find a arborist in your area and ask him if he could drop you a load of chips. they usually have to pay to dispose of this they would be glad to drop off a few loads for you. no pesticides in trees. theres usually enough green leaves mixed in for it to compost by itself. keep it moist and spread out and it will be nice black soil in less than 6 months! want it to break down quicker , throw some blood meal on top and water in.
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Ours take 3-6 years to break down but it’s pretty incredible stuff when it does. Rich, mineral packed, moisture retaining, earthworm infested, perfect soil!
really? i guess its what types of wood is in it. up here its mostly soft wood like spruce and fir which rots quickly. hardwood takes longer. i use hardwood sawdust as mulch around my trees for that reason. no weeds will grow on it at least for a season. we also get a lot of rain up here so it helps for it to breakdown quickly. try adding some N like blood meal . it’ll break down a lot quicker.
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Ours is a mix of maple, Osage orange, elm, cottonwood, oak etc. actually it could be most anything. Osage orange really never breaks down! I built a mailbox pole out of it and it’s been ran over once , hit a half dozen times, ball bat hit etc. well it’s still there and the people that hit it learned to drive around or pick on someone else’s box. My neighbor jokingly said I bet they don’t do that again the last time someone hit and ran it. There was beer cans and spit cans they kicked out when they hit it and jumped out to see what happened. The neighbor said did you call the police and I said “nah I didn’t” and my neighbor asked why not? " I said I figured they learned their lesson". Hedge aka Osage orange fence posts are what I used for corner fence posts. When I saw those chips I’m not sure why I grabbed them but I did use them eventually.
yeah now i see why they took so long to break down! only cottonwood would rot pretty fast.
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Yep. Thanks. I currently have about 20 cu yds of beautiful oak and maple woodchips sitting in my side yard. I have a dedicated spot for them to rest so they can compost down (I’ve done this for years). I may get a load every other year, and yes, for free. (As I mentioned I want to grow winecaps in some area of the yard using them at some point, TBD.)
For any given wood, the amount of time it takes to compost down seems to depend on the amount of green leaves that were on the branches that were chipped. More green, more heat, faster decomposition. As y’all mentioned, some woods don’t decompose quickly which are nice for mulch, and some do, which are nice for composting. But, some loads come with a blend of woods from several jobs. You take what you can get. 
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Anne throw some high N fert. like blood meal, on top of your pile and water in. will cut your compost time in half! done it many times. 
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I’ve got wine caps all under my trees and bushes for 3 yrs now. take some of your chips, scrape a shaded spot down to bare soil. put some spawn down the chips then spawn till you get about 6in.thick. let colinze til your chips turn white with mycelium then mix into your other mulch under your bushes and trees. they will spread from there.
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Where can I get wine cap spores?
What is usually sold is the mycelium blocks, i.e. some sterile growing media which is innoculated with the spores and grown on to form a myceliized mass. So what you get is this block of colonized media (usually sawdust).
Many vendors. I’ve gotten stuff from 100thmonkeymushrooms but their website isn’t working. They have lots of good videos. Maybe Steve has a favorite source or Google winecap mushroom spawn.
By the way mushroom mycelia is supposedly good for detoxifying soil.
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I’ve used diluted ammonia to the same effect but I like the blood meal idea better. First I want to make an area just for mushrooms - kinda like a mushroom garden - and grow several varieties. I’m thinkin’ of a wooden box that I can keep filled with woodchips and also feed it my cardboard/paper scraps and just keep it going.
Not sure if I try to do wine caps and shiitakes in the same bed if they will compete or are they territorial, LOL, or what. I’ve done the shiitakes on logs for many years, but this def sounds easier than haulin’ logs.
I’ll have to call one of the suppliers and see what they think.
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Why not instead of blood meal just fresh blood from the butcher shop? Typically I have friends during deer season trying desperately to get rid of that kind of stuff who live in the city.
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everything mushrooms, mushroom mountain and field and forest are all great! wood blewits grow on wood also but take more time to establish. i grow both. never know what will come up where.
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that works too just make sure you bury it plenty deep or you’ll have critters digging in there. i bury junk fish i catch from a local lake into hardwood sawdust i get free from a firewood business. makes beautiful rich soil. sawdust is finer so it breaks down faster than bigger chips.
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Fish Emulsions is very expensive and that is cheaper. Some of the cheaper methods take a strong stomach. We know as an example Asian carp are an invasive and must be removed so thankfully your helping to eradicate these species causing so much damage. They have been responsible for many boating injuries and decrease in native habitat.
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don’t think shiitakes will grow on chips but wood blewits and elm oysters will. i have 5 beds going under my big spruces. some i let fruit, some i use to grow the mycelium and transfer to my hardwood mulch under my trees and bushes. been doing this for 4 yrs. and have mushrooms coming up everywhere. helps break down the mulch quicker. spawn needs bare ground contact or it won’t take. i mix my chips , mycelium and water in a wheel barrow then dump on bare soil in the beds. i then try and turn some of the soil into the chips.put down a 3in. layer of straw to keep chips from drying out. water when you water your garden. takes about 6 months for wine caps to fruit. 4 mo. for elms, and a yr. for blewits.
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we have yellow perch that is invasive up here. they outcompete the native trout and salmon. i can catch 100 or so in a morning on a local lake. i throw them in a cooler and layer them in the sawdust. in 2 weeks i turn the pile and everything has already broken down. in 3-4 mo. its almost completely broken down. i wait 6 mo. to completely cycle. this is using sawdust not chips. i make fish emulsion by putting in a doz. fish ,a few gal. water , shovel of finished compost and a cup molasses in a 20 gal. tote . cover and place in a sunny spot where the smell won’t bother anyone. stirring occasionally will help it break down quicker but regardless , in a few months it will turn into a dark liquid. i leave mine until even the bones are gone. you get several gal. of emulsion. it does stink more than the store bought but its alive unlike the sterilized emulsion you get from the store. after a mo. of cooking i add another cup of molasses to keep the microbes breaking stuff down.
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@moose71 & @JustAnne4 ,
Why not start a great thread on growing mushrooms with pictures and methods?I love morels and have hunted them many times through the years but I love the idea of growing mushrooms throughout my property. Here is a previous thread I started on fungi but not specifically edible mushrooms Fungi Friend or Foe?
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One last thing I see we all overlooked mentioning but that we all know about compost and that is the piles get really hot when you have a lot of fresh green leaves which cause the pile to catch fire! I know biochar lol! I’ve had them catch fire in July and that’s not the time for fires in tall dry grasslands like Kansas! Ive seen barns burn when amateur farmers put their hay up a little to green. Killer compost is very real but because those grass clipping can’t go on a garden directly it creates a fire hazard.
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I’m sure the plants love it, but hurk!
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