In your garden, under trees at the edge of your property, or along shaded areas of your house -- it's time to grow mushrooms at home with the wine cap mushroom!
Do you like mushrooms? Do you buy them at the store and think they are a little too expensive? Or do you have a garden and want to grow some gourmet mushrooms in the shade of your plants? Interested in growing your own but you don’t know how? You can grow mushrooms at home and start with the wine cap mushroom for simplicity.
Jump into summer and add fun guys in your garden with the wine cap mushroom!
Stropharia rugosannulata, also called wine cap, garden giant, or King/Queen Stropharia, is the easiest mushroom to grow if you’re thinking about growing mushrooms at home in your garden. It looks like a portobello mushroom with a burgundy cap and purple gills, with a texture and taste like asparagus! Cut off the cap and grill it up just like a burger, bake them in the oven, or sauté with lemon juice, asparagus and chopped onions, garlic and almonds.
Grow mushrooms at home in 4 easy steps:
1. Acquire wine cap mushroom spawn
- Order spawn from us here to start growing mushrooms at home. Each 5-pound bag of Stropharia spawn can inoculate a 10’ by 10’ bed of freshly-cut hardwood woodchips.
- Or find a already established wine cap mushroom bed and take some already colonized wood chips or the stem butts of the wine cap mushrooms.
2. Get woodchips for your wine cap mushroom bed
- You want to get about a yard of freshly-cut hardwood woodchips. You can pick these up from local municipalities, tree care companies, arborists, or lumber mills.
- If you see some guys chopping down trees and chipping them on the side of the road, ask if the wood is a hardwood and ask if they will dump it in your yard. Most times they will be happy to do so free of charge! Keep your eyes peeled!
3. Mix woodchips and wine cap mushroom spawn together
- Best times to make a wine cap mushroom bed is in the beginning of the spring or in the fall, 30-45 days before the first frost, but summer will work too! Just make sure it doesn’t dry out.
- Find a spot in partial sunlight to full shade; the best spot is under the shade of plants in your garden!
- Lay down a layer of cardboard on the ground and layer a couple inches of wood chips on top.
- Sprinkle wine cap mushroom spawn onto the woodchips. Then add more woodchips, and then spawn. And make a lasagna bed.
- Once you are done, lay cardboard on top of your pile and give it a nice encouraging, refreshing shower with a hose everyday for a week or two.
4. Eat mushrooms
- After about 6-12 months you should see Stropharia Mushrooms popping out of your bed! Every year or two add one or two inches of new woodchips to give the mushrooms more food.
- Harvest them when the cap just breaks off from the stalk and you can just see the gills of the mushroom. You’re in competition with other tiny creatures that want to eat these delicious mushrooms you grew, too! When you harvest them the very bottom of the mushroom or stem butt should be covered in tiny woodchips and mycelium the white strandy “roots” of the mushroom. You can cut these stem butts off and roll them up in wet cardboard, throw them into a new pile of freshly cut hardwood woodchips, or in a blender with some water and throw this mix over a bed of woodchips to keep expanding the mycelium.
- Invite your friends over and have a potluck barbecue, and boast about how you are growing mushrooms at home in your garden! Share the bounty! After about a year, you can take a five-gallon bucket of the colonized woodchips from your bed and use it as new spawn to add to another bed of freshly cut hardwood woodchips to keep growing pounds and pounds of fresh gourmet mushrooms at home!
Grow mushrooms at home like you lived on a mushroom farm! From a handful of spawn you can grow a thousand pounds of mushrooms and make all your gardener friends jealous with your booming multispecies garden! Spice things up this summer and fall by adding some wine cap mushrooms into your garden!
Let’s Grow Some Mushrooms! You can check out all of our mushroom spawn options, which include the delicious wine cap mushrooms. We also have spawn for other edible mushrooms like shiitakes, chestnut mushroom, lion’s mane mushroom, and a variety of oyster mushrooms (coming in beautifully-bright blues, yellow, and pink. We have options for you to grow mushrooms indoors with mushroom growing kits and grain spawn, or outdoors with plug spawn or sawdust spawn. We can help with whatever mushroom cultivation method you want to use for growing your own mushrooms at home. We even offer online classes for those who want more information on growing mushrooms as a hobby or as a profession. And don’t forget! Have fun(gi)!