There is always a risk of things like this. For example, to make my winecap bed, I had to get a bunch of woodchips. There is no way woodchips that one will buy in bulk are not contaminated with the spores of other wood-eating fungus.
replyWhat you learn is how to positively identify the mushrooms you intend to produce/eat. It doesn't take long. I've only had alien mushrooms show up once.
"I've only had alien mushrooms show up once" gonna be my reassuring quote of the day, thanks : )
replyOn the other hand, the morels that seemed to come with a load of wood chips were great for the year or two we had them.
replyI tried growing a little wine cap bed once, and it hadn't gone well. Perhaps it was the chickens pecking at it, can't say. I do still get wine caps on occasion, but they have migrated to more far-flung parts of the yard.
> the morels that seemed to come with a load of wood chips were great for the year or two we had them.
replyYou probably already know this, but for anyone reading, there’s a species of mushrooms that looks kind of like morels that is poisonous, potentially fatally so.
https://www.foraged.com/blog/morel-mushrooms-vs-false-morels
Do people ever try to irradiate or fumigate or however they’d treat the woodchips?
replyMaybe it would cost 10 times as much as the wood chips themselves… small batch spore bakeoffs…
Pressure cooking in small batches is the diy standard, I've had good results with a standard insta-pot
replyAdding poisons (fumigation) is definitely not a good idea. In mushroom plants the compost/humus used to grow mushrooms is often steam boiled to sterilize it, to keep the yields high and the production safe from any dangerous contamination. It is seeded with the spores of the desired species afterwards.
replyyou could probably autoclave it with a standard dental/tattooing autoclave (~500 USD and requires a gas stove)
replyI imagine it would require the bad spores to be carried with the good ones. Typically you get a slurry solution that you carry in distilled water, injecting your substrates. That would need to have the bad stuff in it as well.
replyDon’t they float in the air?
replyWild spores and such yeah. When you purchase spores for the intent of growing them, you generally get a kit to mix them into a syringe or they already arrive in the syringe ready to be used. I tried growing some culinary strains and they generally come in the mail like that.
replyonly spores I think
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