In our early retirement years my wife and I have taken to a variety of gardening. We have a fairly large vegetable garden, which is doing quite nicely, as well as the start of a varied fruit orchard (although the trees still have a lot of growing to do).
(Our cat, Daisy, sitting in the shade atop our mushroom bed, Wine Caps peeking through in the foreground)
Gardening can be a lot of work, but we find it rewarding. For example, I’d heard that it’s possible to grow your own mushrooms so I did some research into the topic. I decided to give it a try with wine caps (Stropharia rugoso-annulata), supposedly one of the easiest mushrooms to propagate. For those interested in the details of planting, please refer to this page on the Field and Forest website (and the company from whom I purchased our Wine Cap spawn)
(Some of our wine cap mushrooms popping through wood chips)
Wine Caps have a thick white stalk and a port wine colored cap. They are crisp, with a slightly nutty flavor, and can be prepared in a variety of ways like grilling or sauteing. I planted my wine cap spawn in late March, between a 2 inch bed of straw and a 4 inch layer of willow tree chips (harvested from the limbs of one of the trees on our property). I watered them faithfully twice a week, and my first mushrooms appeared in early July; they have been coming in ever since. I can attest that they are delicious and that our mushroom patch (about 80 square feet) is being quite productive.
(Some of our Wine Caps — harvested and ready for the frying pan)
I’ve since inoculated shitake and morel mushrooms spawn. They’re not expected to produce fruiting heads until next year, and I’ll let you know how that turns out.
Note: Mushrooms can be very delicious, but they can also be dangerous. Never eat a mushroom until you are 100% sure you’ve identified it and made sure it’s safe to consume.
It’s been almost a year since I wrote this post and I thought I’d give interested parties a little follow up. We had great success with these mushrooms last year — probably harvested about 600 of them on our little patch. We ate a lot of them with dinner as we picked them, gave some to friends and neighbors, and freeze-dried a bunch. These came in handy during the cold weather, as we could use them in soups, pastas, or on steaks.
In the spring I placed another 3 inches of chipped willow wood on the bed and have kept it wet. Today I harvest our first wine caps of the year, some of which were truly gigantic! Looking forward to another good mushroom year.