Worms love mushrooms

My free-range red wigglers love their mushrooms.

Mychel Matthews wrote:My free-range red wigglers love their mushrooms.

Interesting! Which kind of mushrooms are you feeding to them?

These are free-range worms, living as nature intended -- in the upper most layer of the soil under leaves and other yard debris. I keep the area wet and mushrooms naturally grow, die and decay. I throw some leaves on top and the worms move in. I do have a "feed trough" -- the "belly" of an old pot-bellied stove -- that I keep full of kitchen scraps, coffee grounds and egg shells.

Are there several different kinds? Could you post a picture?

Here is a post I found from http://madbioneer.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-have-been-growing-mushrooms-for-years.html reaffirming the thought I had that worms ate mycelium.

"They eat the mycelium, weakening the mycelium and reducing its ability to produce mushrooms."

When looking for that link I found this one about oyster mushrooms that I thought was very interesting.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-stamets/oyster-mushroom_b_2522084.html

Where in it says that the oyster mushroom eats nematodes by stunning it with a chemical excretion and invading its body through it's orifices. So mixing live oyster mushroom mycelium and worms is probably a bad idea, they will go to war with each other and one will win.

However dead mycelium cant excrete and becomes easy worm food.

Red Wigglers (Eisenia foetida) are the most common of the composting worms. Just google it. I don't have a shot of mine handy.

I've been reading Tradd Cotter's "Organic Mushroom Farming and MycoRemdiation" for the second time. I usually skim books for pertinent info when first buying, and then try to read cover to cover later... anyway, the point is that he has a small section I just read a few nights ago on Mycovermicomposting, stating the red wigglers thrive on a diet of spent substrate and feed on mycellium.

I have put some spent substrate from Oyster mushrooms in my outdoor compost heaps and when I check on them after a few weeks, they are full of worms.

This is part of my plan for some new systems that I am trying to implement:
Grow Oyster Mushrooms on a substrate of straw, spent beer mash, and coffee grounds.
Feed spent substrate to worm bins to produce a high quality vermicompost.
Use vermicompost for compost tea for mass inoculation of gardens and fields
Additional vermicompost used for seed starting and rooted cutting pots for edible landscape plants.

Any suggestions for growing mushrooms in a cold climate at high altitude? thanks.

Interesting. I'm curious about incorporating intentional mushroom cultivation into a worm bin since it's hot and dry here and not yet enough organic material to support mushrooms in the garden. Or perhaps put them in harvested worm castings?