For most growers on the Indian plains, the months from about November to February are the only time of year when the weather does the cooling for you. A room that sat at thirty degrees all summer drops into the teens, and suddenly you can grow mushrooms that would otherwise need an air conditioner. Button, shiitake, king oyster and enoki all fall into this group, and they are the higher-value crops too.
Before you buy any spawn, hang a thermometer in your growing room and read it morning and night for a week. India is a big country. A grower in the hills gets a long cool season, while someone in a humid coastal town may never see a room cold enough for button without cooling. The temperatures below are practical starting ranges, so check them against your own room.
Button mushroom, the main winter crop
Button (Agaricus bisporus) is the mushroom most people picture when they hear the word, and winter is when the plains can grow it without cooling equipment. It fruits best at about 14 to 18°C, with humidity around 85 to 90 percent.
It is also the most demanding crop on this list. Button won't grow on plain straw; it needs properly made compost. Once the spawn has run through the compost, you cover it with a casing layer a few centimetres thick. Well-rotted farmyard manure mixed with garden soil and sand works, and so does coir pith with sand, but the casing has to be treated first. Never use raw soil.
The rough timeline looks like this:
- Spawn run: about two weeks at 23 to 26°C, in the dark.
- Case run: another week to ten days at the same temperature after casing.
- Fruiting: bring the room down to 14 to 18°C and ventilate hard. Cool air and low carbon dioxide together are the signal for button to form mushrooms. It doesn't need light.
- Harvest: the first flush comes roughly five to seven weeks after spawning, then a new flush about every week. Most of the crop comes in the first two or three flushes.
Count backwards before you start. Compost preparation plus five to seven weeks to the first harvest means a late start can run into March, when much of the plains is warming up again.
You can find our button mushroom spawn in the shop, and the button mushroom course covers the full method in English and Hindi.
Keep your oysters going
You don't have to stop growing oyster when it turns cold. The common grey, Florida and white oysters fruit well in the low to mid twenties, and the Phoenix or sajor caju types go down to around 18°C. Pink and golden oysters are the exception. They love heat and slow right down in a cold room, so save them for March.
If your room drops lower than that, try the blue oyster (Pleurotus ostreatus), which copes with cool rooms better than the summer types. The pinheads come up bluish, and the caps lighten to grey or white as they grow, depending on light and temperature. Oyster on straw is still the easiest crop to run alongside a winter speciality, and it keeps money coming in every week.
Shiitake
Shiitake fruits at about 16 to 21°C, which lines up nicely with winter days in much of the country. It grows on hardwood sawdust, roughly eighty parts sawdust to twenty parts bran with a little gypsum, and the blocks must be sterilised. Pasteurising isn't enough for sawdust crops.
Shiitake is a patient mushroom. The spawn run usually takes six to eight weeks or more, and the block turns brown as it matures. Each flush is started by soaking the block in cold water for several hours, often overnight. Because of that long spawn run, plan ahead: blocks made in early winter can be fruiting by the coldest weeks. Our shiitake sawdust spawn is first generation and freshly made, so store it for several days before you use it.
King oyster
King oyster (Pleurotus eryngii) is grown for its thick white stem, which chefs slice and sear almost like meat. It sells at a premium and keeps far longer than ordinary oysters. On the warm plains it really does need either a cooled room or the cold season, because it won't pin properly without a drop to about 10 to 15°C.
Run the spawn warm, around 24°C in the dark for roughly two weeks. Then give it the cool shock with very high humidity, more fresh air and a little light. It fruits at about 15 to 21°C. For big, thick single stems, thin the pins down to one to three per opening. Like shiitake, it goes on supplemented sawdust that has been fully sterilised. King oyster spawn is in the shop.
Enoki
Enoki is the true cold lover of the group. It fruits at roughly 10 to 16°C and struggles in warm plains, so it suits the hills, the colder parts of the north in peak winter, or a cooled room. It grows on sterilised sawdust and bran. If your winter nights don't get properly cold, start with king oyster or shiitake and come back to enoki later.
Lion's mane
Lion's mane is comfortable at 18 to 24°C, so strictly speaking it isn't only a winter mushroom. Winter just makes those temperatures much easier to hold in an ordinary room. What it really asks for is very high humidity. Let the air dry out and the crop suffers. It grows on supplemented hardwood sawdust, sterilised, much like shiitake. Here is our lion's mane spawn.
Keep the spawn run warm
The cool temperatures in this article are for fruiting. Colonisation still wants warmth: 23 to 26°C for button, 21 to 27°C for shiitake, around 24°C for king oyster and 21 to 24°C for lion's mane. A room that is perfect for fruiting on a January night is too cold for bags that are still colonising, and the mycelium will crawl. Keep a separate, warmer and well insulated space for incubation, and move bags into the cool room only once they are fully colonised.
What to leave until summer
Milky mushroom and paddy straw belong to the hot months. Milky wants 30°C and above to fruit, and paddy straw likes the high twenties to low thirties. Starting either one in December will only frustrate you. Their turn comes when the heat returns.
A simple winter plan
Keep oysters running all season for steady weekly sales. Put your main effort into one cool-season crop: button if you can make compost and have the space, or shiitake and king oyster if you would rather work with sawdust blocks. Then switch back to milky when March warms things up. Match the mushroom to the season instead of fighting the weather, and you'll spend far less on equipment.
Not sure what will work in your area? Message us on WhatsApp at +91 73639 70073 with your town and a week of room temperatures, and we'll help you choose.
