Fall is mushrooms

King stropheria/ wine cap mushroom bed went in today. What I did:

Laid down a layer of cardboard

Laid down a bale of straw, one flake at a time flat like tiles, on top of the cardboard

Watered well

Crumbled my block of spawn over the straw

Set another two bales' worth of flakes over the spawn, again like tiles, so the spawn had one tile below and two above, for a total of roughly a foot of straw over the whole bed

Watered well

So altogether it was pretty simple. I had found some deck railing while at the dump the other day, so I scavenged that to block off the spot to the north of the storage container for the mushroom bed. The area is larger than the one bed, so if I want to double its size next year I can. I'm hoping there's enough time for the mycelium to get well established before it gets too cold out and everything goes into deep freeze. I'm also hoping it overwinters; my understanding is that it will, but I haven't found a ton of literature on trying to grow them this far north.