Coriander. You either love it or hate it. It’s impossible to be indifferent!
Mulch is no different. Many plants and insects will be put off and won’t set foot in it, but some species live ONLY for mulch!
A curious guest you might encounter under your hedges and shrubs is the wine cap stropharia or king stropharia. It’s an edible mushroom that grows almost exclusively on woodchip mulch.
Stropharia rugosoannulata
The king stropharia, also known as the straw boletus in Europe, had its moment of glory shortly after the 1998 ice storm. It was once found just about everywhere where broken branches had been stored or used as mulch. It was studied, even cultivated, and above all, eaten!
Today, more than 25 years later, it’s rarer as there’s less kindling everywhere, but you could still have some at home if you mulch your garden with wood chips.
It can fruit (grow) from June to October. Its cap comes in a range of colors, from wine-red to white, brown and beige, and measures between 5 and 25 centimeters in diameter. The hat is curved. When young, it takes on the shape of the well-known Paris mushroom, then spreads out when mature.
The key to identifying it, if you think you’ve got a wine-cap stropharia, is to look at its ring. Around the foot is what we call the ring. This is where the hat was connected to the foot before it spread out. For some, all that’s left is a vague scar; for others, the ring slips off, rather like an oversized ring. For our star of the day, it’s a fairly thick, roughly undulating ring. It looks like a gear.
Look-alikes
Be careful, if you see this “intruder” as a good meal, you need to be sure of your identification, as there are a few other mushrooms that resemble our star.
Hard’s stropharia doesn’t have a wavy ring, its cap is ochre-brown and its blades (the lines under the cap) are brown, unlike our rough gentleman, whose blades are white at first and turn gray or even purplish as he ages.
Another impostor is the lacerated stropharia (Stropharia hornemannii). Easy to eliminate from the possibilities: its cap is slimy and shiny like a frog’s skin, and its foot is covered in scales. Our rough one is matte and its foot is smooth.
How Do I Confirm My Identification?
To confirm your identification, and also because it’s cool to see, you can make a sporea. Sophisticated techniques are available on the Internet, but personally, I’ve always made my sporea simply and effectively by cutting off the foot and placing the cap on a white sheet or “Saran wrap” (cellophane paper), blades down.
After a few hours (sometimes tens of minutes if your specimen is in its dispersal stage), lift your hat and underneath you’ll have a spore print!
These are the reproductive spores of your fungus that have been deposited on the leaf. In the case of king stropharia, you want purplish-brown to blackish-purple lines. If it’s brown or white, it’s not Mr. Rough.
If you’ve found a small colony of mushrooms, all stuck together, it may be that the largest mushroom has left spores on the smallest: no need to make the spore yourself, nature has done you a favour!
The Gardener and the Mushroom
What kind of gardener are you? Everything clean and perfect? Do you let life develop as it pleases? Or do you eat everything you can?
I’m the third kind. You can be sure that edible mushrooms don’t linger long when they’re growing in my house! Hop into the frying pan! I remind you that all wild mushrooms must be cooked and harvested in environments free from pollutants (fertilizers, pesticides and the like).
But if you don’t want to eat your wild mushrooms, you can leave it in place or pull it out with no problem. It doesn’t compete with your plants, and can even help them! I’ve seen websites that sell mycelium for planting in your home.
If you don’t like the “enchanted forest” look, removing them doesn’t hurt either, and you can do it with your bare hands without any problem.
Good luck with your mulch visitors!
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