Do corophilic mushrooms grow well on poop-free compost?

Do all secondary composers grow equally well on the same composted substrate?

Some secondary decomposer mushrooms are usually sought out in manure (ex: philocybes). Others are searched for in leaf litter, pine needles and other forest duff (ex: blewit). I don't understand if these two substrates host these different species because the substrate itself is more hospitable to their respective associated species or some other factor. Perhaps corophils like cow poo because its out in the open and they like the sunlight whereas forest duff in under trees in partial shade.

Can I use the same compost to grow mushrooms that are typically found in manure that I would use to grow those typically found in forest duff? Or would I have to formulate compost specifically for the species i'm growing (leaves, grass clippings, weeds etc for one kind and stable bedding for the other).

While i'm guessing there aren't any growers using anything besides leached manure for secondary decomposers, I have seen at least one gentleman on youtube inoculating his "complex compost pile" with blewits (don't know if he was successful or not). If any and all composted biomass is acceptable then would-be growers who have no access to leached manure may be able to make use of municipal compost.

On a tangent, on my fantasy farm, all organic matter besides cover crops and any straw, chips or saw dust that I want to grow primary decomposers with would go to the chickens for them to work over, eat bugs from and add their own nitrogenous "contribution" to. I could take some of the resulting compost and add enough fresh material that it would heat up and self pasteurize then this resulting compost would be inoculated and spread on vegetable beds so as to get mushrooms and vegetables from the same space.

dan long wrote: Or would I have to formulate compost specifically for the species i'm growing (leaves, grass clippings, weeds etc for one kind and stable bedding for the other).

Yea, that. The answer to this and your other post about leaching manure are the same: you have to create the environment that the mushroom is accustomed to growing in to get a successful culture.

In the science of mycology, there is a thimbleful of knowledge and an ocean of facts waiting to be discovered. I came across a statistic once (more like a wild-ass guess) that there are about 75,000 known species of fungi, out of an estimated 1 to 2 million, i.e., 95% of the species of fungi are waiting to be discovered. While it is an easy matter to count up the number of species reported in the scientific literature, I still haven't received a satisfactory answer as to how the experts come up with the 1 to 2 million figure. And that's just counting the species out there, never mind the data about their relationships to each other, evolutionary history, metabolic pathways, growth conditions, genetics, etc. There is a lot to be learned and damn few mycologists with fully funded research programs.

So rather than be disappointed that the information is not out there, you should look on it as a challenge. Try new media (composts) and see what happens when you inoculate it. Let manure sit out in the elements and get rained on for one, two, maybe three months before you sterilize it and inoculate it. There are a lot of negative results to be had -- coprophilic mushrooms evolved to grow on poop and there is a lot of dead, decaying stuff that they won't grow on. The science question waiting to be answered is: "what is it about poop that makes it such a good media for them"? Is it the pH? eH? Maybe the ratio of nitrate to ammonia? Then after you start answering that question, you can start using the knowledge: how much poop (and of what type) do you have to mix in with your other media to get the coprophilic ones to grow?

Have you done a search of all the scientific literature on the species that you want to grow? Do you need help chasing that down?

John Elliott wrote:

dan long wrote: Or would I have to formulate compost specifically for the species i'm growing (leaves, grass clippings, weeds etc for one kind and stable bedding for the other).

Yea, that. The answer to this and your other post about leaching manure are the same: you have to create the environment that the mushroom is accustomed to growing in to get a successful culture.

In the science of mycology, there is a thimbleful of knowledge and an ocean of facts waiting to be discovered. I came across a statistic once (more like a wild-ass guess) that there are about 75,000 known species of fungi, out of an estimated 1 to 2 million, i.e., 95% of the species of fungi are waiting to be discovered. While it is an easy matter to count up the number of species reported in the scientific literature, I still haven't received a satisfactory answer as to how the experts come up with the 1 to 2 million figure. And that's just counting the species out there, never mind the data about their relationships to each other, evolutionary history, metabolic pathways, growth conditions, genetics, etc. There is a lot to be learned and damn few mycologists with fully funded research programs.

So rather than be disappointed that the information is not out there, you should look on it as a challenge. Try new media (composts) and see what happens when you inoculate it. Let manure sit out in the elements and get rained on for one, two, maybe three months before you sterilize it and inoculate it. There are a lot of negative results to be had -- coprophilic mushrooms evolved to grow on poop and there is a lot of dead, decaying stuff that they won't grow on. The science question waiting to be answered is: "what is it about poop that makes it such a good media for them"? Is it the pH? eH? Maybe the ratio of nitrate to ammonia? Then after you start answering that question, you can start using the knowledge: how much poop (and of what type) do you have to mix in with your other media to get the coprophilic ones to grow?

Have you done a search of all the scientific literature on the species that you want to grow? Do you need help chasing that down?

I there any better way to find scientific research besides using google scholar?

dan long wrote:

I there any better way to find scientific research besides using google scholar?

Google scholar does make things easy to find. When I was in graduate school, way back in the last millenium, the Internet was routed through 300 baud modems. Needless to say, nothing was "on line" and we did our research in libraries. Are you close to a major university research library? I don't know that a research library is going to be better, the last time I went prowling through a research library, I was disappointed to find that most of what I was looking for was discontinued, unavailable, or only available through inter-library loan. It seems that the ease of online researching is becoming a death knell for real libraries as the budget cutting administrators see another place to chop dollars.

But with online availability comes a big drawback -- the publishers want big bucks for access to more than just the abstract. A lot more than it used to cost to feed nickels into the Xerox machine at a real library. Sometimes you can luck out and check the author's home page at his institution and he may have made a .pdf reprint available. That's why I like to put filetype:pdf into the search string when I am on Google Scholar. From there you can look through the rest of the author's publications and presentations that may not come up as search hits.

John Elliott wrote:

Google scholar does make things easy to find. When I was in graduate school, way back in the last millenium, the Internet was routed through 300 baud modems. Needless to say, nothing was "on line" and we did our research in libraries. Are you close to a major university research library? I don't know that a research library is going to be better, the last time I went prowling through a research library, I was disappointed to find that most of what I was looking for was discontinued, unavailable, or only available through inter-library loan. It seems that the ease of online researching is becoming a death knell for real libraries as the budget cutting administrators see another place to chop dollars.

But with online availability comes a big drawback -- the publishers want big bucks for access to more than just the abstract. A lot more than it used to cost to feed nickels into the Xerox machine at a real library. Sometimes you can luck out and check the author's home page at his institution and he may have made a .pdf reprint available. That's why I like to put filetype:pdf into the search string when I am on Google Scholar. From there you can look through the rest of the author's publications and presentations that may not come up as search hits.

I'll use the .pdf advice immediately. I'll put the library advice to use when i get back to the States. I'm still stuck in Taiwan waiting on my wifes visa so the libraries are going to be full of Chinese books with very little English literature available. I'm ashamed to say that after 5 years, while i can speak fluently, my reading is limited to restaurant menus and road signs.

it probably depends on what species you're trying to grow.

I think you'd be well served researching 'properly prepared button mushroom compost'. Often it is derived from manure and straw. You can pretty much mix anything rich in cellulose and nitrogen together in the right ratio, water and turn, and get good stuff. The spent compost is what you buy as 'mushroom compost' in garden stores.