This is a five pound bag of the mushroom mycelium and
you'd want to inoculate a space that's about four feet by four feet...a square.
So that could be in a garden bed.
It could just be on the forest floor, really anywhere that suits you and again,
keep in mind that if you have a dry year you might want to keep it in place that you would
water anyway so that you could water your mushrooms.
So what I usually do is just a few flags, sort of pace out that space.
So four, it doesn't have to be perfect.
It seems like mushrooms enjoy growing most between the ground lair and the duff,
so we want to get them established there and eventually they'll move through but it's probably
they're accessing the moisture in there and also they tend to want to be
part of the soil biology so I think if you have them too far away from that moist
soil level then they're not going to do as well.
So move that aside because we're actually going to put that back at the end.
That's good, then we'll just spread this out.
So after your sawdust layer then you're going to add your mushrooms, and again this is a
five pound bag of stropharia spawn.
Our materials are really just a few buckets of hardwood sawdust.
This is oak sawdust from a local furniture maker, and then a few buckets of mixed hardwood
wood chips.
This is mostly oak and maple and some others, and then of course your spawn as well.
So we'll start with the saw dust, about an inch or so.
That's good, then we'll just spread this out.
So after your sawdust layer then you're going to add your mushrooms, and again this is a
five pound bag of stropharia spawn.
So that's basically been grown in a laboratory in a sterile environment on sawdust and once
we open this bag which has a little breathable patch on it, once we open the bag it's no
longer sterile but putting it in this environment's fine and stropharia is actually
out of all the mushrooms the most tolerant of other species so we don't
have to worry too much about keeping it just in stropharia.
Other things are okay.
So, open this up and so you can see here that this is all colonized with that white mycelium
and basically we just try to sprinkle it has finely as we can through the sawdust.
Literature says you can inoculate a bed up to three or four times
this size with the five-pound block, but we like to see people succeed so if you have
a smaller success in this again you can harvest some and actually
move it once it's growing well.
So better to start smaller and over inoculate and have it work.
Last step we'll add our wood chips.
And so the minimum would be about two inches.
You can go as deep as four inches.
Again, as your stropharia eats through these, this is really its food, so first it will
grow through the sawdust and then it will grow through the wood chips and as it grows
through the wood and as it grows through the wood mushrooms and also build your soil at
the same time but what we need to be careful of,
especially as winter is coming on is to keep a fresh layer of chips on top of this
because if the stropharia is right on top, it may die in the cold winter temperatures.
So you could add maybe a couple inches of fresh chips just before winter starts and
you'll be fine and good to go.
Stropharia is very noticeable as like kind of large, thready, white masses on there and
again some of the good sign that it's doing well is like it's actually fused these wood
chips together into a cluster and that's kind of throughout all this material is a
lot of wood chips completely covered in the mycelium and sort of the presence of
it throughout all of this duff layer here.