which fungi would be good for Waste water treatment . re: Farm yards and animal processing plants?

Hello .
I'm curious about suggestions..
I live in South west Kansas ( zone 6 )
I have an opportunity to try some mushroom colonies here in my HOT DRY summers.
would like to know which would be good for cleaning up water runoff.

So you have suggestions for special media to grow on around lagoon pits?

Also if used in this way, to clean up water, are the mushrooms Edible or Not.

Thanks for your input.

I think Wine Caps or King Stropharia mushrooms are known for being good nutrient absorbers in a water runoff situation. I am thinking of growing some Stropharia in a deep bed of wood chips that a gray water pipe is running into. I personally don't feel I'd want to eat them, but considered using the mushrooms as slug bait then feeding the whole lot to our ducks.

Oyster mushrooms drastically reduce e.coli concentrations and it is ridiculously easy to grow.

Great Ideas so far.. thankyou..

I just ordered the Giant Stropharia and some other things..
I have lots of Straw and looking for logs to plug with other varieties. ( my future want list )

What media do you grow your Oyster mushrooms in?

Has any one grown edible mushrooms on Horse manure and straw?
My Brother has a horse barn and lots of mixed pooh. 12 Ft high last time i was there..

Still looking for info re: can one eat mushrooms from Lagoons.
I like the fact that they can clean the water .. it would be nice to get a crop from it if it was safe to consume.

Debra Snook wrote:

What media do you grow your Oyster mushrooms in?

Has any one grown edible mushrooms on Horse manure and straw?
My Brother has a horse barn and lots of mixed pooh. 12 Ft high last time i was there..

Still looking for info re: can one eat mushrooms from Lagoons.
I like the fact that they can clean the water .. it would be nice to get a crop from it if it was safe to consume.

Oyster mushrooms are great generalists, and will grow in most dead woody tissues, from logs to toilet rolls to coffee grounds (although they don't like conifers: those have to be preprocessed).

Horse manure will support a different class of "secondary decomposers" (oyster mushrooms are primary decomposers). Traditionally, that's what conventional white mushrooms were grown in, but you really need to pasteurise it first. In practical terms, this means composting the pile. You can find instructions online, but I've never had access to enough horse manure to try it.

Lagoons are a complicated one. You can use fungi to clean runoff (Paul Stamets' books contain instructions and I expect Peter McCoy's does as well), and in theory you could eat the mushrooms, but they may bioaccumulate mineral toxins, so I'd think twice about it if you aren't sure about what went into the animals that created the manure.

thanks Neil just what i was looking for..

Garden giant (Stropharia rugoso-annulata)

for bioremediation...