Niko Lourotos

Joao Winckler wrote:On a deck in pots, my money would be on slugs or caterpillars more than deer. Deer would probably knock the pots over going for them. Check under the rims and bases of the pots at night with a torch, slugs love hiding in the drainage holes during the day. If it's clean cuts with no slime trails then something with teeth is more likely.

Thanks for your thoughts!
Could slugs eat/cut the stems like that?
I would have thought that it is too chewy/hard for them...

John Weiland wrote:Our garden is fenced against deer, but rabbits occasionally get in .... and that's the effect they would show on our beans.  As others have noted, if these are on a low deck, try moveing them to a higher point like a deck railing or table.  If the new location is away from deer and rabbits and *still* occurring, I would suspect squirrels or similar.

Really?? Squirrels? There are many of then around. I thought the ate nuts etc.
Hm... if it is squirrels, what do I do???

Mark Land wrote:Hi Niko,
looks to me like it could be ants. I had the same problem with young plants (of any vegetable kind) which were sitting on the ground on a deck, terrace or similar. There are many species of ants that cut young leaves and stems. Have a look around on your deck if you can see any traces of ants (dirt or gravel being thrown up between tiles is a sure sign of a hive building) .

Easiest sustainable way (not using chemicals) is get the plants to much higher ground, and harder to reach.

Oh wow! Never thought about that. YES. many ants around. I will investigate that line of inquiry, THANK YOU

Bush beans, growing in pots on the deck. ("Florence Green" and "Orca", even though varieties are not important, I think ...)
Something has been going to town on their leaves, chewing them right down to the stem 😠 The damage seems too severe and on less than tender tissue, so it does not seem like slugs to me ...
Any ideas? THANKS!!

Nicolas Derome wrote:
My bed (started in 2022, moved to a different town in 2023) is still going. I got a flush in late May/early June, as usual. It was a little light, maybe because I didn't add enough fresh organic matter, or maybe because after a wet start, late April onwards has been a little on the dry end of the spectrum. I added a few inches of maple woodchips in mid May though, so we'll see if that boosts the harvests in autumn, or if it will just focus on continuing to colonize and the dividends will come next year instead. My beds are in part shade, they don't seem to mind that too much, although I suppose it can mean the top inch or two of organic material is more prone to drying out and not being colonized as much.

I also have a big root mat for them to colonize. Right next to the winecap bed is a 30x8ft area that used to be reeds of some sort, which I chopped back, covered in landscaping fabric and then mulch a couple years ago. That seems to have killed back the reeds, which I couldn't dig out because it was just a completely unbroken mass of roots. Now that those roots are breaking down, we'll see what colonizes them. I also had 3 morels fruit in that area. I spread some winecap spawn into the maple woodchips I put around some newly planted fruit trees as well, which they seem to be colonizing pretty well already after just a few weeks.

Generally, I have found that they do not need quite as many wood chips as we assume they do! Mine have spread all over the shady  parts of the garden, outside the wood chip "piles", basically to ground with leaf litter and scattered debris. And they flush right through that. I guess that this the neat thing about winecaps - they are "ground shrooms" as much as "wood mushrooms".

Here in Vancouver the summers can actually be very dry. The colonies lie very much dormant for 3-4 months, but always come back on the next rainy season. In general, they seem quite hardy, resilient and low maintenance!

I 've been there! Happily, the solution was ridiculously simple, easy & cheap. BEER TRAPS (tip: buying beer is not actually necessary - any fermented liquid will do - they are attracted to fermented smells). They have readily and completely eliminated the problem ). I am in Vancouver, by the way, Wet Pacific Northwest!).

You can buy nice pretty-looking ones at Amazon, but now I simply make them out of empty milk jugs. I refill them every 2-3 weeks, decimating successive generations of slugs.
An easy substitute for beer is a fermented dilution of a bit of flour, a bit of sugar and a bit of yeast. I make it in the afternoon, let it sit until dusk to ferment, then fill the traps... Bam! in 2-3 days I have enough drowned slugs to fill a bag.

So I ended  up on this thread looking to determine whether I  can feed pine cones (not chips, just dried up cones from the ground) to my wine caps.
I think the general consensus is "probably"?

But I also found other interesting queries to which perhaps I can contribute my own observations & experience!

SLUGS: Yes, definitely a problem. But simple beer traps worked great to totally eliminate the problem. I got some cute green "pagoda" ones from Amazon too, so they look appropriately gnomish among the mushrooms

BEDS: I just form dedicated mushroom beds in the darkest corners of the ornamental garden, where nothing flowering and pretty really grows, simply by laying down logs (branches from trimming older trees, really) in a rectangle and filling it with leaves and debris. In most cases, the wine caps also seem to have spread beyond their beds, within a year or two.

SUBSTRATES: Pistachio shells worked really well. Walnut shells did not seem to bother them either. I have no straw, but I do end up with a lot of dried up scarlett runner bean husks every fall. The rest is leaves, twigs and sticks from pruning (after they've dried up) and, if I am lucky, mixed woodchips from landscapers working nearby (which I always end up "aging" /drying for a few months first, not sure why, it seems appropriate). It all goes in.

VIABILITY: With the above approach, the beds seem permanent to me. They come back year after year, two flushes, in May and October, since my original purchase (during Covid lockdowns). I just dump stuff on top, ad hoc. If it is too dry in the Spring, I may wet them a bit. That's all.
(*) I do get the distinct feeling that they do not like city water (chlorine?) but they, of course, love rain - even rain water from the rain barrel.

LATEST: I have an old bamboo planter,  concrete, about 2'x8'. I killed the bamboo years ago  (it was shooting runners over the planter, in to everywhere, even got into the house!) but now the planter is solid bamboo roots and cut stumps sticking up every square inch. I can't plant anything else in it and removing the bamboo tangle seems a herculean task, so I will lay chips and  mycelium on top and hope that the winecaps will  simply eat everything and in 4-5 years I will have a planter full of compost - and a dozen bonus wine cap harvests to boot!!

Cheers from Vancouver!