather, some warm. For us, that means we can use the same spawn bag of a cool species oyster for spring and fall batches.
This year’s bucket picks: oyster mushrooms (blue in Spring/Fall and Pink this summer)
Lesson learned last season: elevate your buckets on pallets or bricks to avoid dirt splash-back in the rain. We put a pallet on top of cinderblocks as a standing platform to help produce cleaner flushes this year.
Would you try growing your own mushrooms this way?
