Wood chips and King Stropharia

I have some questions I hope the wise folks of this board can answer.

First, the basic situation: I have recently received 2 dump truck loads of wood chips from the electric company work crew. The material is a mix of trees and leaves and pine needles (still green). The likely types of trees included would be pine, willow, pecan, oak. I mention this on another thread and someone mentioned using some of the wood chips to grow mushrooms and gave me a link to a website for a company in my state to get info on what mushrooms I could grow in my area with my type of chips. On that site, they have a video about using king stropharia in/around a chicken coop for remediation and food production. This is especially interesting to me since I have chickens and ducks so if king stropharia would help prevent/treat for coliforms that would be great.

My questions:

1. Should I innoculate the wood chips while still in the two piles or spread them and innoculate the beds?
2. If I want to innoculate the woodchips in the poultry area, should I innoculate IN the area or around the perimeter? or wait until the wood chips in the pile are innoculated and then move some to the poultry area?
3. Does king stropharia need shaded areas or will it also grow in sunny areas? The piles are not shaded, will that prevent them from growing the spawn?
4. How much spawn would I need? The site sells king stropharia for $25 per 5lbs I think it was which innoculates a 10x10 area...I can't afford much more than that...would that work for my piles? or should I only innoculate a portion of the chips?

5. what else do I need to consider? what advise would you offer from your experience growing mushrooms...king stropharia in particular?

Thanks!

This is a method I used based on Paul Stamets' books and local gurus here:
John S
PDX OR

So, I would first grow it in a bucket or two and then use that to innoculate a larger bed rather than try to innoculate a large pile?

Tina, John is suggesting an inexpensive way to inoculate a large pile. Read his doc, it should take less than 2 minutes.

John, what kind of wood chips? If they were hard wood, where did you get them?

I inoculated pine chips and they actually did OK. I threw a little hardwood chips on top after I read that pine wasn't the right medium.

Cj Verde wrote:Tina, John is suggesting an inexpensive way to inoculate a large pile. Read his doc, it should take less than 2 minutes.

John, what kind of wood chips? If they were hard wood, where did you get them?

I inoculated pine chips and they actually did OK. I threw a little hardwood chips on top after I read that pine wasn't the right medium.

I did read it. I was just clarifying to my blondeness that I understood correctly -- that I start with a bucket or two full of chips, innoculate them well, and then incorporate those into the larger piles. My piles are are mix of trees -- I see green pine needles and also leaves (not able to identify the leaf type) -- from what I'm reading, this should be okay...yes?

After I inoculate the wood chip pile, how long before I spread those chips to beds? Do I have to wait a year or do I just wait until I see the white webs or is that one and the same thing? I want to use some in my poultry yard as I've read that King Stropharia is good for controlling coliforms...can I just add a layer of the inoculated chips on top of the existing bed of chips?

Sorry for the dumb questions but I'm totally new to the world of growing fungi....

Tina Paxton wrote:I was just clarifying to my blondeness that I understood correctly -- that I start with a bucket or two full of chips, innoculate them well, and then incorporate those into the larger piles. My piles are are mix of trees -- I see green pine needles and also leaves (not able to identify the leaf type) -- from what I'm reading, this should be okay...yes?

After I inoculate the wood chip pile, how long before I spread those chips to beds?

Hair color and sarcasm is hard to transmit via text...

I think you need actual wood chips and pine isn't a preferred medium though mine did grow on pine chips. Pine needles doesn't seem like a great medium to me but who knows.

Spread on the bed in springtime. Be prepared to think it didn't work & then in late August/September you'll be pleasantly surprised.

I agree with CJ. Hardwood is what you want. What we get for free around here is a load of chips after they chop down and chop up several trees. I follow Stamets and wait until after leaf fall (December here) to make sure it's mostly wood, not mostly leaf. There will be a mix of conifer and hardwood usually. It was fine at my house when they did that. I have seen them chopping down , say a huge hardwood tree in my neighborhood, and said, will you dump that at my house at the end of the day? Then you get mostly hardwood.

I bought a bag of spawn-chips with wine cap mycelium through it. So I quadrupled it in buckets first. I would do that again if I didn't already have a patch and wanted to start one.

Do the layers and the cardboard as it says. Wait a bit and then add more chips to the pile with spawn, so it grows. THat's what I would do. There was a huge pile growing by accident with wine cap in a park I go to for archery. I should have gathered them but it surprised me so much.
John S
PDX OR

thanks guys! I am disappointed that my piles are not the right substrate but glad to know it before I went to the trouble and expense of trying to inoculate it.

Do you know what yours are? Pine? Conifer?
Thanks,
John S
PDX OR

John Saltveit wrote:Do you know what yours are? Pine? Conifer?
Thanks,
John S
PDX OR

A mix. Likely to be a mix of: pecan, oak, pine, mulberry...

They should be fine for stropharia.
John S
PDX OR

I wouldn't worry too much if you have enough spawn. (quadrupling the spawn isnt a bad idea though.) I also started with some leaves mixed, and my patch is still going despite only having straw fed to it for the last 3 years.

I've had lots of luck growing stropharia in minnesota in a woodchip mulch that was a mix of several species branches and leaves. It was under a couple of young cherry and peach trees. So, some shade, but not full. I think a sunnier place would work as long as the woodchips didn't get dried out. I don't think you could really inoculate the piles without spreading them around, mixing layers of spawn and chips. And two truckloads is definitely more than you could inoculate with one $25 bag of spawn (without multiplying). It seems likely that if you tried to put it IN the chicken area all their scratching would prevent the mycelium from taking hold. If you can put an inoculated woodchip bed on the downhill side of the chickens that might be the best way to deal with potential contaminated runoff (besides changing over to a paddock shift system). According to the place i got my spawn Mushroom Mountain King Stropharia Instructions you can even grown them on lawn compost, so i really doubt some shredded leaves would be a problem.

Shawn Harper wrote:I wouldn't worry too much if you have enough spawn. (quadrupling the spawn isnt a bad idea though.) I also started with some leaves mixed, and my patch is still going despite only having straw fed to it for the last 3 years.

Did you have to pasteurize the straw before adding the straw onto the existing patch?

I was thinking about starting propagating more King stropharia spawn indoors on alder wood chips, keep dividing them into more containers, and then dump them outside over time.
Figure that would be a good way to keep my outdoor patch strong. Keep feeding it with new spawn grown indoors all year round.

I multiplied them indoors to start.

I added unpasteurized straw as a top casing and moisture retainer successfully once it had colonized, as per Stamets instructions.
JohnS
PDX OR

Thanks for sharing your experience John.  Mycelium Running is a great read.  

Hardwood chips are hard to get here. They do exist, but you have to wait to get them from the service that the arborists all use. Then you have to agree to take 14 yards worth of mixed chips (which will be mostly softwood) on a moment's notice. Not the thing for a suburban, aging family. What I did was innoculate straw I'd soaked in a garbage can full of water, coir, a few coffee grounds,and  softwood shavings in alternating layers with sawdust spawn, and topped with compost. Mostly straw. Two patches did OK, but third, which I'd mostly covered with wet burlap bags, did great! They barely came back in the second year, however, even with added straw and burlap and I doubt they ever will without hardwood.

This year, I'm stuck in the house and have no straw. I'm kicking around the idea of substituting shredded cardboard for straw. I might be able to get the shavings as curbside delivery and I still have burlap. What do you think? Would it work? Its so expensive to order spawn - I don't want to waste it.

Many people have had one or two great years with Stropharia.  The trick is finding out what you can maintain for cultivation.  Most people figure out a combo of some species to forage, some to buy, and some to cultivate. This depends mainly on availability in each case.  If you can't get chips, it's going to be hard.  Some of the companies are running a scam, where they say, if you donate to us, you can increase your odds of getting what you want. They claim it's free for the advertising, but it isn't really free. I've had better luck with smaller companies than Chip Drop, which advertises free chips, but in my experience, rarely delivers.  With the one man or family operations, I get much better cooperation and results.  And it's actually free. Not fake free.
John S
PDX OR