There is always a risk of things like this. For example, to make my winecap bed, I had to get a bunch of woodchips. There is no way woodchips that one will buy in bulk are not contaminated with the spores of other wood-eating fungus.

What you learn is how to positively identify the mushrooms you intend to produce/eat. It doesn't take long. I've only had alien mushrooms show up once.

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eMPee584 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"I've only had alien mushrooms show up once" gonna be my reassuring quote of the day, thanks : )

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tlavoie 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On the other hand, the morels that seemed to come with a load of wood chips were great for the year or two we had them.

I tried growing a little wine cap bed once, and it hadn't gone well. Perhaps it was the chickens pecking at it, can't say. I do still get wine caps on occasion, but they have migrated to more far-flung parts of the yard.

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Barbing 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do people ever try to irradiate or fumigate or however they’d treat the woodchips?

Maybe it would cost 10 times as much as the wood chips themselves… small batch spore bakeoffs…

	▲	fodkodrasz 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Adding poisons (fumigation) is definitely not a good idea. In mushroom plants the compost/humus used to grow mushrooms is often steam boiled to sterilize it, to keep the yields high and the production safe from any dangerous contamination. It is seeded with the spores of the desired species afterwards.
	▲	dnautics 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		you could probably autoclave it with a standard dental/tattooing autoclave (~500 USD and requires a gas stove)