Judith Browning

megan, the strawberry patch is maybe 30 feet from this end of the hoop house...we do move things around, plants with soil and even chips sometimes.

I suppose it's more likely they just showed up in the more recent chips.

Stropharia rugosoannulata
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stropharia_rugosoannulata

This article says spore print is 'dark purple-brown to black'.

Pearl Sutton wrote:They certainly look like it.
Check that they spore print black, but I'm 99% sure that's them.

thanks Pearl!
spore print in the works!
will post results tomorrow.

Megan, that would be great!
The beds had been covered with wood chips over the winter and I removed most to plant...seems odd that the mushrooms were at the bottom edge of the wooden sides although chips were on the floor also but decomposed....now it is bamboo leaves.

If I wanted to encourage them do you suppose I could just chop up these and mix with more wood chips?

similar but European...
Stropharia hornemannii
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stropharia_hornemannii

The stem is solid (other than the holes from bugs)

I don't know how I missed these....must have popped up just a couple days ago?

at first I thought they were shiitakes since I add old plugged logs to those beds and get an occasional surprise mushroom.

Looking closer though, I wonder if they are wine caps?
The three younger one's look correct and the older ones have pale lilac gills? a few have a visable ring on the upper stem.
They are very buggy and overblown. ..what might look like white spots in a photo are big holes.

They were all along the bottom edge of my wooden sided beds in our shaded hoop house.

I removed them before I thought to get photos.

If I can positively ID them as winecaps I would like to propagate them in that path...we have wood chips.

We grew some in a garden bed with strawberries more than five years ago and it seems unlikely these would be from those?  

hours of cooking!
we gave up too soon ...just ate a small amount and composted the rest.
We thought the flavor similar to asparagus...and lovely texture but definitely a lasting astringency in my mouth.

Will look forward to next winters new growth!

There are piles of dead canes and standing dead but no where we would be comfortable burning for biochar....will try to suggest to anyone who can put more effort in the clean up.

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.
What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.
Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave.
They show us what community and friendship mean;
they show us how to live and die.

Anne Lamott,
Bird by Bird

Rez,
Mine spread by tip rooting because I rarely get them pruned well.
Ours only bear fruit on the previous years new growth.  I cut out any canes that have already fruited.
Sometimes the canes are almost horizontal and they tip root 6'-8' away...so they are popping up everywhere.  They bear better with more moisture but survive our hot droughty summers.

 I have a thornless blackberry. It makes big canes (6 feet tall), tho rarely grows new leaves from old canes, and makes occasional fruit (so sweet you really have to mix it with something sour) but it is still coming off the same base that I planted five or six years ago. The thornless raspberries have spread out a bit (they are easy to control, just yank up what I don't want), but not the blackberry. That end of the garden tends hot and dry, so maybe that's the secret.