Of course, this depends to a great extent on the scale upon which you want to take up mushroom growing. On the very smallest of scales, mushroom growing is truly effortless. Everything is really so pre-packaged these days, from TV dinners to mushroom growing, and all you have to do, really, is to purchase a kit. The kit will have virtually everything that's needed, and all the instructions that you require. But, since it is a kit, it will not save as much on costs as a little more innovation of your part might do.

If you would like to save the most, of course, you should do everything yourself, from harvesting spores from mushrooms that have become mature to actually doing all the task of preparing the growth medium (a reasonably big job) on your own. Generally speaking I would only advise this for people who are thinking of going commercial, but to be honest, even doing everything yourself is pretty easy.

There are lots of instructions available on the internet, and if you're here, you already know for yourself what a source of knowledge the internet can be. Feel free to experiment, and never be so afraid of failure that you don't try something new. Yes, you might make a few mistakes along the way, but mushrooms are really a low-maintenance organism, and ultimately I have not the slightest doubt that you'll be growing those mushrooms with hardly any effort at all. The growth medium itself is often a simple method of self-fermenting a special mixture of manure and straw over a few days.

This takes a little careful overseeing, but other than that is really pretty easy to do, and it more or less makes itself. Extracting spores from mature mushrooms can be as simple as placing the cut-away cap on a piece of glass and waiting a day or two for the spores to fall out, and then collecting them. There's really nothing about mushroom growing that needs to be an unsolvable mystery.