Worm Bin Mushrooms

Daniel Herrington
#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.

Chris C
#2. May 27th, 2010, at 6:10 PM.

This thread is a few years old but I figured I’d add my experience too. I’ve been worm composting for several years now and have a really healthy core family of worms in a tiered worm factory type bin that just tear through anything I throw at them. I recently wanted to ramp up my capacity so I started a new flow through type thing in a large trashcan seeded with a big hunk of worms from my smaller bin. It has been a few months since I started the bigger bin and it seems like they are really starting to get going now.

Also recently I’ve started getting into mushroom cultivation and am starting to have great success with Oyster mushrooms, pretty much considered to be the easiest mushrooms to grow because they are aggressive and grow on anything. While I was getting the hang of growing the mushrooms I had lots of failures where my mushroom substrate would get badly contaminated with green mold which is pretty common. In those cases I didn’t want to keep the moldy stuff around so I just threw the contaminated substrate in my big worm bin since I was pretty confident the mold would be out-competed by all the other organism. I was right on that front and the mold got it’s ass kicked. The interesting thing is that now my big worm bin is totally teaming with mushroom mycelium. It is really going crazy which makes sense because it’s dark and nice and moist and there’s lots of stuff to eat. I’m still waiting to see how the worms and mycelium get along. Right now it seems like there are very few worms in the areas with lots of mycelium and they are grouped in uncolonized areas. I don’t have any evidence yet that the mycelium is the reason. It’s still a fairly young bin and I’m dealing with other issues that could be causing the worms to prefer certain areas. But I’m confident that If I left things alone for awhile I could trigger some fruiting (by giving the mycelium some light and fresh air). I’m not sure I’m really interested in doing that because I have plenty of oysters fruiting in other containers and I would really like this trash can to be an active worm bin. It would be really cool though if it could all just be symbiotic with the mycelium speeding the composting process.

I’m not sure this would work very well with any mushrooms other than Oysters since they will really colonize most anything. Most other edibles (like shiitake) are wood lovers and are just much choosier. I guess it’s possible that dung loving mushrooms might be able to be grown in worm poo but I’m not really sure.

-Chris

Chris C
#3. June 7th, 2010, at 5:09 PM.

Just to respond to my own comment I would warn against anyone trying to combine your worm bin with you mushroom bin. My flow through bin with the worms and oyster mushroom mycelium collapsed so I had to dump it out. It gave me a chance to see what was going on in there. The mushroom mycelium was definitely not cohabitating well with the worms. I only found a handful of worms left and a lot of the bin was solidly colonized with oyster spawn.

It kind of makes sense when you see it. The mycelium and worms are working towards totally different goals. The worms want everything nice and loose and the mycelium wants to bind everything together into one big network. Not to mention the fact that I think oyster mushrooms have nematicidal properties such that they actually consume nematodes (I’m not positive on that) so it’s possible the mycelium actively went after the worms.

In short I wouldn’t mix these two hobbies in one bin. Oyster mushroom’s are VERY aggressive so even if you throw spent spawn into your worm bin it will probably take over the whole thing once it gets a crack at the nutrient rich worm poo. Oysters do seem to really like the finished worm poo though so you could definitely grow mushrooms on finished worm compost. Then you would probably have some really great spent compost that you could throw in your garden.