I’m succeeding at spreading wild fungi outside, but not edible fingi

My dead tree stumps are colonised with various wild fungi. So I axed some woodchips out of them, spread them as mulch, and the fungi’s slowly spreading.

Can there be a similar approach to cultivating store-bought mushrooms? Everything i’ve found so far is the equivalent of purchasing a vegetable seed that you can grow to maturity but won’t produce seeds for reproduction

In the late spring I went to the store and bought a few packs of mushrooms, ground them up in a blender (with water) to make a slurry and spread them around the property in various shady locations. Nothing coming up yet but was told it takes time for the mycellium to develop....maybe even a few years.

Yup! the slurry method should work even for porcini but takes time. You can actually grow morels like this

Can the slurry be done with dried mushrooms or does it have to be fresh?

Tim Kivi wrote:My dead tree stumps are colonised with various wild fungi. So I axed some woodchips out of them, spread them as mulch, and the fungi’s slowly spreading.

Can there be a similar approach to cultivating store-bought mushrooms? Everything i’ve found so far is the equivalent of purchasing a vegetable seed that you can grow to maturity but won’t produce seeds for reproduction

Fungi don't behave like many of the vegetables you are referring to, they will produce fruits when the mycelium has fully occupied the medium it is growing in/on, the fruits will produce spores since that is what they do and those spores will drop when fully ripe.
Since no "pollen" is involved with fungi, spores that are fully developed will sprout and grow.

Vegetables and fruit trees can behave in a sterile manner if they are cross hybrids that is; hybrids of hybrids or even further along (hybrid x hybrid x hybrid, etc.).
Even "seedless" varieties can and do produce viable seeds on occasion and those fully developed seeds will sprout and grow and produce the food they are supposed to produce.
I've done several "seedless" watermelons and other melons this way, and now I have seeds from the results of those that did sprout and grow.

Redhawk

Meg, the slurry may be done with dry mushrooms if the mushroom was sun dried (spores are killed if the mushroom was artificially dried at higher temps)

Fungi are everywhere, spores even more so. Every sip of air we take contains 1 to 10 spores according to university research. Every cubic meter contains between a thousand and ten thousand spores. Most of which are wild spores of wild species, they are super-adapted to the environment. A lot of the mushrooms we like have been selected to produce mushrooms we like the taste of. They're no match in the wild. Not all mushrooms, but a lot. So they have a hard time competing with established mycelium.
It's a numbers game, and you have to wait to see results. If you keep doing it, they will come.
That book by Paul Stamets, running with mycelium explains this much better than i can and it's basic approach is moving mycelium itself. The body of the mushroom itself and ways to make more of that and then invade natural spaces with it.
Fresh wood chips are a great place to occupy/colonize with spores or even more chance if mycelium itself is added.
It's a whole world of mushrooms, mycelium and spores out there, and we don't know that much.