Hey everyone!
So I've not posted here since I made a post awhile back about top soil restoration via extensive mulching. Anyway, I did it! I buried almost my entire backyard in woodchips, leaf litter, and compostable cardboard/paper products. And beneath that, I dumped about two years worth of kitchen
compost on top of my flower bed. Wee!
Naturally this means that I have a HUGE amount of currently-untapped substrate to experiment with. At the time I've done the following:
1. Inoculated the southeast side of my backyard with Stropharia rugosoannulata. This was done with "round 1" of the mulch, so I'm already seeing some lovely results from this process.
2. Inoculated my front flower bed with Lepista nuda. It's far too soon to see results from this yet.
...and that's about it. Now, I like wine caps, but I also like variety, and the exact species I use to turn my "possibly excessive"
wood debris into quality
mushroom compost doesn't really matter to me.
So far I've been trying to think of different species of value I've found growing on wood chips naturally, and the list is admittedly pretty short:
1. Assorted coprinoids. These would be kind of neat, but the shelf-life is abysmal for obvious reasons. Plus, eating Coprinus/Coprinopsis would mean I'd have to give up red wine with dinner and that's lame.
2. Pleurotus, either pulmanarius or ostreatus. Those are pretty decent, colonize AGGRESSIVELY, and are honestly a decent candidate for showing up on their own. Sawdust spawn would also be very easy to purchase. Wife isn't super keen on Oysters though.
3. Leucoagaricus americanus. Also tend to arise on their own on woodchips where I live, and while not really POPULAR as an edible are actually pretty decent. I'm not sure about sourcing spawn for these, and I don't really have a proper set up for agar work.
4. Psilocybe caerulescens. What to say here...well, I *mostly* find them where either a bunch of
trees have been cut down in previous years like my neighbors
yard, or in mulched flower beds (particularly the
local library). But, well, I'm not terribly keen on this one for two obvious reasons: pretty sure cultivating these knowingly is a felony and also I have small children that would probably eat them. Trippin toddlers sounds bad. Again, I also don't have a set up for agar work.
Does anyone have any other suggestions? I've seen people list Laetiporus and Hericium spp. as options, but both work best on logs.
Should I just start saving my Stropharia and repeatedly dump spore slurries over the fresher chips?
Cheers,
-Miriam
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