That is a great question. It is possible to grow wine caps on just cardboard and straw. Of course, when you add wood/wood chips to that mix, your wine caps will have more to “eat” and will, as a result, fruit over a longer period of time.

Regarding the size of your wood pieces, the smaller you can make them, the more quickly your wine cap spawn can colonize and provide you with fruiting bodies—mushrooms! Much larger pieces take longer, but, if you mix then really well with a ready supply of smaller particle “food” like straw, it could work out OK.

The pieces that you describe as 2″ x 2″ sound comparable to some of the larger chunks of bark you might find in commercially available mulch. I think that could work, provided they are mixed in with enough smaller stuff. (Again, straw, shredded cardboard…) The more surface area that is exposed on a piece of wood or other food, the quicker the mycelium will penetrate that particular piece. And the more pieces like that with lots of surface area, the quicker the mycelium will colonize the entire patch area. Once colonized, fruiting is much more likely.

For some of your larger pieces of wood, you could try making several cuts in them or drilling some holes in them in order to increase their surface area and give the mycelium more nooks and crannies to occupy. This would help the mycelium to break down the larger pieces a wood more quickly.

For you, it will be a matter of making sure your wine caps have a ready supply of small-particle “food” like straw on hand as well as some of your larger chunks of wood. If you know of a woodworker who has sawdust to get rid of—sawdust from natural, untreated wood, that is—you could also mix sawdust in with your large chunks. That might help, too.

As for BBQ pellets, I think it really depends on what they contain or what was used to produce them. Do they have synthetic glues or additives to give them certain flavors? When I have used wine caps for environmental clean up in compromised areas like old burn piles, I do not eat those mushrooms, because they can contain heavy metals/other unsafe elements now potentially incorporated in their fruiting bodies. All that is to say, if you aren’t certain about the composition of those commercially prepared BBQ pellets, you might want to avoid them. If they are just 100 percent wood or sawdust that has been smashed into a pellet with no weird additives, those can work well.

Oh wow! That’s well planned. I’m so happy it was fruitful. Thank you for sharing. I’m sure other mushroom lovers will find this helpful, as well.

Hi Gary,
It’s possible to rejuvenate red wine cap mushroom beds outdoors. It is a balancing act. You don’t want the mycelium to run out of food. As long as you still have a nice colony of mycelium in there and you give them more to “eat,” you should continue to have mushrooms. That said, it might take a little while before they fruit again, because the mycelium needs to wend its way through all of the new material you have provided.

In the case of red wine caps, in particular, they need access to soil, a little plant growth, and straw/wood chips/cardboard—something along those lines. It is that combination of things that helps them to thrive. And once the organism is large enough/has permeated the new material, it will send out its fruit.