Best fungi for oak and hickory leaves

Hello everyone,

So I have a very friendly neighbor who lets me collect all of his fallen leaves.  I have about 3/4 ish acre of dense leaf fall.

In the past I would rake everything up and dump them on my garden beds over winter.  I did not get those leaves this year but they are still there.  I am highly interested in decomposing them with mushrooms.  My question is which one.

Ideally I would want a mushroom that is a voracious consumer of the fallen leaves.  My first inclination is to use wine caps, but I have recently been told that wine caps are not really ideal for this application.  So another option might be oyster mushrooms, but I don’t really know about this.

If anyone has a good suggestion for a rapidly acting mushroom for oak leaves I would love to hear about it.

Thanks in advance,

Eric

Hi Eric, are you able to play the long game for a couple years? Just building a pile with those leaves and walking away from it will yield wonderful, fluffy, dark, crumbly, good smelling leaf mold. Soil denizens will move in, among them earthworms, helping create a really awesome end result for use however you see fit. The process can be shortened, compared to piling up whole unbroken leaves, by chopping up the leaves with a lawn mower.

James,

I certainly could wait, but I would rather get something growing ASAP.  In the past I used shredded leaves in the same manner one would use straw.  And I certainly could just pile these on top of my beds, which by now all composed of woodchips composted by wine Caps.

Do you think the already existing wine caps would munch away on the leaves?  I plan on introducing some oyster mushrooms to a specific bed this spring.  

Is there something specific about leaves that makes them unsuitable for wine cap or oyster decomposition?

Eric

Two species come to mind, one of which is the winecaps you already have mycelium for in your wood chip compost.
The other I'd use for those leaves is oyster any of them, King strop would probably like the leaves too.

Redhawk

Thanks Kola RedHawk.  Sounds like my plan to use wine caps and oysters is just about right.

Thanks much.

Eric