Finally had some rain - now Wine Caps!

We had a long cold and very dry spring here. Everything has been literally a month behind in leafing out and flowering times. We finally had a week of nice heavy rain, and now a week later I have my very first wine caps popping up.

I innoculated 3 spots last year. The first was a formal "mushroom patch" 1.2m by 1.2m, edged with logs and filled with chips 12" deep. Unfortunately my chickens have found that and worked over the top layers a bit. I'm hoping it will recover, as there is still plenty of mycellium deeper down. I now have it capped with a big sheet of weighted down cardboard tomake it less appealing to chickens. I know other have used cardboard - will it fruit through the cardboard, or should i be removing it?

My second batch of spawn was divided between a second smaller "patch", and the rest was spread in a few clumps around paths and between existing rows of plants which are mulched with chips. I just raked back a few inches and threw down clumps. It is this - neglected, more exposed, and trampled on while gardening - that has popped up some mushrooms for me. I have picked two so far, and there were 6 more popping up this evening. I'll be having the first two with breakfast tomorrow, and will take some pictures.

I'm so chuffed.

Ultimately I hope that all of our woodchip paths will be innoculated - approximately 200m round the whole property.

More rain over the past week, after a period of dry. I didn’t manage to get up to the patch for about 5 days, and when I did there was a monster haul (by my standards anyway).

This batch have been cleaned and gone in the dehydrator. There are lots more still to come by the look of it. I can’t wait until more of the area is inoculated.

Nice looking collection of Wine Caps Michael!

It is exciting when a flush of mushrooms finally decides to pop up, but sometimes there is no obvious reason as to why they pick that particular moment.  

And you are exactly correct that the most neglected areas sometimes are the most bountiful.  This year I found Wine Caps growing under my Comfrey where I had spread some spawn last year just to give the Comfrey a boost (as if Comfrey ever needs a boost!).  Basically, all I did there was bury some well-infected wood chips, covered them with more wood chips and then forgot about them.  This spring while mowing I almost mowed the mushrooms but turned away at the last second.  I got several mushrooms out of that neglected patch.

I have found that year 2 can be a bit of a challenge though.  The fungus needs new, fresh substrate but is not quite as active as year 1.  Fresh wood chips can help, but the Wine Caps like straw even better.

In any case, good job on getting your first flush of Wine Caps.  Hopefully this is the first of many.

Eric

We spread fresh chips pretty much every year, so I'm hoping they will keep going year to year :D

I have a decent chunk of old stems in the tub from this morning, with some mycelium still attached. I'm going to try burying them in a different bit of woodchips and see if I can spread them that way.

Michael,

Burying the stems is a great way to propagate fungi.  I wish I would have known this when I got my first flush, but I will try this in the future.

Good that you continue to add chips each year.  Ironically, an error I might have made is adding to many chips as I put down a layer about 12” thick.  Worse, I added in no fertile holes.  Wine Caps like a chip/soil interface for growing.  This year I added in some straw as straw is easier to colonize.  We will see how things work out.

But your mushroom crop looks great and I think you are taking all the right steps to grow more.

Eric

Yep, I'm observing the same about the thick layers of chips vrs thin layers.

The purpose built bed that I made, which was chips around 12" deep, has made a few individual mushrooms but no proper flush.

The layer of chips already spread as mulch, around 3" deep, has been flushing well, and has spread about 3ft in each direction from where I inoculated it. That section is mulch around my berry bushes.

My first bed of Wine Caps I used alternating layers of wood chips and straw, all topped with a thick layer of straw.  At the time I did not appreciate how important that straw was.  Eventually that fungi spread across my garden bed, 32’ long, from a roughly 12’ section that I deliberately sowed.  It was interesting to watch the hyphae and mushrooms spread across the bed.  

At roughly the mid-point of the bed I had an unused square bale of straw just sitting in a sort of storage.  When the Wine Caps got to the straw bale they absolutely devoured it.  I can’t say that it produced a huge quantity of mushrooms—it did produce a few though—but the bale just sort of collapsed in on itself.  In one year it was half the original size.  The second year it barely protruded above the surface of the chips.  Later that year, the bale was completely unrecognizable.

My original plan was to only use substrates I can produce on my own ground.  I may either have to import some straw or use some additional techniques such as the bokashi method.  

One bit of good news I got a couple of weeks ago:  earlier this spring I bought 3 square straw bales to rejuvenate the mushrooms.  At the time I just plopped them down on a bed that had been inoculated but had a disappointing mushroom harvest.  I did not touch those bales for about a month, maybe 6 weeks till I could get into my other bed to plant tomatoes where I also added in some new spawn.  I wanted to use a straw bale to perk things up and when I went to move it I heard a distinct “rip”, looked down and saw a nice fuzzy white rectangle where the bale had been sitting.  It seems that a few weeks of sitting on a bed of latent Stropharia in cool, wet weather was enough to get the spawn running again.  I am not planning on moving the other bales of straw just to see what happens.

Eric

Winter update.

Inoculated my original bed 2020, harvested first mushroom summer 2021.

Today I was spreading a truckload of chips around my fruit bushes. About 25 square meters in all. I have always had in mind that this area should do double duty for growing wine caps. I moved and spread the chips over the area, then added mycelium from the 2 sq meter patch that fruited last summer. I did a very crude job - just opened a trench in the wood chips down to the soil level. I used a barrow of mycelium rich chips per trench, then topped it off with a layer of fresh wood chips.

Ultimately I also want to inoculate all our woodchip paths, but didn’t want to overdo the amount I removed from my nursery area. The paths can be next winter’s job.

One observation - our chickens figured out how to get over the fence to their run at some point in the summer. They basically spent 6 months free ranging from their coop, adjacent to the original mushroom patch. They had too much fun scratching and digging in the patch. They mycelium retreated to deeper layers, and it really knocked back fruiting in some areas. In future I will make sure that mushroom patches are further from the chickens!