Wine cap

Stropharia rugosoannulata is a bed fungus, not a bag in the kitchen. The straw goes outside, in the shade, and then you wait.

It is not a slit block

Wine cap, Stropharia rugosoannulata, is a litter fungus. In nature it comes from piles of straw, chips and shredded wood, often in a garden, with a wine-red cap when young and a ring on the stem. Indoors, in a closed bag, it can colonise and then disappoint you. It makes real mushrooms when it has soil, rain and a season, not when it has a plastic box and your three-week patience.

It is one of the few in this catalogue whose last gesture is outside. A bed in the shade, or half shade, on cardboard or directly on soil that has not been treated with fungicides, covered with straw or hardwood chips. Full sun cooks the mycelium at the surface. The dry shade of a porch that never sees rain leaves it asleep.

Wine cap liquid culture is a seed. On its own, poured onto dry garden straw, it barely shows. It wants grain first, like the others, so you arrive at the bed with real spawn.

Coltura Liquida Stropharia Rugosoannulata 10ml | Wine Cap Fungo€11,50

From grain to the bed

Inoculate sterilised rye or millet, wait for the white, break at one third. Then that spawn is mixed into hydrated straw, or chips, in a volume that can be a perforated bag kept in the shade to colonise, or the bed itself if the season is mild and wet. Spring and early autumn are the moments when this fungus makes sense. July on an exposed balcony is a way to dry spawn.

Straw, if you use it as the first food, is kept moist like a wrung sponge, not like a soup. In the garden you lay it in layers with the spawn, about ten centimetres, and cover with a last layer of clean straw that acts as a skin. That skin is watered when it does not rain. It is not flooded.

Substrato Funghi Paglia Pastorizzata — 1 kg / 2 kg€11,90

Colonisation outdoors is not white and tidy like a bag. You will see threads, then straw that looks overrun, then, if it goes well, mushrooms. You will also see other mushrooms. An inkcap on the straw is not your Stropharia. Wine cap has a wine-coloured cap when young, gills that become grey-violet, a ring. If you are not sure, do not eat it. A guide does not replace identification.

Times are weeks or months, and sometimes the following season. A bed made in autumn can stay silent until spring. It is not dead merely because it did not fruit before frost. Surface frost, in many regions, slows it without killing the mycelium in the moist wood underneath.

What not to expect

Do not expect the kilo a week of an oyster. Do not expect mushrooms in the kitchen twenty days from the syringe. Do not expect a pot of multipurpose compost on the windowsill to be enough. Flower compost is the wrong place, often already rich in other organisms and in fertilisers.

A plate is for when you want to check the mycelium before sowing a whole bed. It is a white you transfer to grain. It is not a mat to bury.

Piastra Petri Colonizzata — Fungo del Vino (Stropharia rugosoannulata)€19,90

When the mushrooms come, harvest them young, with the cap still convex. Open and flat, they are often full of larvae, because you are outdoors and you are not the first to find them. Cut at the base. Leave a few if you want spores on the bed, but it is not obligatory: the spawn you put in is already the mycelium.

Cook them. A garden mushroom is checked twice, because a wrong name outdoors costs more than an oyster born in a closed bag. If the straw smells of spoiled manure or is a green carpet, that zone is removed. You do not spray a fungicide. A fungicide is the end of the fungus you were trying to keep.

The bed, season after season

A wine-cap bed is not a block you throw away after two flushes. If the mycelium has taken, the straw is used up and has to be replenished. Each year, or when the layer has sunk until the soil shows, you add new straw or hardwood chips, moist, without mixing so hard that you tear up the whole bottom. The mycelium climbs into the fresh food. A bed that receives only water and never new food runs out, and you think the species “has finished”. It has finished lunch.

The cardboard under the first layer is there to hold moisture and slow the grass, not to be the substrate. You wet it, lay it, cover it. It is not sterile and it does not need to be: this fungus is made for soil. What should not be there is a recent fungicide, a weedkiller, or a heavy nitrogen feed given to the lawn the week before. Excess nitrogen makes grass and bacteria, not Stropharia.

Water when the straw, dug with two fingers, is dry under the surface. A real rain is worth more than a daily watering can that wets only the skin. In summer, if you cannot keep the shade, it is more honest to leave the bed resting than to water it at noon. Mycelium in the depth waits. Mycelium on the surface, hit by the sun, does not.

When mushrooms come, they often come in waves after rain and a drop in temperature. Do not clear the whole bed on the first day if you still need to learn the species: leave one specimen to open, watch the gills turn grey-violet, look for the ring. Then decide. A red cap without a ring, with gills that stay white, is not this fungus. Doubt is settled by looking, not by cooking.

Leftover spawn, if the grain is still white and smells of mushroom, can widen the bed or start a second one in another shady corner. It does not keep forever on the balcony. Heat dries it, rain on an opened bag contaminates it. Use it, or return it to the fridge, closed, for a short time. A swollen, sour bag is not “spread anyway” on the bed. You would be sowing the problem.

In the kitchen the cap is brushed more than washed. Water soaks it and takes what little scent it has. Cook it until the centre is no longer raw: a litter mushroom from outdoors can have small guests, and cooking is for them too. It is not a raw mushroom, and it is not a mushroom to keep for three days in a lukewarm sauce. The same day, or dried. The bed, meanwhile, stays where it is. You do not take it apart after the first cluster to “see what is underneath”. Underneath is the mycelium that has to make the next wave.