Garden mushrooms, step by step
Interactive lesson: a wine cap bed in wood chips and straw — the spot, the substrate, setting it up in layers, care, topping up, harvest and wild mushrooms in the mulch.
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The whole lesson as text
1. Meet the wine cap
The wine cap is the easiest mushroom for an outdoor bed.
- Three jobs at once — The bed gives food, holds moisture and smothers weeds, and the mycelium turns wood and straw into humus faster. In a good year it gives roughly 1–2 kg per m².
- Cap — Young, it is wine-red to red-brown, like a knob. Old, it fades to brownish yellow and is 5–20 cm across or more.
- Gills, ring, base — The gills start whitish grey and turn dark purple-black with age. The ring is thick and white, with grooves or cogs on the underside, and white rhizomorphs at the base run into the chips.
- Spore print — Lay the cap of an open mushroom gills down on paper that is half white, half black, and cover it with a glass for 6–12 hours. A wine cap print is dark purple-brown to black.
Why: Chips from pruning and straw rot under the trees anyway. With wine cap spawn, the same mulch gives big mushrooms in two to four months and then turns into loose humus.
- When you buy spawn or check a mushroom, use the Latin name Stropharia rugosoannulata.
- If the spore print is white, rusty, orange-brown or pink, it is not a wine cap.
2. Place and substrate
Wine caps like part shade and fresh wood.
- Part shade — Morning sun and afternoon shade, or the light shade of a canopy. Tall plants such as sweetcorn, squash and beans give summer shade.
- Circle round a tree — Under a fruit tree is an excellent spot, but the mulch doesn't go right up to the trunk. Not near walnut or conifers: compounds from the leaves and needles inhibit fungi.
- Fresh chips or straw — Broadleaved hardwood chips less than 1–2 months old, in 1–5 cm pieces. Wheat or barley straw must be unsprayed, and it can be mixed half and half with chips. Free arborist chips are a great source; ask which trees they came from.
- What doesn't work — Old grey chips, chips of conifer, walnut, sweet chestnut or black locust, and sawdust alone. When chipping, wear goggles, ear defenders and gloves.
Why: In full sun the mulch dries out in summer, and in deep shade the mushrooms are smaller and fewer. Old chips are already taken by other fungi, and herbicides in straw can stop the mycelium growing entirely.
- A shredder or wood chipper pulls branches in fast and unpredictably: hands never in the hopper, close-fitting gloves.
- Chips are not pasteurised: the wine cap is strong enough to beat the microbes in fresh wood.
3. Setting up the bed · Locked
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4. Care and topping up · Locked
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5. Picking wine caps · Locked
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6. Wild mushrooms and oysters · Locked
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