This kit is designed to help you learn to grow mushrooms at home without any specialized equipment. They are fairly easy to work with and include instructions for growing them on a bag of precooked rice at home or a bucket of straw if you’d like to grow a lot of them.

Each set includes detailed instructions, your mushroom culture, and a fungi word search. It’s a great project for anyone with a love of plants, or to do as part of a nature study, or simply because they are beautiful and fascinating. And they’re great for cooking with/eating or just looking at if you’re the non-mushroom-eating type.

This is a pretty flexible project age-wise with the only caveat being that you’ll want adult supervision for the inoculation process for young students so that no fingers get poked:) it’s an indoor project, you’ll need a bag of pre-cooked rice, rubbing alcohol, and some paper bandage tape.

• King Oyster mushrooms are native to Mediterranean regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and are the largest mushroom in the oyster family.
  The distinctive shape of the King Oyster mushroom lends itself to a variety of innovative cooking techniques, including searing them sliced in the fashion of scallops. When freshly picked and uncooked, King Oysters are almost tasteless and have very little scent to them, but when cooked, they deliver an incredible umami flavor and a meaty texture.

• Blue Oyster mushrooms were first documented in 1775 by Nikolaus Joseph Freiherr von Jacquin, a dutch scientist who studied medicine, chemistry, and botany and traveled the world gathering samples and specimens of his discoveries.
  Blue Oysters are particularly appreciated for their density, and can be used quite successfully as a replacement for meat in many recipes. They are especially wonderful sauteed in butter.

• Pink Oyster mushrooms were first cataloged by botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius under the name Agaricus djamor in the 1600’s. It was later transferred to the genus Pleurotus by Karel Bernard Boedijn in 1959, and has since been known as Pleurotus djamor. They are edible mushrooms and while they taste bitter raw, their flavor transforms to something really lovely and bacon-ish when cooked. Their unique shape and color give an elegant flair to any plate.