The Easiest Mushroom to Grow | Wine Cap Mushroom Guide

why am I sitting in a pile of straw and wood chips because we're going to grow mushrooms right here and I'm going to show you how to do it today on Nature's always right today I'm going to show you how to grow your own wine cap or King straf Faria mushrooms now this is a mushroom that I'm excited to tell you about because you can do this technically anywhere in the world now there might be easier places and harder places to do this but this is accessible growing mushrooms is something I really think you should consider not only as a food source for yourself and your family but also as a business to me market gardening micro greens and mushrooms are the top three entry points into regenerative agriculture um agriculture in general because they have such a low barrier to entry High profit margins so where do you want to put your wine caps what possible locations can you do these in so you want to do this in a place that has partial shade so on the north side of a building is a good place on North side of a greenhouse on underneath a bunch of trees um some dappled sunlight is completely fine the thing that you're trying to avoid really is just the beating sun down on top of all of your wood chips or your straw that would dry it out and then stop the mycelium from growing or even kill it if it went on from long enough you can do this in your garden in the rows between your garden beds I've seen people do um you know the wood ship Pathways and they'll inoculate the wit ship Pathways with King staria so it's fantastic for Market gardening um if I was going to do it on a production model though I would make just garden beds that are made out of straw and wood chips and then inoculate those that would just be a much more efficient system than doing it in the pathways of your Market Garden um you can do it on top of grass if you have if you do that I recommend putting down a layer of cardboard just like we do when we start our noil garden beds to help snuff the grass and then do your straw and then wood shifts on top of that I've chosen this area because it's right next to my mushroom logs it also right behind me it's a very flat area it gets a little bit more sunlight uh has a little bit more opening for rainfall so the next step up for me to prep I'm going to cut down all of these little tree saplings The musked Grapes vines that are going everywhere get rid of those then put my straw on top of the leaves here the leaves are a great little carbon Source but they're just not they don't get super wet like stratas they don't have a ton of food like wood chips do so it's subpar but it's still going to be fantastic for our our mulch I might not have enough wood chips actually so what I'll do is um combine wood chips and leaves on the top to help cover the Sun and keep in moisture now you don't need straw to do the one caps you can just use wood chips but I highly recommend that you do get straw and when you get your straw be sure that it is spray free you can ask your local farmer that question do you use herbicides um you can also to look for organic straw sometimes that's possible but that's pretty rare to find organic straw but be careful because there's a lot of herbicides that are sprayed onto these crops uh so you don't want that ending up in your mushrooms I've actually purchased mushroom compost that had an herbicide in it before and when I learned that it really caused me to stop eating any mushrooms from the store uh especially if they're not organic because of the substrate source so by growing our own mushrooms we are controlling the substrate now this substrate STW is recommended because this can be fed on very quickly by the mycelium so the straw just like in compos making a straw is more of our quicker carbon that's going to accelerate the heat a wood chip is going to be a a longer term carbon that uh slowly builds heat in a compost pile but for the mushrooms they're a long-term carbon source as well the area that you're going to be placing this you know I'm going to try to stack my straw up you know 8 to 12 in so cooking your straw is a really good idea to help the mycelium grow more quickly and successfully just like all other biological life forms mushrooms need water in order to do their life processes so going to soak this here and then spread it out in the ground so you should soak your straw for 24 hours or even longer you can go up to 3 days if you wanted um I'm only going to soak for probably about an hour a couple hours um cuz I don't have time but the next week we're going to get a bunch of Rin so I have no doubt that this will be able to get fully soaked so if I lived in a dry climate that didn't get much rain here are my suggestions to try if you want to do this so the main concern that we have is moisture control if we lose the moisture we lose the mushroom so if you don't get rain for 5 6 7 8 months then that you need to bring water there right so you could do some sort of irrigation system so like drip tape like I've showed you in some of my videos over the tops of the beds you could do a misting system over the top or some micro uh little sprinklers uh that go up and then shoot water around that actually would be quite good I would make sure that it's in 100% shade at all times there's not direct sunlight hitting it um just to really help prevent the drying out I would create a structure over the top you may even need to create a greenhouse over the top or you could use shade cloth but Greenhouse will create the most humidity right so you could do a poly low tunnel or you could do a caterpillar tunnel higher um and you maybe would want to manage the plastic on the sides you could lift them up you would have to play with that to figure it out you know maybe have a foot of air space and then it's just plastic all the way around and then you have some sort of misting system or micro sprinkler system um inside that runs once a week or whatever is going to be necessary to keep it moist so just like when doing plants we dig down in the soil to see how much moisture is in there to see if it needs water so you'll be doing the same thing for your mushrooms if you're in a dry climate you really want to soak these materials as long as you can as well because that initial soaking just like in soil if a soils already wet it's easy to accept more moisture but if soil or straw carbon completely dries out it goes hydrophobic and it's very difficult to get water to penetrate and soak up in there so then is going to be the some of the key points I think that you will need to do in a dry climate Okay so now let's talk about wood chips probably the more important food source long term if you did a bed of just wood chips they say it'll last about 2 to 3 years of fruiting but you can also replenish the bed over time with more wood chips um and if you feel like it the spawn has gotten weak and it's just run out of life you can always inoculate with more wine cap spawn in that same area and it'll keep it going so so when it comes to your wood chips what type of wood chips do you want to use well soft Hardwoods are the best to use according to field and Forest and that's just because the breakdown process the my cealing can get in there faster to start working it and getting it broken down now what I have here is mostly hardwood chips that's fine um it's recommended to soak your wood chips just like the straw and your mushrooms will just have an easier time getting in there and getting to work now I don't have a good wood chip Source here this is all from the forestry mulching that I had done in this area so that's what I'm going to collect now to get your own wood chips if you live in a Suburban or a city area it's very easy just go to chipdrop.com um and you can get free drops or if you ever see a tree guy in your neighborhood they're working that's how in San Diego I found my tree guy he was out there with his crew working on a yard and I said hey you need a place to dump these chips come to my house and dump them so that's a great way to get get them are there any mulches that you shouldn't use well I wouldn't use black walnut never use that in the garden either and then Conifer mulch should not be used as well but conifers are totally fine to use in your garden so before we add in the rest of our straw and the wood chips that we just collected it's time to put out our mushroom spawn and I got this mushroom Spawn from field and forest.net they are the best mushroom company in my opinion in North America they are organic certified everything that they do that I've seen has just been the utmost quality the information that they put out to their customers is fantastic I'll put an article down below about winec caps for you guys on their website that has all their recommendations and just a great short little W write up that has all the info that you need so in that article field en Forest says that a 5.5 lb spawn will do about 50 ft area this is much bigger than 50 square ft but I'm assuming that because the area that I live is so humid hot wet I don't think it's going to have a problem here spreading this spawn a little bit more thin we'll see this is my own experiment but that's what I'm going to do you should follow field and forest's recommendations if you want like the utmost Harvest and and all of that stuff um all the recommendations that they gave for the mushroom logs and all that have been very accurate so what I'm going to do is just do a really good job of breaking up this spawn so I can get the little spores out everywhere in here and it will take over the straws are fantastic quick food that's going to be the first thing that the mushroom feeds on to get going and then um as it starts to break down those wood chips more it's going to access the nutrients in there and get the wood chip nutrients will be which will be the long-term food source and what I will add to this area once a year I'll probably add in more wood chips just to keep adding in a food source so we're going to sprinkle this out we're going to add in the rest of the straw the wood chips get it all wet hope for some rain in the next week and that's it and then we'll just be waiting probably till next summer that's when the wine caps will come up now if I would have done this at a the best time I think to do this is in Spring after your last frost do this process and then you'll have mushrooms most likely by Fall which would be amazing right so but you can do this right now if you're watching this video in August you still have tons of time to get this set up um you need to do it before your first Frost I'd say this is about 150 to 200 ft um I probably would have wanted one more of those 5.5 lb blocks for this big of an area um but we'll see how this does I'm kind of curious to see what will happen with this a smaller amount of inoculant so just doing this is getting that underneath our final step is just going to be to walk over all this compress it down so just like in the garden we want good seed to soil contact right so that seed will Sprout well the spawn is like a seed of the mushroom um so if it's touching more surfaces of the carbon there's more chances of it proliferating and establishing more quickly and successfully also getting a really good rain would help to compress things as well so I'm going to do about three times the amount of wood chips that you just saw me put out check out my email newsletter there was an actual email that went along with this video

Channel: Nature's Always Right

Views: 47,990

Keywords: how to grow mushrooms, growing mushrooms at home, homestead mushrooms, grow your own food, grow your own mushrooms outside, learn to grow mushrooms, organic mushroom farming, organic mushroom farming at home, nature's always right, steven cornett, field & forest mushrooms, homesteading, how to grow mushrooms at home, how to grow wine cap mushrooms, how to grow wine cap mushrooms outside, growing mushrooms, wine cap mushroom, wine cap mushrooms growing, wine cap mushroom bed

Id: IpyMtdPChdM

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 18 2022