How To Grow Wine Caps Mushrooms

You may have never heard of Wine Cap Mushrooms, also known by their scientific name Stropharia rugosoannulata, and their awesome name, Godzilla Mushroom. Whatever you call them, Wine Cap Mushrooms are tasty and lovely-looking mushrooms. They have a rich brown colour, a nutty flavour and contain a lot more moisture than your typical mushroom when cooked. Wine Cap Mushrooms are exquisite when prepared in soups and sauces, cooked with lemon juice, nutmeg or fennel as flavourings.

Because they are not widely-harvested, wine caps are very expensive, organic varieties going from $18/pound. Once again, learning how to grow mushrooms an is easy, inexpensive and a great way to sample something new in the mushroom world.

Wine Cap mushrooms thrive when planted both outdoors, but sadly they don’t easily take to growing indoors, so you’ll need to plant these on the ground or in a pot. Wine Cap Mushrooms can tolerate a huge range of temperatures, from 4-32 degrees Celsius (40-90 degrees Fahrenheit), so planting spring is your best option.

Materials

1. Wine Cap Mushroom Spawn. My favourite location to get spawn is eBay. I have yet to buy spawn from this particular seller, so I cannot vouch for the quality of their spawn. However, their reviews are good and I’ve always found eBay reviews to be dependable.
2. Wood Chips. Any type of tree variety will do, excluding pine. Also avoid wood chips with large amounts of leafy matter. You can buy these at garden stores and centres, but often times these are given away for free by tree and shrub services.
3. Compost.

Instructions

1. Find a shady spot in your garden, such as around a tree. Loosen the soil where you are going to be putting down your Wine Cap Mushroom spawn.
2. Remove some soil to create a small depression in the ground, around 8 inches if you can manage it. Fill depression with a mix of wood chips and compost, adding in more wood chips than compost.
3. Take your Wine Cap Mushroom spawn and sprinkle it over.
4. Cover your spawn with an approximately 2 inch layer of compost.
5. Water the whole thing once a day (more during dry, hot days) to keep it well hydrated.

Harvesting

As I mentioned above, Wine Cap mushrooms can get huge.

Nonetheless, Wine Cap Mushrooms are at their best when eaten smaller, when the mushroom heads are around a palm’s size or just as the skin on the head of the mushroom (the dark brown veil) starts tearing near the edges.

Leave a few behind to mature completely if you’d like your Wine Cap Mushrooms to regrow somewhere else in your garden — no guarantees of where though! Wine Cap Mushrooms reproduce by releasing spores into the air, so they may land anywhere.