Why You Should Consider Growing Chaga Mushrooms
The first thought for any farmer would be profit, although there are many reasons why you should learn how to grow chaga mushroom. We would like to think that growing medicinal mushrooms is going to be a major component of the forest landscape going forward and maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Growing Chaga provides the ability to make some extra cash in a unique way, while also cutting costs with regards to the taxation of your land.
Also, growing mushrooms helps maintain the value of your land, without needing to cut down trees or deforest in anyway in order to earn money from the land. This way, forest owners are contributing to maintaining the ecological balance and reducing detrimental ecological impacts. Third, growing chaga mushrooms supports investments for human health. It is proven that tea, supplements, and elixirs made with Chaga mushrooms support the immune system and decrease the inflammatory processes of our bodies. North American forests offer a clean natural environment offer ideal conditions to cultivate and harvest high-quality raw materials needed to produce this incredible mushroom.
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How to grow the Chaga mushroom
Chaga grows on Birch Trees, so in order to start growing chaga, you will need 0.25-2 acres of woodlands that contain Birch Trees. This may not be possible in the southern areas of the United States, but if you live somewhere like Minnesota or the northeast you may have this right in your backyard.
The mushrooms can grow on Birch Trees which are 10 years or older and have minimum diameter 10cm. Chaga mushrooms are planted using wooden stakes that have been inoculated with chaga mycelia. The dowels that contain Chaga mycelia are made and developed in labs, which can be found on the internet through a number of vendors, which isolates the spores needed to begin growing operations. The Chaga dowels are grown and produced in the lab, and once you have them, you can start planting them immediately.
To grow the mushrooms, dowels are planted into drilled 5-centimeter holes on Birch Trees. A single birch tree will receive 4 to 6 planting holes, in which the dowels are placed. The holes should not be drilled higher than 2 meters off the ground.
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How long does it take to grow chaga?
Chaga may be harvested from the trees three times in five to seven years, at which point the trees may be used to produce paper or for firewood once they are no longer able to produce chaga, as this means they are close to, if not already dead. You can learn more about the details of the process from the following video:
Can Chaga Grow on Any Tree?
Chaga cannot grow on any tree, but it can grow on trees other than birth trees. Chaga can grow on ash, elm, beech, alder, and even hornbeam trees. However due to the unique qualities and compounds found in birch trees, the chaga that’s found in birch trees offers the most health benefits due to the plant based sterols, betulinic acid, and other compounds that are unique to birch and thus contained in the chaga that grows on them. Whereas this is not the case for other trees.
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