Autumn checkup on wild mushrooms 2012 - Dartington, UK

On the weekend I have been visiting Fungi Futures' workshop and training about oyster cultivation on spent coffee grounds in bags and on cardboards in garden beds with semi sterile and unsterile techniques. It has been a fantastic event, and I hope to give more details in another post soon.

I am also in debt to give some insight into the experiment I have been busy at the University in the past months: cultivation of two strains of king oyster (Pleurotus eryngii var. eryngii and var. ferulae) and shiitake (Lentinula edodes) on sterilized spent coffee grounds and straw mix.

In the meanwhile, however, I share some of the photos I made during the short exploration of Dartington Hill in Devon, near Totnes. This is a transition village, with many interesting agroforestry, organic and sustainable initiatives, with a strong focus on community empowerment and letting go over-consumption and dependency on non renewable resources.

The surrounding is beautiful, with huge, ancient chestnut, oak, and beech trees. Dartington Hill is an especially splendid and taken care part of the area. I have found mostly brackets, only couple of mycorrhizals and none of the saprobes. And lots of lichen :).

Some of the flora and lichen:

 

 

 

 

As per the mycorrhizal mushrooms, I have found a Russula, probably a to-be Amanita and a Xerocomus. Period.



In the trunk of one of the amazing hundred years old Taxus trees in the old celtic cemetery I have found a growing white bracket:

 

 

Back in Totnes yet, in the small castle park next to the ruins of the castle, I have bumped with all likeliness into couple of Ganoderma applanatum in the trunk of a HUGE oak tree:





 

 

Next to it, as nearly best present of the day stood an old beech trunk, harboring some nice Laetiporus sulphureus or chicken of the woods:

 

 In the evening in Dartington Hall, I have been gifted with the nicest surprise of the day: Fistulina hepatica or beaf-steak polypore on a row of chestnut (Castanea sativa) trees:

 

 

 

 Finding this fungi has been like a saint grail to me in the past 2 years, so unexpectedly running into it made my day big time :).

Hat from Boletus-dyed wool

In an earlier post I have shown results of a dyeing session with dried Boletus edulis and made the promise to show also the hat being made from them. So here it is! :)

A lovely Australian colleague living here in Europe offered her help with the knitting and by using the alum (second from the left) and the 2nd iron/copper (on the right) mordanted skeins, she prepared a nice hat, in oldies style. I simply love it!

Cultivation tests on spent coffee grounds

Around end of last year I have collected for some days the spent coffee grounds from my workplace. I sterilized it in pressure cooker in glass jars and then inoculated it with spawn either bought from Mushroombox.co.uk or what I collected in the wild.

I have read a lot about recycling coffee in this way, but I wanted to see with my own eyes.

I have tried several species, mainly oysters: Pleurotus citrinopileatus (yellow oyster), Pleurotus ostreatus (grey oyster), Pleurotus eryngii (King oyster), Lentinula edodes (shiitake), Hypsizygus ulmarius (elm mushroom), Pleurotus djamor (pink oyster), Hericium erinaceus (lion's mane). With the latter two I had no success, but I will give it another try later on.

All the rest managed to form pinheads (small pre-shrooms) and they mostly developed to elongated fruit bodies. The elongation was due to the fact that the basic setup I used was not meant to control levels of O2 and CO2 and to provide regular fresh air exchange, all crucial at time of fruit body development.
After the moving is complete back to Hungary I hope to renew the experiments on more species and with a better suited setup.

Spawn run (while the shroom conquers the substrate) took something between 30-60 days, which is pretty long for so little quantity, but they were basically forgotten there in the dark of my shelves on room temperature and without any additional substrate material, coffe grounds are pretty dense to be simply overrun.

After this incubation period the jars looked like this:

I opened them up and placed into nursery boxes with a simple humidity and temperature meter:

 The boxes were covered, and the top opening was covered with a garden foil:

I tried to keep the humidty above 85-90%, by keeping the bottom of the box constantly moist and removed the cover for air exchange in the mornings and in the evenings. These were all but sufficient for the proper mushroom formation, but at least I got some results.

The grey and yellow oyster and the shiitake did well on the substrate:

Pleurotus ostreatus

Pleurotus ostreatus

Lentinula edodes

Pleurotus citrinopileatus

The P. eryngii took its time compared to the others: until the king oyster decided to form some shy fruit bodies, the yellow oyster gave 3 waves of crop...

Pleurotus eryngii

 My wild collection of Pleurotus was extremely desorientated. No matter what I did, it kept forming these impossible shaped fruit bodies. I think it really missed the fresh air movement that it got used to in nature:

wild Pleurotus strain

I am not very familiar with the elm mushroom. It formed plenty of pins, out of which only some developed into bigger fruit bodies, strongly elongated and deformed:

Hypsizygus ulmarius

 I made some checks after disposal of the test glasses. I found that run within the substrate was only partial in most cases, as visible on the photos below:

It is mostly due to the density of the coffee. Most larger scale projects mix at least wood shavings to the coffee, I might give it a try next time.

Spring check up on wild shrooms II

I have checked upon the Aesculus hippocastanum trees (horse-chestnut) next to the road, which nurtured Flammulina velutiped during the cold winter months in their long verticular cracks.

The shrooms were still there, both old and young. I collected 350-350g from each (old and young) for the dyepot, leaving still enough on the trees. I also planned to take sample in the strain collection, but due to the moving (from Netherlands back to home) that was not feasible any longer, but I anyway had an earlier collection from these trees and they looked okay.

And this is how they look after some frost period:

Spring check up on wild shrooms I

I have restarted recently my regular cycling trips in the neighbouring forests and pastures after the winter period. The shrooms are still sleeping, apart from some newgrown Trametes hirsuta and versicolor (brown variety) I havent found yet new crop.

First pic: T. hirsuta, other three: T.versicolor brown variety.

I have also found some leftovers from the autumn: Scleroderma citrinum, Piptoporus betulinus, and some gorgeous Calvatia gigantea, that was the best surprise of the day, even the week.

Scleroderma citrinum

Piptoporus betulinus

Calvatia gigantea

The Calvatias, some 4-5 of them were sitting in a row after each other next to the small hump of the road. On the other side of the hump a local farmer collected his nitrogen rich wastes, which made the C.gigantea's appareance logical. This also meant that they were there all along autumn, I just didnt get to see them due to the dense vegetation, though I was regularly checking on this hump for Boletes. I could not resist to take one of these beautiful babies with me for my strain collection and for the dyepot, I am so looking forward to the results!

Dyeing with dried Boletus edulis

This is one of the final results of the dyeing fever that took on me two weekends before.
I took dried Boletus edulis and tested several methods on half skeins of Regina Classic 002 wool after scouring and soaking for overnight. All skeins were dyed in the same dyebath in a consecutive manner.

I really love their welcoming warm, shiny colors. I am bringing it tomorrow to my workplace where a collegue will hopefully be willing to knit a nice hat out of them ( I cant knit :( ).
update: a hat is ready :)!

For the mordanting I used standard alum and a home made iron/copper mordant bath: I placed some 8-10 pieces of eurocents ranging from 1 till 20 plus 4-5 yellowish screws, and placed yarns into it for cold soaking for overnight. It took a while until the cover dissolved from the screws and the first yarns with the overnight cold mordanting method were more copper mordanted, while the ones I simmered thereafter were more affected by the iron screws, and acted more iron-mordanted.

From left to right:

• 1.st bath: unmordanted: warm golden yellow.

• 1.st afterbath: cold mordanted with alum for overnight. In the photo is not apparent but this is a stronger and brighter color as the unmordanted version: strong warm golden yellow.

• 2nd afterbath: I poured some 2-3 tablespoon of ammonia (it is a lot compared to the dye pot which is 2-3 liters, I manage to boost pH to 10 normally with 1-2 teespoons for same volume of liquid from pH 6-7) and placed iron/copper cold mordanted wool in it. It is grey.

• 3rd afterbath: I placed iron/copper simmered (30-60min) wool in it. It turned out be a warm greyish-brown. I think either the ammonia was mostly soaked up by the previous yarn or my iron/copper dyepot slowly turned into the direction of iron as the screws started to release their iron content, or there is a difference in cold and hot mordanting in this way - or a combination of any of these three :).