Merryhill Mushroom kits

Posted December 31, 2025

In Fungi, Mushrooms, Product Review, Protected Cropping, Urban Gardening, Vegetables

I love foraging for mushrooms!

Nothing very adventurous you understand as I’m not experienced and knowledgeable enough to know what is safe to eat and what is definitely not!

Almost ready to harvest

And I’ve tried growing my own mushrooms from a kit over the years without a great deal of success but the Merryhill Mushrooms kits they kindly gave me to review have transformed that!

Merryhill Mushroom kits come in a wide range of species that should satisfy anyone’s tastes.

I was given a kit containing spores of pink oyster mushrooms and another containing chestnut mushrooms.

Both are pre sown and couldn’t be easier to get started!

All kits come with clear instructions that are really easy to follow.

And if you are unsure about anything, Merryhill Mushrooms are keen to talk you through any part of setting your kits up and caring for them until your first harvest.

Whilst there is all this clear information and the reassurance of backup should you need it, I found setting up each kit so very easy!

Merryhill Mushrooms Pink Oyster kit

The first pink oyster mushrooms emerge

The pink oyster mushroom kit needs no heat and is best positioned away from direct sunlight.

I positioned mine in our large back porch on the north-side of our property and my two flat-coated retriever dogs kept a close eye on progress for me there!

After opening the three small tabs and misting water into those holes a couple of times a day, I was surprised at how soon mushrooms appeared! In fact our first harvest was after just ten days!

The first harvest

I probably should have harvested them earlier, maybe after eight days as I found these a little tough.

But then that’s probably down to my lack of culinary skills!

I shared some of these first oyster mushrooms with my daughter who is a vegetarian and she said hers were just great!

So that kinda points to my lack of skills in the kitchen!

Pink oyster mushrooms and lardons on toast

The second flush of pink oyster mushrooms appeared after a month and at the time of writing I’m expecting more to appear in about three weeks time.

There’s no great hardship to remembering to mist them a couple times a day especially as I had positioned both kits enroute to the back door.

Although there’s lots of info that comes with each kit, there is masses of really helpful stuff on

website and that’s specific to each variety.

Here’s the link to the stuff on the pink oyster mushroom kit.

Merryhill Mushrooms Chestnut/White Mushroom kit

Merryhill also gifted me a chestnut/white mushroom kit to try out.

The first mushrooms emerge

Slower to start to produce a harvest than the oyster mushroom kit, it also proved to be easy to set up and to look after!

I positioned this kit away from direct light but in our heated utility room.

Apparently a temperature of between 14 and 21C is best and that’s easy to achieve.

In our utility room I could easily keep an eye on it and make certain the top of the compost always remained moist.

But the start up procedure with this one was different to the oyster mushroom kit.

wetting a bag of soil on top of the mushroom grow kit

Wetting the soil

The top of the box needs to be cut off and kept to use briefly [for 8 days] as a lid.

There’s a bag of topsoil in the kit and this needs to be wetted before spreading on top of the compost in the box.

After 8 days I removed the cardboard lid to find a mesh of white mycelium covering the top of the soil. The mycelium is effectively the root system of a fungi.