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 :).

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.

Start-up with dyeing - Part I.

During the late autumn period, after I got hooked up on Miriam Rice's mushroom dyeing books I prepared dye bathes from all sort of mushrooms that crossed my path in the forest in a volume bigger than my fingertip. Unfortunately I havent found too much from each species (ca. a handful max in most cases), so as it later turned out, my dye bathes were not awfully packed with colors.

Nevertheless, as I was looking at my rather washed out colors after the first slight disappointment I was thinking what amazing colors will I be able to achieve once I will have sufficient amount of mushroom available. Most sources suggest at least 1:1 ratio of mushroom and wool in weight, in my case wool heavily overwhelmed mushrooms.

As I also learnt by experience, different mordants and different dyes (and their combination) respond differently to different treatments. For some mushrooms, cold soaking for a day or so gives a pretty good result, while for others one must simmer it for some time, otherwise dye molecules wont attach to the fibre no matter how long it has been soaked. For shorter simmering one certainly gets brighter colors, but I tyically had to simmer for 2-3 hrs as the amount of dye molecules were so low in the bath, and so I mostly have duller tones.

Fresh mushrooms were used each time for the dyebath, with 3 exceptions of dried samples. Liquids were then stored in the fridge at 10C for some months. No need to mention, that most of them got pretty smelly either from bacteria or from fungi and their pH were elevated from around 6.3 (pH measured for non smelling liquids) to 7-8. I expect that extended storage may also affect coloring capability. Next time I will rather freeze them and prepare dyebath fresh. According to some freezing anyway has a good effect on the amount of available dye.

I used a commercially spun merino wool yarn (Regina Classic from italian manufacturer Adriafil, base color 002, lot 004 each) in white color for all dyeings, as I havent manage to locate hand spun untreated yarn in the vicinity and for a reasonable price. Apparently it is the official wool used on the "Speed Knitting" competitions, so should do as a start :).

The following species were tested, and they were willing to dye the fibers to a bigger or smaller extent. (Unfortunately some of them were fully exhausted already by the test swatches, and could not be used later on the half a skeins that I dyed.):

Piptoporus betulinus --> lignivorous polypore (dried) --> test swatch + half skein
Hapalopilus rutilans --> lignivorous polypore (fresh) --> test swatch
Hypholoma fasciculare --> lignivorous (fresh) --> test swatch + half skein
Calvatia excipuliformis --> saprobic (fresh, ripe) --> test swatch
Panaeolus (antillarium ?) --> saprobic (fresh) --> test swatch
Xerocomus sp. --> mycorrhizal (fresh) --> test swatch + half skein
Boletus edulis -->  mycorrhizal (dried from supermarket) --> half skein
Scleroderma citrinum --> mycorrhizal (fresh) --> test swatch + half skein
Paxillus involotus --> mycorrhizal (fresh) --> test swatch + half skein
Craterellus cornucopioides --> mycorrhizal (fresh from the market) --> test swatch

The next ones proved to be completely or mostly dye duds, not resulting in any significant dye with the so far tried methods:
Clitocybe odorata
Coprinus comatus
Coltricia perennis
Mycena pura
Pleurotus djamor
Trametes versicolor brown variety

/ see Start-up with Dyeing - Part II. for more /