How to Make Mold Grow on Wood

Most of the time, you do not want to grow mold. Mold growth means you have a plumbing leak or some other potentially damaging water intrusion in your house. Identify it, remove the water source and save yourself a big expense replacing damaged walls, floors and ceilings. If you are growing edible fungi, however, wood is an ideal growing medium. You will need a dark, moist place for your fungus farm, so place it in your worm compost bin.

Things You'll Need

• Worm compost bin
• Lengths of deadfall wood or wood trimmings
• Water
• Sugar
• Fungus spores

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Instructions

• 1

  Lay deadfall wood chunks or branch trimmings on top of the soil in your worm compost bin. Make sure there is plenty of space between each chunk, as the molds will grow 3 to 6 inches in radius and up to 10 inches across, depending on the size of the wood chunk.

• 2

  Sprinkle all the wood lightly with a sugar-water solution: 2 tsp. of sugar to 1 pint of water. Let stand 1 hour.

• 3

  Sprinkle all the wood chunks with spores from known edible fungi. Do not use spores you find in the wild unless you are an expert mycologist. Even experts can make tragic, deadly mistakes when identifying wild fungi.

• 4

  Close the worm bin and leave everything alone. When you open the bin every other day to feed your worms, sprinkle all the wood chunks lightly with a spray of sugar-water. Keep the bin closed. Fungi love dark, warm, moist places.

• 5

  Harvest your fungi when they are handsize or larger. Keep repeating Steps 1 through 4 as needed. Edible fungi make a great substitute for meat.