Fungal surprise—I didn’t expect this with Wine Caps

Today I was out clearing beds of some weeds when I got a surprise—I have a large and apparently healthy crop of stink horn mushrooms!

I think that what happened was the stink horns came in and colonized as a secondary fungi.  The Wine Caps that I sowed earlier probably broke down much of the mulch, even though I only got a couple of mushrooms.  The wood chips did break down about halfway.  Today the former wood chips are broken down to something more fine than coffee grounds and is positively riddled with white strands of mycelium.  There is so much mycelium that it knits the bedding material together.  Digging in it produces an audible tearing sound.

While I was looking forward to Wine Cap mushrooms, my primary aim was to decompose wood chips and this has absolutely happened!  I probably have some extremely fertile compost now even if I don’t get the actual mushrooms I was hoping for.

I will update later.

Eric

We did the same last year, lots of wood chips and blended with wine cap mycelium. In mid summer a flush of mushrooms came up under one of our squash trellis' but were only a tan. Disappointed we didn't get any edible samples before moving, I recently learned that with limited sun wine caps come up tan...darn it. So it worked but my ignorance to the species had me miss them completely.
That said, the mycelium through out the garden did a great job of breaking down the wood bits. When we left in August many beds were only 8 months old but you could no longer tell they were mostly made of chips. I believe the peas, oats and wheat planted within helped as well though. Joint effort! From other things I've read Wine caps do better on more soil than wood so maybe you'll get a good flush or two next year!