Building a Mushroom Grow Tent

Automate Your Mushroom Grow

Building a Mushroom Grow Tent

Automate Your Mushroom Grow

Ready to take your mushroom grow game to the next level, or even begin practicing to have your own mushroom farm? Refining your craft and learning the art of indoor cultivation with a martha tent setup is a great way to improve yields and get beautiful consistent flushes.

Automating an indoor mushroom grow is not as complex as it seem - the basics require airflow, an enclosed space, and humidity. From there, it's a matter of dialing in your equipment settings to match the mushroom of your choice. Read on below to see what you'll need, and what conditions are ideal for some of the most popular gourmet mushrooms.

Why Upgrade to Tents?

A close-up view inside a grow tent showing oyster mushrooms growing on a substrate over a layer of sorghum grains.

Why Upgrade to Tents?

A grow tent setup allows you to grow more mushrooms per square foot, which means more mushrooms for your and your friends or family to share and cook as needed. Grow tents also offer a cleaner, dedicated space for growing which can prolong the life of your mushroom blocks.

A grow tent allows you to automate and precisely dial in the optimal grow conditions for any mushroom, allowing you to achieve better yields and grow more types of mushrooms that require specific growing conditions to see success.

Mushroom Grow Tent FAQs

Basic Tent Setups

Why should I use a grow tent?

Simply put, an automated grow tent is one of the best ways to grow mushrooms at home. With the additional space, convenience of automation, and precise control, you can grow just about any type of mushroom with ease.

What are the basic components of a mushroom grow tent?

Most grow tent setups use at a minimum, the following items:

What kind of tent is best for mushrooms?

The best grow tents for mushroom growing at home are typically "Martha" style tents or small grow tents used for indoor gardening. Ideally, these tents have shelves, but shelving can also be bought and added to any grow tent.

For smaller spaces, a Martha Tent or Small Grow Tent are ideal.

For larger spaces or dedicated grow rooms, a large grow tent can be used, but comes with it's own set of challenges and requires some heavier duty equipment.

What kind of humidifier works best for mushroom grow tents?

Ultrasonic humidifiers use micronized airborne water particles to improve airborne humidity, resulting in a humidified fog that raises the RH% to the desired level. This helps prevent excess water from accumulating as much as possible while still saturating the air.

Some ultrasonic humidifiers, like the AC Infinity Cloudforge Humidifiers, have built in controllers that automate humidity levels - this saves you the time and hassle of configuring external humidity controllers and allows you to set your desired humidity with ease.

Any ultrasonic humidifier will do, but it's important to consider the size of your tent - smaller humidifiers like the Cloudforge T3 are good for small grow tents below 2x2, or even monotubs. Larger humidifiers like the Cloudforge T7 have the advantage of larger tank capacity and higher output to humidify larger spaces such as a martha tent or 4'x4' grow tent.

What kind of fan should I look for?

Mushrooms need to breathe too! They thrive in high oxygen envionments and release CO2 (the opposite of plants!) so we need to make sure they have fresh air to breathe in a grow tent, and that we are adequately removing any accumulated CO2 from mushroom growth.

A simple FAE Fan can be used to bring fresh air in from outside (via ducting) or from a well ventilated room to ensure fresh oxygen is coming in and air is not stagnant in your grow tent. We recommend placing your FAE fan at the top of your tent or higher up to capture the most oxygen.

For open bottom or vented tents of smaller sizes, exhaust fans arent typically needed - for larger tents, an exhaust fan and CO2 controller to dump CO2 rich air may be necessary, and should be placed at the bottom of the tent (where CO2 accumulates)

Where should I put my grow tent?

The best place to put your grow tent is ideally a room with good lighting, and access to fresh air or a window. While a window isn't required, you can use a window to vent out spores or intake fresh air from outside.

Is there any DIY involved?

For some kits, like Martha tent kits, there is a little bit of DIY needed to cut the entry holes for the humidifier and fan. Our setup video shows where you can place these holes in an ideal configuration, but you have the flexibility to cut those holes wherever you need.

What are the ideal settings for my tent automation?

Here's a quick cheat sheet for the ideal settings for an automated martha tent or mushroom grow tent:

  • RH or Relative Humidity: 85%-90%
  • Fan Settings: For exhaust setups, run fan on/off every 10 minutes. For intake fans, ensure that air is circulating but not removing humidity excessively.
  • Light: A well lit room with natural lighting or LED Lighting on a 12 hour on/off cycle

Want to learn more about mushrooms?

Want to learn more about mushrooms?