Do you love mushrooms? Would you like to grow some in your yard, and gather your own mushrooms right outside your door?

I told you how much we enjoyed growing oyster mushrooms in the garden over the summer, and shared with you our process of growing them vertically in straw in a laundry basket. If you would like to learn more about that, be sure to check out that post.

Oyster mushrooms are not the only mushrooms we’ve been growing around here, there is another mushroom we grow in our yard that is by far the easiest mushroom we’ve grown. That’s the one I came to tell you about here today, and it goes by the name of Wine Cap Mushroom. (Stropharia rugosoannulata)

If you are new to growing mushrooms, and would like to start with something easy, wine cap mushrooms can be grown in the yard in woodchips. It’s a great mushroom to grow for beginners!

Wine Cap Mushrooms are also known as Garden Giants or King Stropharia. The name wine cap comes from the color of their caps. They are some beautiful mushrooms!

Wine cap mushrooms love growing in wood, but can also grow on compost piles, on decomposing straw, soils enriched with sawdust, and even in the garden. We love growing them on woodchips, where they proliferate like crazy. They prefer hardwoods, but they are not a super picky mushroom.

Many years ago we got a load of woodchips from the power company. After Jeff spread the woodchips around the yard for pathways, wine cap mushrooms came up wild all over the yard. We were delighted!

I have pictures of B helping to collect them around the yard when he was one (and now he’s a teenager, so he’s been a part of the wine cap mushroom gathering for a long time.)

We didn’t see any wine cap mushrooms for a time after that (we didn’t refresh the woodchips), so the next time we had a source of woodchips, Jeff wanted to order wine cap mushroom mycelium to get it going again.

We ordered wine cap mycelium from North Spore, and spread it around the yard, wherever we had woodchip pathways. It went nuts! There were flushes of wine cap mushrooms everywhere.

Spreading the wine cap mushroom mycelium, covering it in fresh woodchips, and then watering it here and there (if it’s a dry time of year), is a great way to get a patch of wine cap mushrooms going.

The pictures in this post are all from harvests in 2022. Since that time, we have been spreading fresh woodchips over the top of the pathways multiple times per year, and we’ve had continual harvests for YEARS. Lots and lots of wine cap mushrooms!

We cook the wine cap mushrooms right after harvesting them, and also dry a bunch for the winter to add to soups. We love them! It is wonderful to not only have fresh mushrooms available right outside our door to add to meals, but to have such an abundance that we can store mushrooms for the winter as well.

Buying that wine cap mushroom mycelium was a very good use of our money because the mushrooms harvests have just kept on rolling! We harvest regularly throughout the spring, summer, and fall. This year, we had some especially huge flushes throughout September and October, and still had some wine cap mushrooms popping up in late November.

If you order the wine cap mushroom mycelium, you can keep it going by providing new woodchips on a regular basis, and by continuing to spread the newly forming mycelium around the yard.

Something that’s so great about wine cap mushrooms are how easy they are to establish and spread in new areas! If the wine cap mushrooms become too large and bug eaten, you can spread them around new areas with woodchips. We also use the ends of the stems, with the mycelial roots, to spread around the yard.

One thing to know about wine cap mushrooms in particular is that you don’t want to eat them for multiple days in a row because they can cause an upset stomach. The reason for that is because you need time to rebuild the enzymes needed to digest them.

Don’t let that discourage you from growing and eating them, though. Our family did get a stomachache after eating them for more than 2 or 3 days in a row, before we knew about that. We typically eat them once or twice a week, and haven’t had any problems since.

If you harvest more than you can eat all at once, dry the extra. To dry wine cap mushrooms, we slice them and put them on trays in our oven on the lowest temperature. You can also dry them in a food dehydrator.

What I include in every post about mushrooms: Of course, always be sure you confidently identify any mushroom before eating it, and start with a small amount at first to see how your body reacts.

We have found it best to harvest the mushrooms before they get too large. The more mature the wine cap mushrooms get, the less “meaty” the caps are, and the more bugs we find in them. (And they become less flavorful.)

It can be challenging to get them while the caps are still fresh and smaller though, because they grow so incredibly quickly! Like I mentioned earlier, however, if a mushroom goes too long, simply use it to spread to another area in the yard.

If you feel inspired to grow wine cap mushrooms in your yard, we hope you will enjoy abundant harvests of delicious mushrooms for many years to come!