mushrooms....?

[bornthrifty]

ok,

so I have been reading a little bit about mushrooming...

and it says to be sure that when you pick them you shake a mushroom or two to let out more spores so more mushrooms will grow next year


so now I am wondering

you see I have an area under my deck that every year grows mushrooms,
gross ugly orange mushrooms that I have been wanting to get rid of ever since we moved here

any how, if this is such a good environment for mushrooms, why wouldn't I
shake some good mushrooms over that ground and hope for the best?

when I read about raising mushrooms they talk about sterile environments and such...certainly there is a way to mimic nature here, and get a mushroom I could actually eat?


probably not huh, certainly it can't be that easy?

thanks for your help

 

[freemotion]

You can buy spawn that you can innoculate wood chip mulch with in a shade garden, and grow mushrooms among your hostas! If I mulched, I'd do that. If you can get untreated wood chips from someone with a chipper, you could do this.

I will be innoculating some oak logs with shiitake spawn if I ever remember to order it.

The spawn or spore (not super educated here, but have been reading websites and catalogs) first create a....er....what's it called?...it looks like a big web underneath the chips or bark of the logs, and it takes weeks or months to grow. Then certain conditions will stimulate fruiting, or the growth of the actual mushrooms.

So I think the reason you would not be able to grow edible mushrooms under your deck is that the big webby growth thingy is already there, and the orange mushrooms are the fruit of that huge network that you can't see. Any spores/spawn that you spread there would not be able to compete with what is already flourishing.

But if you have a shady spot that doesn't currently have mushrooms, you could create the right conditions and get the right mushrooms started first, before wild competition gets a chance to get started.

 

[bornthrifty]

got it!

now I understand!

thank you so much for your explanation I couldn't quite make sense of what I had been reading on line



suddenly my shady yard looks more and morel like a blessing

 

[patandchickens]

you see I have an area under my deck that every year grows mushrooms,
gross ugly orange mushrooms that I have been wanting to get rid of ever since we moved here
any how, if this is such a good environment for mushrooms, why wouldn't I
shake some good mushrooms over that ground and hope for the best?

Your biggest difficulty is that mushrooms are very, very picky about where they live (what they're living on/in). They need organic matter (usually dead wood, often buried dead wood) and it needs to be the right pH and the right rest of the environment and often even needs to be from the right particular few kinds of tree.

As free says, probably the best way to utilize that space for mushrooms would be to buy some shiitake plugs to inoculate logs. They have to be live-cut wood from the right kinds of tree cut at the right time of year, though, so this might be something to think about for *next* year

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[mrs.puff]

The big stringy stuff is called the mycelium, which is like the roots of a tree. Often different mushrooms can occupy the same area. Different mushrooms eat different things. Wood (various kinds, soil etc). The best way to get spores to continue to spread is to put your mushrooms in a mesh bag after you pick them, so the mushroom can still pop its spores out.

BTW-- shaking the mushroom really doesn't release the spores. The spores are released by a microscopic mechanism that actually shoots the spores out. If anyone is interested, try reading a book called "Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard". I think that's what it's called. It's Mr. Somebody's Orchard, I know that.

I used to be a mushroom fiend and read a lot about them. I have at least 10 mushroom guides at home.