[baron_harkonnen]

> a self-contained growing kit

For a more "hacker" experience with mycology I highly recommend starting from a spore syringe/spore print, but doing every part of the process yourself. You can grow any of a wide variety of mushrooms and it's really cool to understand the details of creating a sterile environment for the spores, creating the substrate, and following a wide range of "Teks" for varying difficulty.

Most of the online documentation is coming from people aiming to grow p. cubensis (aka magic mushrooms), but the techniques will work equally well with many food varieties (especially oyster).

The BRF (Brown Rice Flour) Tek is a good place to start, and you'll quickly begin to see how wild you can get with home mycology. Once you grow your first batch you can easily make your own spore prints, and start doing very fascinating stuff with home made agar (cloning, inspecting genetics, cleaning out contaminants, spawning spores, etc). There is also a fairly large range of options for automating the process with electronics if that's the kind of thing you enjoy.

If you get really experienced you can start taking spore prints of local native species and then growing them at home from spores! It's a far deeper hobby than I would have imagined, you can start from something very simple that just takes a few hours to start and can reasonably end up closer to something like this video than you can imagine!