Perennial Mushrooms

We live on a 1/4 acre piece of property in the Hudson Valley, New York (Zone 5). One side of our property is sloped, very shaded and part of a deer trail. So needless to say, it’s very hard to find a way to make it productive and were trying to maximize whatever space we can.

I love mushrooms but usually they’re out of my budget. It’s not like a never buy them but I consider them something like a treat, I’m not usually making them on a Monday night if it’s just us. I know people forage for mushrooms around here but I don’t trust myself with just a field guide and a basket, I would need someone who knows about mushroom foraging to teach me (if you know someone like that send them my way).

I was SO excited to know you could grow your own mushrooms very simply. My Daddyo has been growing them for years with plugs and logs but I felt overwhelmed by that whole process. Plus, I failed at my previous two attempts at growing mushrooms….

So how did we get all these mushrooms? I discovered you could find a mushroom variety that will keep coming back year after year and easy to identify, in this case wine cap mushrooms. I used sawdust spawn from North Spore and created a bed using the lasagna method (video describing the lasagna method below). It was very simple to put together, maybe 20 minutes. I used the sawdust spawn, straw and fresh hard wood chips. The most challenging part of this process was finding fresh hardwood chips. They need to be fresh because older wood chips may already have other fungus living there and hardwood chips are what this variety prefers.

So how did this attempt at growing mushrooms work? Its been so prolific! I made three beds in the summer of 2021, it was an usually dry summer. One bed died because I put it in a spot that was too sunny, another bed died (mostly?) because I did’t water it enough, but the third bed took. This variety will fruit in the cooler temperatures so you can expect flushes in the spring and fall. They pop up quickly and in most cases are huge, some of them the size of your hand. When it’s a full flush i’m harvesting multiple mixing bowls worth of mushrooms at a time.

I recommend having some sort of a plan about what to do with all these mushrooms when they arrive! See the post about what to do with the harvest for more thoughts on that. Happy mushrooming everyone!

Photos of the wine cap mushrooms during our second year.