There was a time when North Vancouver gardener Brian Didier (pictured) didn't pay much attention to the mushrooms popping up in his backyard.
"I remember years ago, there were mushrooms growing in my backyard and my neighbour's mother came over, an older woman from Germany," says Didier. "She got all excited about these mushrooms and wanted to come over and pick them and eat them."
The retired Telus technician, who is an enthusiastic wild mushroom spotter and gatherer, has since tried just about every method of growing mushrooms in his Lynn Valley garden: a shiitake log, mushrooms growing out of a bale of straw and from a trench filled with wood chips.
"The last couple of years I've had two fruitings of shaggy mane mushrooms popping up in one spot and oysters in another spot," says Didier.
Popping up suddenly, strangely shaped and associated with supernatural creatures, mushrooms seem to belong to the wild, and to reward those who take the time to hunt them out in the deep, dark woods.
But tasty mushrooms are actually quite easy to grow in backyard gardens, and can be a great way to use shady areas of your yard.
"Stropharia lends itself well to cultivation and is quite flavourful," recommends Scott Henderson, a Vancouver-based mushroom lover who makes and sells growing kits through his online business, The Mushroom Man (shroomstore.ca).
Also known as the wine cap mushroom, stropharia can grow to the size of a Portobello mushroom. It can be grilled on the barbecue and has a rich taste similar to the Portobello.
In his lab in East Vancouver, Henderson inoculates sterile wood chips with wine cap mushroom mycelia - the thin, white tendrils that grow underground, slowly breaking down the wood chips and using the nutrients. As early as August and into the fall, the mushrooms will "fruit," the only visible part of a complex hidden network.
Using the wood chip method, gardeners can dig a shallow trench and layer the inoculated wood chips with newly bought wood chips that have been soaked overnight. It's important to only use new woodchips, says Henderson, because old chips that have already been used may have picked up the spawn from other mushrooms growing in the wild. Continue layering, "like a lasagna," until you have about four layers of inoculated and non-inoculated chip.
Like a sourdough starter that can passed to neighbours and kept going for years, a mushroom bed can keep producing for many years with little upkeep. Although wood chips, straw or soil from a well-established mushroom patch can be passed to a fellow grower, Henderson recommends beginners stick to a prepared, sterile kit for the best hopes of success.
The top of the mushroom bed can also be covered with soil and incorporated into the rest of your garden; plants growing next to the mushrooms will provide much-needed shade.
Once you've mastered wine caps, you may want to move on to tackle trickier varieties. Shiitake and oyster mushrooms can be grown in a log. Dowels or sawdust inoculated with mushroom spawn are inserted into holes, and the mushrooms appear on the surface of the log. It can take between a year and a year and a half for this method to yield mushrooms.
Didier and Henderson both say freshness and variety are good reasons to grow your own.
"You're not going to find stropharia in the grocery store," says Henderson, adding that since mushrooms are 90 per cent water, they really do taste best when freshly picked.
"Usually they barely get out of the frying pan. I'll cook them up and my daughter and I will eat them right out of the frying pan," says Didier. "They don't get very far."
