Why would I buy a bag of rotting sawdust, you might ask? We’ve been busy every night these last months pasteurizing bags of hardwood pellets and inoculating them with the spawn of Stropharia rugoso-annulata, also known as wine cap or Garden Giant mushroom, an incredible, edible garden companion. You can easily grow wine cap outside wherever you have garden beds by breaking up chunks of the mycelium (the white threads that form the body of the fungi) from a spawn bag and burying them under mulch. Planted throughout your gardens, it will build soil, release minerals, kill harmful nematodes and attract earthworms, all while producing edible mushrooms and continuing to move itself around and reproduce. This spring we will mix wine cap spawn into the mulched paths surrounding all our no-till, market garden grow beds. wine cap loves to consume bacteria and has been shown to filter and eat up E. coli from pasture run-off... what a great ecological partner!

Once you've started to grow a nice patch of Wine Cap, you can eat the beautiful wine colored fruiting bodies (the part we typically think of as a "mushroom") and re-inoculate your garden with the stem butts, or the ends of the mushrooms. With enough moisture, these stem butts will form mycelial mats under mulch and the process continues.

The special mushroom spawn bags we use allow the mycelium to consume the sawdust and continue growing and breathing through a white patch at the top of the bag. Fungi breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide just like we do, making them a great partner in an indoor room full of growing plants! One 5.5 lb. bag will inoculate an approximately 20 square foot bed, but once the mycelium gets spreading you can use an established patch to make much more and plant an area as big as you can imagine!