Worm Bin Mushrooms
After a promising start, our ‘Reader Photos’ section has certainly been quiet. Thankfully, fellow ‘wormhead’ Dwayne C. has helped to get things back on track with this cool photo of mushrooms growing in his worm bin.
It’s not something you see every day, but it is kinda cool when it happens. It has even had me wondering if one could grow edible mushrooms in some sort of worm composting system. I remember reading an article in the print version of Worm Digest (published an number of years ago) describing how the author had put a gourmet mushroom kit in her worm system and ended up being able to harvest mushrooms for several months.
Your chances of seeing actual mushrooms (the fruiting bodies of certain groups of fungi) are much greater in outdoor systems (for obvious reasons) and can be closely linked to the type of material you have in your bin. Manure is an example of a material that commonly is colonized by certain species of mushrooms. Having lots of carbon-rich bedding materials in your bin can also encourage fungal growth.
Last summer I used lots of straw in my outdoor bin and ended up with some big mushrooms in the bin (as shown below).
Generally, the mushrooms don’t last very long (in my experience anyway). I always imagined the worm feasting on the fungal mycelium below, but I’m not really sure if that happens (worms definitely eat fungi – but I’m not sure if they’d actually consume mycelium while it is still alive).
One of the mushrooms that appeared in my outdoor bin last summer.
Technorati Tags: mushrooms, worm bin, compost bins, vermicomposting, worm composting, fungi, mycelium
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Written by Bentley on June 9th, 2008 with
1 comment.
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#1. June 17th, 2008, at 6:00 PM.
Hi Bentley, interesting inquiry regarding the Mushroom growth. I think I can address the last part since I work with fungi. Essentially the mushroom runs out, rather than being eaten. Like the worms if unfed in a bin would eventually starve, a similar process happens with the mushroom. However, the mycelium strands which are technically vegetative would tend to bind to the soil underneath as the mushroom collapses for lack of nutrition. I can, for instance, grow Oyster mushrooms in a 27 pound bag of newspapers and within 25 days break all the material down to a virtual topsoil. If I kept the supply of papers coming then the Oysters would continue to be like a crop on a farm and could be harvested and even eaten. The topsoil material is then like our compost from Vermi. That said, the mycelium stays in the soils and like a network of strands will help to bind it. Very much as mycelium does in the wild. When we walk on that soft fungal soil, that is what we are walking on. I hope that helps. Http://www.fungi.com can also shed some light on this topic. For my part, I do both the Vermi and use Fungal material as well.