Growing greenhouse mushrooms in winter leisure time leads to prosperity

Just after the Spring Festival, the land of Yan and Zhao is freezing cold, yet inside the greenhouse of Fang Hongjie and Zhang Xiujuan, a couple in Nanfang Village, Jizhou District, Hengshui City, Hebei Province, it is as warm as spring. Bags of mushroom logs are neatly arranged, and clusters of large-leaf oyster mushrooms bloom like flowers, fresh and tender.

Zhang Xiujuan of Nanfang Village, Jizhou District, Hengshui City, Hebei Province, busies herself in her own mushroom greenhouse. Photo by Xinhua Net reporter Lei Dongrui

"Look, this one can be picked right away, that one still needs a few more days. Growing oyster mushrooms is mainly about getting the humidity and temperature right, and then there's ventilation..." When talk turned to growing oyster mushrooms, the chatty and cheerful Zhang Xiujuan opened up like a "chatterbox," seeming every bit a mushroom-growing expert.

Nanfang Village, Jizhou District, Hengshui City, is located in south-central Hebei and is a typical farming village, where villagers mainly grow cotton, wheat, corn and peanuts. After the winter leisure season begins, most villagers go out to work to earn some extra income.

"Going out to work means someone bossing you around, and we don't like that. Besides, growing crops alone doesn't bring in much income now, so we wanted to try a transition," said Zhang Xiujuan, busy at work in the greenhouse.

They heard that growing oyster mushrooms requires little investment, carries low risk, is easy to learn, and doesn't interfere with farming, and that oyster mushrooms are pollution-free green food containing substances such as selenium and polysaccharides that can boost human immunity, with very high nutritional value. So Fang Hongjie and Zhang Xiujuan hit on the idea of growing greenhouse oyster mushrooms. After careful consideration, in September last year, Fang Hongjie's family discussed it with two other families and decided that each household would invest 7,800 yuan to build a greenhouse and try growing oyster mushrooms.

Practical and hardworking farming folk act as soon as they decide. To save money, they relied on themselves and worked hard, doing everything they could on their own, from building the greenhouse to loading the mushroom spawn. "When we were welding the frame, it was snowing, so cold that our hands got frostbitten," Zhang Xiujuan said.

The hardest part was dealing with technical problems. To make the oyster mushrooms grow better, they asked experienced people again and again, and also bought many books on growing oyster mushrooms, teaching themselves cultivation techniques such as mixing the substrate, inoculating, and controlling temperature and humidity.

Exploring as they went and learning through practice, thanks to their careful tending, they got a bumper harvest of oyster mushrooms from one greenhouse that very year. Since November last year, they have harvested three crops so far, totaling nearly 6,500 jin. "Because it's our first year growing them and our technique isn't up to standard, this year's yield will definitely be higher than last year's," her husband Fang Hongjie said confidently.

The oyster mushrooms they picked in the morning could appear at the nearby market by mid-morning, and the fresh mushrooms were well received by everyone. "Oyster mushrooms generally average 2.5 yuan per jin, and especially for the crop before the New Year, they sold for more than five yuan per jin. The three families not only recovered their costs but also made several thousand yuan," Zhang Xiujuan said happily.

Having tasted the "sweetness" of success, Zhang Xiujuan is full of confidence. Speaking of this year's plans, she wants to invest another 10,000 yuan to expand the scale. As their mushroom business does better and better, more and more people from nearby villages take the initiative to ask about growing techniques. Seeing everyone's enthusiasm running high, Zhang Xiujuan is very happy, because only when more people grow them will a bigger industry take shape, and the market will grow bigger along with it.