Also known as the Garden Giant or King Stropharia the Wine Cap is an ideal mulching mushroom ideally using woodchip and cardboard to make beds, although it is possible to use other lignin and cellulose based substrates.
Substrate:
The most relaible way to grow this mushroom is to layer the spawn (either sawdust or wood chip spawn) with cardboard and woodchip, predominately hardwood (no more than 50% softwood if it’s mixed). Sawdust can also be used but works best in combination with woodchip. Straw can be used but the bed will not last as long and we have not yet compared yeilds (in part because we don’t want to rely on straw as a substrate). The woodchip should be fresh no more than a couple of weeks after being chipped. If the woodchip has been left for more than a few weeks and no more than 2 months, it can still be used but should be treated through cold water fermentation. This is a simple process of submerging the woodchip in water for 10-14 days.
Inoculation:
A site is cleared of vegetation and any pernicious weeds removed. A sheet layer of cardboard is applied and thoroughly saturated with water. If the water is pooling anywhere, make holes in the cardboard to alow it to drain. The spawn is scattered over the carboard followed by a 2-3cm layer of woodchip. You proceed in this fashion beginning with another layer of carboard but this time not a sheet layer of card but using ripped up pieces of card to allow for infiltration. After 3-4 layers a final mulch of straw is added on top. For a 4 layered bed 1 -1.5kg of spawn will suffice.
The bed will last for 2 years until it needs to be replenished.
Fruiting:
The bed will take 3-6month until it will fruit depending on the time of year you make the bed. The fruiting temperature range is between 12-20c. This means fruiting usually occurs at the beginning and end of summer after rainfall.
Cropping Cycle:
The cropping is dependent on seasonal conditions although it is possible to try and initiate fruiting artificially with the use of watering. This means that it is likely that a 10msq bed will produce a total 10-20kg of mushrooms over a period of 2-3 weeks around May and at the end of August. Although you can expect sporadic flushes throughout the summer (with rain and a drop in temperature).
Propagation:
Once established you can easily propagate more beds by making cardboard spawn from the stem butts of the fruit bodies, or simply taking the mycelliated substrate from and existing bed. Spawn can be quickly bulked up using plastic woven garden sacks, 50l sacks are ideal or you can recycle similar plactic woven shopping “bags for life”. Simply layer the spawn using cardboard and woodcip in the same manner as you woudl to make the bed. Cover over the top with a plastic bag, wrap arround the bottom but don’t completely enclose it in the plastic bag.
Commercial viability:
It all depends on your ability to quickly shift seasonal harvests. This is reason we are promoting this species for market gardens as they will already have a customer base interested in such produce. The limiting factor is access to woodchip. Anyone who has made woodchip will understand this, a large ammount a brash can make a disappointing amount of woodchip. If you can source woodchip as free local by product (treesurgeons, etc) great but you are relying on this off site input. Straw is an option but more research is needed to test viabilty for larger (deeper) beds to increase yeild. We inoculated small straw bales last year and spread it under our sweetcorn beds. We did get a small flush in September.