Winecap companion planting

I know some of you have experimented with mushrooms, and most of you mulch with wood chips. Does it work well to grow winecaps in the mulch around your trees (or veggie garden)? It seems like that thick mycelium would compete for nutrients, or at least water, but a lot of sources claim they’re helpful, and I’m not sure the same rules apply to fungi that would to weeds.

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I started a winecap bed years ago. I’m not a huge fan of eating them but some of my friends really enjoy them. Anyway, I don’t think they feed much on/in the soil. Anytime the wood chips run out of a bed, the winecaps die out. They’ll happily continue on producing as long as you pile on more woodchips every year or two. When I spread chips in a new area, I mix in a few scoops from the old bed and winecaps establish in the new area. I also pull up winecaps and bury the whole thing in some new woodchips. They will often start a new colony from the “roots” of transplanted mushrooms. I’ve never known them to care what plants they grow around and I haven’t noticed the plants reacting positively or negatively to the shrooms. I believe they probably benefit most plants by breaking the woodchips down to usable materials, but I am always adding compost anyway. This is just amateur observation on my part.

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the easiest way to do this is start a wine cap bed under a shady tree. mix your spawn with fresh woodchips, preferably hardwood. make a 5’x5’ bed with them. mulch with about 4in. of straw. water. water your patch when your water your garden. in about 6 months, check your woodchips. if theyre white and sweet smelling , theyre ready. put them around your trees and bushes and immedietly put fresh woodchips on top of them. water well. by next summer youll have shrooms coming up everywhere. as long as you give them fresh chips they will produce 5+ years. can also do this with elm oysters or blewits. be warned, youll get tired of eating all the shrooms. i traded some of mine for other things. :wink:

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I’ve got winecaps growing in chips around my yard. The plants with winecaps seem no worse off than plants elsewhere and possibly slightly happier (far from a controlled experiment, however). They produce way more than I am interested in eating. They can be quite good when small and sauted until crispy, but the older ones I find awful (even before they get woody). Friends do seem impressed by my gifts of mushrooms. If you don’t harvest them, they can be kind of unsightly as they breakdown.

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The wine caps are only feeding on the lignin in your straw or wood chips. Other plants do not need this food source so there is no competition. Adding any mushrooms will help increase the cation exchange capacity of your soil making it much more fertile for growing plants that the soil would be without mushroom compost.

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So, how do they taste? A lot of the responses here seem ambivalent. We’re big fans of sautéing
“normal” store-bought mushroooms. A steady local supply of something similar sounds pretty nice.

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wine caps taste similar to button mushrooms. not like a shitake by any means but you can use it as a versetile mushroom in most mushroom recipies. elm oysters are very good sauteed also. i use to use a dehydrator to dry my excess. you can store them a long time once cracker dry. reconstitute in warm water for 15min. before using.

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I grew winecaps on a big bed of wood chips a few years ago, inoculating in Sept and harvesting (as I recall) in May. The production was truly phenomenal but the taste was mediocre at best. I will admit that I did not know enough to harvest only the small, young mushrooms but it seems pointless to grow much when you have to eat them as fast as they pop up so they don’t get bigger and older.

The winecaps did a great job breaking down the chips. In 2 years, roughly 12" of chips became roughly 6" of a soil-like medium that I use now in potting / planting mixes.

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I’ve found that wine caps tend to surprise me in where they decide to pop up. This spring the only ones I’ve had have popped up in sunny areas or close to such. The cooler, shaded area I actually prepared for them 2 years ago has only popped 1 mushroom this spring (and this is an area of almost 150 sq feet…

I like them sauteed with onion (like most mushrooms) but haven’t really experimented cooking them in other ways. I gave a paper-bag filled to a vegan friend and she said it made a wonderful mock-meat taco filling. She liked it so much that she has asked for my help in establishing her own bed.

It does break down chips into something that seems to work well in the garden, but I haven’t done any real comparison

Scott

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I would put the spawn under a no-spray tree, just so that you do not have to deal with delaying a spray that is needed for your trees.

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the large cupped shaped caps are great for stuffed shrooms. :wink:

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Well, chipdrop.com came through for me, so I got some spawn and spread it under my persimmons. I doubt I’ll get anything this year, but hopefully next year I’ll have something to report. If that goes well, I’ll probably propagate it to the rest of the yard.

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Something has sprouted up all over the bed I inoculated! I haven’t confirmed yet that they’re winecaps, but I’m optimistic.

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Looks like winecaps to me!

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yep. enjoy!

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Today’s lunch: garlic mustard and winecaps. The garlic mustard had already flowered and was mostly inedible, but the mushrooms were good!

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try stuffing them when at large button stage. ive tried several and all were good.

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They are crazy productive right now. Maybe that will slow down in a different season or when the weather dries out, but I’m certainly getting a quick return on them, and hopefully some better soil for the trees while I’m at it.

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you should have flushes till the weather cools. i kept mine going for 6 years just adding more fresh hardwood chips every spring. i still had a few pop up last summer but very small flushes now. can also grow elm oysters the same way and blewits will grow around your compost pile. ive got wild one growing around my chic run. i add arborist chips to keep the mud down in there. maybe the spawn found its way from my compost to the chic run. my ducks made sure the woodchips stayed wet.

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The mushrooms break down woodchips and make those nutrients available for plants. They also make woodchips more porous and better able to store water like a sponge. The mycleium also acts like an underground cobweb that catches water.
King stropharia also use spike cells to immobilize harmful root nematodes and enzymes to digest them. The smell that the enzymes and mycelium produce also attract and feed earthworms and bees. Sometimes youll see non burrowing bees actually burrow into your soil.
If you dig up some of the mushroom “roots” smell it, it should smell sweet and earthy. Very pleasant.

Also, once the mushrooms die, it creates a feast for bacteria and all the soil life, boosting soil bacteria competition and helping to crowd out soil diseases.

You should look into innculating all your plants with “mychorriizal mycelium.” Basically beneficial fungus that creates a symbiotic relationship with plants by combining witht their roots on a cellular level. The plants provide sugars, and mushrooms provide water and minerals. These fungi can provide up to 80% phosphorus nutrients for plants.

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