Cultivating and Cooking Garden Giants with Paul Stamets

The Garden Giant is a stellar species for folks to grow in their backyard, and especially in their gardens. This species is plant friendly, helps transform woodchips into rich soils, consumes nematodes and filters out E. coli. Garden Giants produce long, abundant rhizomorphs, and the stem butts can regrow. See Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World for step by step instructions.

Once you have this species (Stropharia rugoso-annulata, aka The Wine Cap, The King Stropharia) growing on your property and if you annually use wood chips as a mulch, the Garden Giant can become resident for years. Not only are the mushrooms huge (see the 4-5 lb specimens in the photos), and edible (mild flavor), but this species can produce acanthocytes - which allow it to eat nematodes, important for protecting root crops.

Acanthocytes of Stropharia rugosoannulata Function as a Nematode-Attacking DeviceAPPLIED AND ENVIRONMENTAL MICROBIOLOGY, Apr. 2006, p. 2982–2987 Vol. 72, No. 4 0099-2240/06/$08.000 doi:10.1128/AEM.72.4.2982–2987.2006

We also published on this species removing E. coli. See my bio at paustamets.com

Moreover, this mushroom will distract slugs from eating your vegetables, and fly larvae love them. I discovered when raising sliver (coho) salmon fingerlings that the fish would strike at the floating maggot-ridden mushrooms to dislodge the larvae and aggressively consume them. So, this suggests that this species could be useful for feeding fish, from salmon to tilapia.

Also, see my YT video on MycoTotes - for the massive expansion of mycelium using a low tech fermentation method.

Crazy fun with fungi.

Location: Earth

Filming by Pam Kryskow