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Working toward 100 ideas to let mushrooms do your dirty work in the garden.

Help me add to this list!

When the list is robust and well-organized, we can add images and descriptions.  

Soil Mechanics
Stop tilling.  It's like a slasher movie for mycorrhizae.
Use a broadfork to loosen/aerate soil without destroying soil life and mycorrhizae.
Use plants to “till” - tillage radish and other large-rooted annuals.
Use succession planting - i.e. plant bulbs into potato beds after harvest.

Soil Microbiology
Stop using herbicides/insecticides/fungicides.

Soil Microbiology - Compost
Use compost to add fertility.
Use compost to mulch and retain moisture.
Learn to tweak compost toward the fungal end of the spectrum when appropriate.
Throw a couple cups of healthy forest floor soil in your compost tea.
Use spent mushroom blocks in compost piles.
Use mushroom compost to amend and mulch your no-till garden beds.

Soil Microbiology - Compost Tea
Use compost tea as a soil drench for fertility
Use compost tea for pest/disease resistance.
Use compost tea as a foliar application for fertility.
Learn to tweak compost tea toward fungal dominance.
Use compost tea as a foliar application for a better-than-organic fungicide replacement in your orchard and fruit trees.
Throw a couple cups of healthy forest floor soil in your compost tea.

Garden Amendments
Grab a shovel full of healthy forest floor dirt to add to each new garden bed.

One-And-Done & Passive Mushroom Projects
Innoculate your wood chips with King Stropharia mushroom spawn.
Bury spent substrate from mushroom farms in your garden to let the fruit again, and again, and again.
Bury spent substrate from mushroom farms in your garden to let them expand and spread spores.
Inoculate bare-root fruit trees with mycorrhizal fungi before planting.
Inoculate fruit apple trees with morel spore slurry (Morchella esculentoides).
Line your garden beds with inoculated shitake logs.

Hugelkulture - Fungi loves the wood in the middle, and your plants love the fungus.
Use wood debris at the base and in the core of your raised bed garden beds.
Use wood debris in a trench below your in-ground garden beds.

Animal Support
Innoculate pasture or animal GI with nematophagous fungi (like Duddingtonia flagrans) for parasite control.
Use wood chips inoculated with King Stropharia around your bee hives for food and disease-resistence.

Staff note (Beau M. Davidson) :

more mushroom mayhem:
https://permies.com/mushroom

COMMENTS:
 
gardener
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Raised ROW gardening:

source

(Imagine that, only in the woods with about 6 hours of total  sun--we built raised rows right on top of the healthy forest floor that is full of fungi of many types!)
 
Posts: 134
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Inoculate bare root fruit trees before planting with mycorrhizal fungi by dipping them in a spore slurry containing Glomus or Pisolithus tinctorius or other micorrhizal fungi.
Inoculate existing apple trees with a spore slurry containing morel spores from the Morchella esculentoides group.
 
M.K. Dorje Sr.
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Use spent shiitake or oyster or lion's mane logs for hugelkultur.
Use inoculated oyster or turkey tail or reishi logs as raised bed liners.
Use spent shiitake  or lion's mane sawdust blocks in compost piles.
 
master gardener
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Increased populations of mycelium can attract earthworms who consume and spread it.

I utilize this relationship in my chicken paddocks with intentional chipped area that is inoculated with Winecaps. The hens thoroughly scratch it looking for worms/bugs. Give the area a break to regrow mycelium and repeat the process.
 
Rachel Lindsay
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I just watched a squirrel run through my front yard with a giant orange mushroom twice as big as its head. Then it ate it. Maybe there is a way here to distract rodents from cultivated gardens with a fungus crop?
 
steward
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Rachel Lindsay wrote:I just watched a squirrel run through my front yard with a giant orange mushroom twice as big as its head. Then it ate it. Maybe there is a way here to distract rodents from cultivated gardens with a fungus crop?



Interesting.  Yes, please let us know what you discover.
 
Beau M. Davidson
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Added a bunch of the above suggestions to the list.
Made Hugelkulture its own category because it's great for this stuff.

Also adding:
Innoculate pasture with nematophagous fungi (like Duddingtonia flagrans) for parasite control.
Use wood chips innoculated with King Stropharia around your bee hives for food and disease-resistence.
 
Posts: 108
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I just watched a squirrel run through my front yard with a giant orange mushroom twice as big as its head. Then it ate it. Maybe there is a way here to distract rodents from cultivated gardens with a fungus crop?



Exactly what kind of mushrooms are you growing there? Now we know what makes squirrels fly.

Its very interesting to see wildlife taking advantage of natures bounty,im sure the wildlife enjoy the fungi as much as we do,my chickens are quite fond of the small mushrooms emerging from my compost.
 
Posts: 49
Location: SE France
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Hello, salut!

Not had much joy with inoculated lgs or mulch or even logs!!  but there are morels which are encouraged with
cardboard, spawn and fire. They seem to appreciate burnt soil.

Mr Paul Stamets has done work in France with Washington University on bee health.
Won’t say more, it’s one of those things that I note for future attention and research, on my long non existent list.
And of course myco remediation. His ted talk is worth a watch.

Thank you for the suggestions, jolly useful.

Blessings from over here
M-H drinking coffee with mosquitoes, an alternative to sugar? No, not really, don’t use sugar.
 
M.K. Dorje Sr.
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Paul Stamets has been investigating how to improve  honey bee health with mushroom extracts for several years, including king stropharia/winecaps. But recently has had the most success with amadou Fomes fomentarius:



Amadou is also used for human medicine, fire starting and even to make hats.
 
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I noticed something last winter while I was gathering wood to burn. I found a completely punked out log soaking in the water in a pond next to my home. There were mushrooms growing in it. Decent sized ones, too.

I'm thinking the presence of the water or humidity regulated the temperature to such an extent that allowed it to grow. The end of the log in the water wasn't fully submerged, I noticed, so there was a decent amount of sunlight that could get in from both ends. The log itself was about two feet long and a foot in diameter. The water came up about halfway on the opening on the lower end.

I've been wondering if I can replicate this with another log, or even a few boards screwed together. I'm thinking that the wood will draw up a sufficient amount of moisture and the mushrooms can place themselves where it needs it best. Maybe I could put another substrate in the box.

Can anyone confirm if they've seen this occur as well? I would love to hear some others' thoughts on this.
 
pollinator
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Pest control. Use entomopathogenic fungus to control pest.

Experiment ideas

Use Bioluminescent fungi to have a night light in the garden.

Create fungi art pieces.  




 
pollinator
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Years ago there was a huge flush of fly agarics on our place.  These are an arguably poisonous species, though some people process and eat them, especially in Europe and Russia I believe.  I would gather them by the bucketful and dump them into my black soldier fly bin, where they would be gone in a few hours.  Neither the grubs, nor the hens to which I fed them, seemed to mind at all. Nor did I, eating their eggs.
 
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This is my first time replying to a post, please forgive if I do this wrong!


Quote from Beau M. Davidson’s original post:


Animal Support
Innoculate pasture or animal GI with nematophagous fungi (like Duddingtonia flagrans) for parasite control.
Use wood chips inoculated with King Stropharia around your bee hives for food and disease-resistence.



I’m curious if I could use nematophagus fungi to innoculate GI from our pet turtle and maybe use it to fertilize ornamental plants?
 
Sure, he can talk to fish, but don't ask him what they say. You're better off reading a tiny ad:
GAMCOD 2025: 200 square feet; Zero degrees F or colder; calories cheap and easy
https://permies.com/wiki/270034/GAMCOD-square-feet-degrees-colder
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