P Mohan

Anne Miller wrote:If the goal is to accelerate the breakdown of the wood chips I feel that an easy solution would be to add compost tea on top of the wood chips periodically.

Hello Anne, how would compost tea help? My naive understanding is that the tea temporarily accelerates the microbial life when the compost is made into the tea. This is presumably primarily bacterial. Say the compost tea does saturate the woodchips, would it still be effective considering that the bacteria need a nitrogen source to breakdown the chips? Perhaps I am approaching the objective incorrectly. I hypothesized that the reason for the slow mulch breakdown is a lack of nitrogen rather than a lack of microbes.

The goal is indeed to accelerate the breakdown of the wood chips while providing complete nutrition for the fruit trees. I have few fruit trees in the backyard that I don't really fertilize explicitly (organic or chemical). When I purchased the property it was just grass around the trees. Over the last 3 years I have been layering on wood chip and I think that has had a marked improvement on the soil life. But given how productive the trees are, I am not sure how to supplement the soil with the lost nutrients.

Would inoculating with fungi generate compost that is generally nitrogen poor, considering that the wood chip is probably carbon? Or perhaps the wood chips still have a macronutrient ratio that is appropriate?

Also you mention separate beds for the fungal and bacterial action. Is this because using both on the same bed with leg to competition between the two resulting in a suboptimal setup?

Can I apply a thin layer of raw horse manure on top of a thick layer of wood chip mulch to accelerate the breakdown of the mulch into compost?

I realize that raw horse manure is considered too hot to be applied directly to soil. Would this recommendation also apply if it was applied to a carbon rich layer such as wood chips?

I don't see any pine sap on the mulch. So fingers crossed. If not winecap, are there other beginner friendly edible mushrooms that I can try to grow in the garden (and get mushroom compost as well in the process)?

I read online that hardwood mulch is preferable for inoculating and growing winecap mushrooms. Why is this?

I got a dump of mulch from a local arborist. Turned out that it is primarily pine which is a softwood. How will it affect the mushroom spawn? Will softwood not colonize as well? Will mushroom yield be lesser/none at all? Will I need to add mulch material more frequently?

Thanks in advance!