Wine Caps on Tree Leaves?

It is difficult for me to obtain wood chips in my location for various reasons, primarily because there is no good place for utility trucks to dump them out and I don't have anything but a small car available to me for hauling.

But what I DO have is tons of of the big paper bags of tree leaves, some chopped others not, over 100 bags left over after covering my garden a foot deep. I pick them up around my neighborhood every year, let them age six months or so, then use them as mulch the next year.




I make soft sided raised beds by digging out 8 to 10 inches of topsoil between the beds and heaping it up onto the beds. Then I lay leaf bags in the trenched paths and cover them with loose chopped leaves.

I would like to grow mushrooms in these leaf-mulch filled trenches and it looks like wine caps might be my best option. However, I don't see any instructions on growing them on leaves or leaf mould, just wood chips or straw. It seems to me that if they grow well on chips or straw they would grow well on leaves too, but I just don't see any confirmation of that anywhere.

So I'll throw this post up asking for advice. Does anyone with experience growing wine caps (or maybe another species if applicable) see any reason why this wouldn't be a good idea? TIA

I think it should work. The reason I say this is for two years I had been dumping my leaves over a hill beside a small stream on my property with the intention to use them once they broke down.  What did I find growing there one spring?  Wild wine caps.

Thinking about it a little more, I’d take one area and see if I could get blewits going since they love leaves.   They are harder than wine caps to grow, and produce in late fall.  You might want to research them.

Kevin Hoover wrote:Thinking about it a little more, I’d take one area and see if I could get blewits going since they love leaves.   They are harder than wine caps to grow, and produce in late fall.  You might want to research them.

OK I'll look into blewits. One plus of wine caps is that they can often fruit in both the spring and fall.

John,
I have wine caps growing on a combination of straw and hardwood sawdust.  I’m not knocking them, but they aren’t one of my favorite mushrooms to eat.  They aren’t bad, but I eat so many types of wild edible mushrooms, and grow several others, that I have others I prefer.

Hi John,

I will offer my thoughts, but first, congratulations on getting that many leaves and kudos for trying out the mushroom idea.

As others have mentioned, the Wine Caps are probably the best option for breaking down the leaves.  You can certainly try other mushrooms, but at some point they will meet and probably not play nice with each other, but it could be an interesting experiment.

So starting with the leaves, I would shred those down to as finely chopped up as possible.  I am honestly not certain how deep to pile on the leaves.  Traditionally I recommend piling wood chips up to 12” deep, but lately I have seen better luck with something more like 6”.  Maybe compromise and go with 8”?

Wine Caps like to grow along an interface of wood and soil as opposed to wood alone.  They can actually get buried too deep in wood chips—I found out the hard way.  Perhaps the best arrangement would be to mix some straw into the leaves.

I find that Wine Caps grow best when I can make at least one hotspot for them, preferably more.  My best success was growing 8 tomato plants in a 2x4 configuration.  The tomatoes themselves were planted in fertile holes filled with some bagged manure.  The Wine Caps really grew well between the rows of tomatoes.

So with this in mind, perhaps you could make some fertile holes, even if just sitting over winter.  If there is anything that will grow over winter (but perhaps not brassicas), the plant roots will interact with the fungi and both benefit.

An alternative might be to place a straw bale right in the center, dirty it up with some soil and inoculate the straw and surrounding leaves with wine caps.  As a rule, Wine Caps like to colonize straw and do so quickly.  I would not expect the straw to last long, but it should get the wine caps off to a good start.  I had wine caps infect a straw bale sitting on wood chips.  After one year, that bale looked like a 2 dimensional version of a straw bale.  A year later I could find no trace at all.

Consider covering all the leaves with a layer of 2-4 inches of straw to regulate moisture.  But again, don’t soak things and consider mixing straw with leaves—in my experience, wine caps don’t do well when soaked.

If you are looking for compost, these suggestions should work out well.  If you are looking for actual mushrooms, I honestly don’t know how a base layer of leaves will work.  The fungi won’t push up actual mushrooms until they fully consume their food source.  Strange as it may seem, mushrooms don’t appear until the fungi is starving and needs to spread spores to continue the fungal party.  I would think that the leaves, being much less substantial than actual wood should colonize and produce mushrooms quickly.  I guess we will see.

I do have a thread detailing my basic recipe for growing wine caps and I will look it up and link it in a following post.

Last point:  PATIENCE!  Growing mushrooms taught me a lot of patience.  Fungi can be weird critters and sometimes appear fickle.  But don’t let that stop you.  I say jump in and just do it.

Please keep us updated—I really want to see how this works out.

Eric

Eric Hanson wrote:
Please keep us updated—I really want to see how this works out.

Eric

Thanks so much for all that good information Eric. I will keep you updated and try to be patient 😁

Subscribed...

I just inoculated my first winecap bed (first ever too).

I went lasagna style with straw, hardwood pellets (for grills and heaters), then one more layer of straw on top.

For the wood pellets... I boiled several large pots of water. They rapidly expanded back into a steaming pile of sawdust on the first pour. Should have been sterilized pretty well when they were making the pellets... then add boiling water for another layer of no competition when growing.

Hope this works... I didn't read up on it much.

I did stick one fist size ball of spawn under each of my blueberry bushes as well. They are deep mulched with grass clippings from the lawn. No boiling water there though of course. However, they were just planted a few months ago... so there is also no mycelium just yet either.

Good Luck!

~Marty

Can anyone report back on if this worked with the leaves, etc?  LIke others, I have trouble getting my hands on fresh wood chips all the time.  I have a bunch of oak and maple leaves + a lot of used straw from animal coops (geese, ducks, chickens,e tc) and am hoping to create a permanent space for wine cap cultivation, adding to the space each year.  

Well, yesterday I did a bit of experimentation myself.  We have a large pile of maple leaves from the fall. I  usually spread these out in my chicken and guinea run as we get snow, but with virtually no snow this winter, I seeded the pile with winecaps (spawn from a larger wood chip pile I've had going for some time).  I also seeded two of my compost piles (they have a lot of straw from the bird coops).  I'll report back and let you know if it works!

Dana Awen wrote:Can anyone report back on if this worked with the leaves, etc?    

I can report back for you!

My experiement with using hardwood pellets that got re-hydrated back into sawdust was a huge success and a huge failure.

The fungi began to spread through both that sawdust and the straw as far as I could tell. I even started to get some blooms of mushrooms. Then, over the next few weeks I got no more mushrooms and instead... the spots that I had inoculated with the chunks of spawn sawdust... had suddenly began sinking down into the bed. Over a week or two I watched them sink further and further into the bed.

I then dug down into one of the sinkholes and discovered it full of worms. They were devouring it all because they were actually able to consume the sawdust. = (

Then about that same time... the chickens found out there were worms down in there... and they tilled the entire bed for me. = (

I am gonna try it again... but in 5gal buckets in the garage or off of the ground next time. With small holes in the lid to water the sawdust with. and larger holes on the side for bigger mushrooms. Basically, the same thing as a plastic bag BUT reusable, easier to sanitize/wash, much more stable on the shelf, and much cheaper than that raised bed.