Dear Fellow Foragers:
My continuing story on propagation. Though
slug infested and a single mushroom, I finally ended up w/a wine cap. So, it may look in not such good shape, but it is neat to have a success w/one, finally. The story was orig. written on 11/11 before this wine cap was found today. Also, I understand from other posts that propagating them is pretty easy, so you don't need to do all I had done below to have your own:
When my wife and I were looking for a house, we found one we liked, however it had an old decrepit in-ground pool. We decided to fill in the pool, to the confusion and dismay of others, and turned it into a sizable garden. I put much time into planting fascinating foods, but ended up spending much more time weeding from day-to-day (it was weed craziness!). After two years as a weeding maniac, I finally decided to find alternatives.
My friend who had no land of his own agreed to assist me in laying down masses of mulch over weed-mats so we could garden together in peace. I purchased mostly ultra-long-lasting rubber mulch, made from recycled tires, but also treated wood mulch to supplement this pricey project. Finally as conquerors of weeds, we planted and planted no longer in battle with nature's weeds.
That next year I was reading some of my new wild edible plant books and finally realized the most prolific weeds were lamb's quarters and lady's thumb! Yes, we had conquered vast amounts of weeds that were an even more prolific garden of greens than anything we have subsequently planted!
On the plus side, the weedy mess, however edible, was a crazy field of weeds that looked pretty bad [to most people]. Also surrounding the garden was a cement walkway, and surrounding the walkway was an area of small stones (there to keep weeds down and provide an attractive landscape, but it wasn't doing well). In reading books like David Spahr's and Paul Stamet's, as well as to have been growing a couple kinds of mushrooms in my house via kits, I hoped I would one day grown mushrooms outside.
It was a garden surrounding a garden: With the center garden for plants, and the area of stones to be a fungal garden, my hope was to one day grown outdoor mushrooms. In March I asked a tree cutting roadside crew, thanks to the above authors, and obtained a whole truckload of untreated mixed-wood mulch. This little mountain was slowly spread to a layer above those stones of about four inches thick. I have been making slurries of wood-growing mushrooms, including Stropharia rugosoannulata & others, along with burying them and a bit of mycelium. However, I have not yet seen any come up (perhaps this spring they will appear).
A few months ago, little bitter mushrooms with yellowish caps starting to appear there. They were Hypholoma fasciculares. While I much prefer these unpalably bitter shrooms of possible toxicity to Galerina marginatas (that would have been a scary garden!), this was certainly not the vision I had worked to achieve. But soon my luck would change.
On around early October, I started to notice caps amongst the Hypholoma fasciculares that had a brick-like appearance in color, yet lacked the intense bitterness of the Hypholoma fasciculares. H. sublateritium was eventually identified as the friendly sibling to the grumpy H. fasciculare gang. With a truck-load of mulch now producing these very frequently, I have collected pounds of these pleasantly flavored and textured shrooms. I do get help, though. My 2-yr.-old has learned (well, 95% of the time) to differentiate between the two species based on how they look, and she gathers them in the basket she insists on holding. :)
And so, I now have a garden around a garden. The surrounding garden is a wild fungal garden not yet yielding what I planted there, but offering delicious goodies. And the vegetable garden contains both planted and wild plants that I have been able to slowly restore w/in the non-mulched areas. I would say things have turned out well. Thank you for reading my story.
Sincerely,
Sam Schaperow
