Introduction to Outdoor Mushroom cultivation

I'm on the third day of the complete mushroom cultivation course that's being held at the Red brick Building community garden in Glastonbury UK.
The course has been organised by a community group called feed Avalon that run all sorts of other community based courses other than the current one I'm on, for example gardening, fermented foods Probiotic drink making courses and many more.
The area the red brick building space holds is in an the site of an old leather tannery between Glastonbury and Street that was derelict for a many years before local residents and grants bought it back to life.
Theirs a restaurant here serving gourmet food, coffees teas. A huge event space that can be hired out that holds many gigs and parties. Of course the community gardens are here to enjoy relax or just wander around.
Outside the restaurant in the gardens theirs many herbs growing and in the summer the smell if you happen to brush past any of them is heavenly.
The course has been very fascinating so far and I've learnt a lot about fungi biology, I went into detail last week In my blog about all the differant types of fungi and this week has been focused on putting into practice the inoculation of logs with oyster mushroom spawn and preparing a raised bed with wine cap mushroom spawn and a reishi garden bed.
Here's the Log inoculation method
The first step was to drill holes into the logs with a special drill bit obtained from the spawn supplier every six inches along the log then the next row three inches gap it ends up as a diamond pattern of spaced holes all around and along the log. The spawn is then picked up with a special tool that plugs the holes with the spawn this takes a long time but a rhythm is soon found.
The holes are then waxed over with melted with food grade wax to stop insects and birds from eating the precious spawn.
The logs were then wrapped in black cling film and by the autumn when they are unwrapped the mycelium should have run throughout the whole log and they should start producing fruiting bodies by next year as apposed to maybe 4 or 5 years left stacked naturally in a Forrest.
Wine cap raised mushroom beds
First the top off the bed gets raked off down to a level of around 6 inches we had to be careful raking around shrubs and bushes trees exc.
A layer of cardboard goes down into the soil first then on top of that aound 6 inches of woodchip that's been left for around outside for a month.
The spawn is spread out next covering the whole area.
On top of this gets put another 6 inches of woodchip and then on top another layer of cardboard.
It's a lot of work but by the autumn of the very same year wine cap mushrooms will be popping up through the ground.
The benefit of this method is that next winter half of the bed could if wished be dug up and used to replicate what you did the first year somewhere else, just having to take the remaining half and spread across the original area and top up with woodchip.
The mycelium network will be strong enough to keep on replicating the original patch over and over again once its permanently established itself on the land.
Method to bury logs for a raised reishi bed
The bed that's being used here is dug out to a level of 18 inches the trough is then lined with a waterproof membrane which will hold water. 3 inches of sand is then layed along the bottom of the pit then the inoculated logs (oak preferred) are then placed upwards 6 inches apart all along the length.
Its then backfilled in up to the top of the dug area, this method allows water thats trapped in the plastic membrane to come up to the bottom of the log to feed it water when it needs it.
Again the logs can be wrapped once inoculated to speed the colonisation process.
Recommended Books to read
Home grown mushrooms from scratch
Mycelium running
Radical Mycology
The mushroom cultivator
Growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms
A great Film if you want to watch something a little weird is "The creeping garden" its all about 'slime mold' you can find it to watch on Amazon play for about £2
I hope You've enjoyed this article
Stay tuned for next weeks episode and much more.........

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