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The ring mushroom belongs to the category of little-known, but lately it is more and more in demand among mushroom pickers. Promotes the popularization of ringworms and an effective technology for their cultivation. Moreover, the sooner you start collecting ring pickers, the tastier and more aromatic the dishes prepared from them will be. Young mushrooms are best boiled, and overgrown mushrooms are best fried.

Photo and description of the ring

Currently, two varieties of edible ringlets are cultivated. These are massive lamellar mushrooms. Ring varieties vary in weight. Larger Gartenriese, smaller ones - Winnetou.

Koltsevik (Stropharia rugoso-annulata) grows naturally on wood chips, on soil mixed with sawdust, or on straw covered with soil. It can also grow on mushroom compost, but for better fruiting, the compost must be mixed with sawdust, straw or wood chips in a 1: 1 ratio.

Fruit bodies are large, with a cap diameter of 50 to 300 mm and a weight of 50 to 200 g. At the moment of its appearance from the forest litter or from a garden bed, a ringlet with an almost round brown cap and a thick white leg resembles a porcini mushroom. However, unlike the porcini mushroom, the ringlet belongs to the lamellar mushrooms. Subsequently, the hat acquires a lighter, brick color, its edges are bent down. The plates are first white, then light purple and finally bright purple.

As you can see in the photo, the ringlet has a thick, even leg, thickening towards the base:

The edge of the cap is curved and has a thick membrane covering, which breaks when the mushroom matures and remains in the form of a ring on the stem. The remains of the bedspread often remain on the cap in the form of small scales.

So, you have read the description of the ring mushroom, and what does it taste like? This mushroom is very aromatic. Particularly good are the round caps of a young ringlet, collected immediately after they emerge from the garden. In the morning, slightly moistened and quite dense, they really look like the cap of a small porcini mushroom or aspen. The taste also resembles noble mushrooms, but there are some peculiarities. Taste of boiled mushroom caps, but has a slight smack of boiled potatoes. However, they are quite suitable for appetizers, as well as for soups. For harvesting for the winter, young ring mushrooms can be frozen or dried. Round caps do not stick together when frozen, they can be stored "in bulk" when frozen, they do not crumble. Before drying, it is better to cut the hat into 2-4 plates, then they look prettier in the soup.

It is recommended not to bring growing mushrooms to the phase of biological maturity, when the caps become flat and the plates are purple. Overgrown ringlets are less tasty. But if you didn't manage to pick the mushrooms on time, then use them fried with onions and potatoes.

The technology of growing ringlets in the beds

The area for growing the ringlet mushroom should be sufficiently illuminated in spring and autumn, and in summer, on the contrary, should be protected from direct sunlight. You can plant mushrooms together with pumpkins, which, with their leaves, create a favorable microclimate: they provide moisture and the necessary shading.

Excellent results are obtained with fresh deciduous wood chips. Fresh chips have enough moisture and do not require any additional processing. Coniferous and oak chips, pine and spruce needles can be used only as an additive (no more than 50% of the total weight). Chips from the branches are rammed in the form of a bed 30-40 cm thick, 140 cm wide and watered with water. If the chips are dry, the garden is watered for several days in the morning and in the evening. Substrate mycelium is added to the chips at the rate of 1 kg per 1 m2 of beds.The mycelium is dropped to a depth of 5 cm in walnut-sized portions. Sometimes a well-overgrown substrate is used as mycelium. A layer of ordinary garden soil (cover soil) is poured over the bed. In dry times, the casing layer is moistened daily.

When growing annulus, wheat straw can be used as a substrate. It is soaked for a day in a container under a press. Then they are placed in shaded places in the form of low ridges with a thickness of 20-30 cm and a width of 100-140 cm. For 1 m2 of ridges, 25-30 kg of dry straw are required. Then, the substrate mycelium is also added to the straw at the rate of 1 kg / m2.

In warm weather (May - June), overgrowth of the substrate and the appearance of long strands (rhizomorphs) occurs in 2-3 weeks.

After 8-9 weeks, colonies of the mycelium of the annulus become visible on the surface, and after 12 weeks a continuous layer of the substrate intertwined with the mycelium is formed. After a drop in night air temperatures, abundant fruiting begins. The ringlet is considered a summer mushroom. The ideal temperature in the middle of the garden is 20-25 ° C. The mycelium of the annulus develops rapidly and after a few weeks rhizomorphs are formed, which contribute to the development of the entire substrate. Complete colonization of the substrate takes 4-6 weeks. The buds of fruiting bodies are formed in 2-4 weeks on straw and after 4-8 weeks on wood chips.

Fruiting bodies appear in groups. Fungi form in the area of ​​contact between straw and soil. When grown in a garden bed, rhizomorphs of ringworm can stretch far beyond it (by tens of meters) and form fruit bodies there. However, the fruiting waves are not as uniform as those of the champignon. Usually 3-4 waves are collected. Each new wave appears 2 weeks after the previous one. Mushrooms are harvested with an unbroken or recently torn blanket. This lengthens the shelf life of the mushrooms. Watering the beds is needed to get high quality mushrooms. The fruiting bodies of the ringworm are rather fragile and do not tolerate transferring from one container to another. On wood chips with a casing layer, the yield reaches 15% of the mass of the substrate, on straw the yield is less.

Substrate mycelium for growing ringworms

Until the middle of the last century, substrate mycelium was used for vegetative propagation of fungi. In mushroom growing, the process of vegetative "sowing" of fungi using mycelium is called inoculation. Thus, the mushroom compost was inoculated with pieces of compost that had already been mastered by the mushroom mushroom. Such a compost seed mycelium is one example of a substrate mycelium. Compost mycelium was used not only for the cultivation of mushrooms, but also for other humic and sometimes litter mushrooms. All kinds of champignons, umbrella mushrooms and even ringlets were "sown" in this way.

For the reproduction of summer honey fungus, oyster mushrooms and other woody fungi, a substrate mycelium was used based on sawdust, mastered by the desired mycelium (sawdust mycelium). For cultivation of mushrooms on stumps and on pieces of wood, wooden cylindrical dowels infected with woody fungus were on sale. Such dowels can also be called substrate mycelium. They are still being produced abroad.

The substrate mycelium contains almost no excess nutrition for fungi - only mycelium for their vegetative reproduction. Therefore, it can be stored for a long time without loss of quality and it can be added to a non-sterile substrate.

As the technology of mushroom cultivation improved, the firms producing mycelium switched to grain as the carrier of mycelium. Mycelium made with wheat, barley, or millet is called cereal. Grain mycelium is released only on sterilized grain. Therefore, using grain mycelium, it is possible to establish a sterile technology for the production of mushrooms, which ensures the maximum yield on a sterilized substrate. But in real production, a pasteurized substrate is sown with grain mycelium.The advantage of grain mycelium over substrate mycelium is its economical consumption and ease of use. With sterile technology, you can introduce several grains of millet with mycelium of the fungus into a kilogram bag with the substrate and the mushrooms will grow and give a decent harvest. In fact, grain mycelium is added to the substrate from 1 to 5% of the mass of the finished substrate. This increases the nutritional value of the substrate due to the mycelium grain and allows faster growth of the substrate.

But how to use grain mycelium to "sow" a fungus, for example, a ringworm, into a non-sterile bed? As it turned out, this is not as easy as it seems. With this sowing, molds attack the sterile grain of the mycelium, the grain instantly becomes covered with green mold spores, and the mycelium of the annulus dies. To obtain a good result, you must first "sow" the sterile grain mycelium into a bag with a sterile substrate made of wood chips, wait until the mycelium develops there, and only then use it as a substrate mycelium for seeding the beds.

Shredder for growing ringlets

A large harvest of woody mushrooms can be obtained only in beds or on loose substrate in plastic bags, but not on pieces of wood. The substrate must be moist, nutritious and loose so that it has enough oxygen for the growth of the fungi. All these requirements are met by a substrate made from freshly ground branches.

Chips can be substituted for straw in the cultivation of oyster mushrooms, shiitake and other woody mushrooms. But the main thing for which you need to buy a shredder is for the manufacture of a substrate for beds with a ring. Freshly milled branches with leaves, or better without leaves, represent a ready-made substrate with a moisture content of about 50%, which does not need to be pre-moistened. The branches of trees and shrubs contain enough nutrients for the development of fungal mycelium.

Need any garden shredder with knives. Along with the shredder, I recommend buying spare replacement knives. They only need to recycle fresh branches. Then the chips of the required size are obtained, and the shredder itself will serve for a long time. Models with gears can also be used, but they do not produce a substrate that is not permeable to air. Young birches up to 4 cm thick are well ground in a garden shredder. Near birch copses on abandoned fields, areas with a dense forest of young birches are formed by self-seeding. Such self-seeding takes place not in the forest, but on agricultural land, where it spoils the fields. In addition, if you cut off not all birches in a row, but thin out the self-seeding, this will improve the growth of boletus and porcini mushrooms in it.

The brittle, or white, willow growing along roads and rivers can grow up to 5 cm thick branches in one season! And even they grind well. If you root several dozen of these willows in the estate, then after 5 years you will have an inexhaustible source of substrate for mushrooms. All deciduous trees and shrubs that form long and straight branches are suitable: willow, hazel, aspen, etc. Chips from oak branches are suitable for growing shiitake, but not ringlets and oyster mushrooms, because their enzymes do not degrade tannin.

Pine and spruce branches are also well ground, but they strongly stick with resin on the chopper knives and its inner body. Coniferous wood chips are only suitable for growing purple rows (Lepista nuda).

Dry branches of trees and shrubs are not suitable for shredding, as they are often affected by mold. And, in addition, when grinding dry, especially soil-contaminated branches, the knives quickly become blunt.

If you need to store the substrate for future use, then for storage it must be dried under a canopy, and moistened before use. To obtain a substrate with a moisture content of 50%, the dried wood chips must be poured with water for 30 minutes, then the water must be drained and the resulting wood chips must be dried in the garden for 24 hours.

Plantation watering with ring

For good fruiting of a mushroom plantation, regular watering is needed. It is not difficult to organize it.

There is a small spring in the garden, so there was no need to make a well or a well. Water from the spring flows down the site in the form of a small stream and is collected in a pond measuring 4 x 10 m. From there an asbestos-cement pipe 8 m long is laid, from which the water flows into a settling tank, where clay particles settle. Then clean streams of water replenish a concrete tank with a diameter of 2.5 m and a depth of 2 m, where a drainage pump with a power of 1100 W is installed, providing a head of 0.6 atm at a capacity of 10 m3 / h. For additional purification of water from clay particles, the pump is placed in a plastic can, on which a bag of agryl 200 microns thick is put on. Agryl is a cheap covering material for garden beds.

The pump delivers water to a pipe with a diameter of 32 mm. Then, with the help of special fittings, water is distributed through pipes with a diameter of 20 mm. It is recommended to use pipes and fittings made of low pressure polyethylene (HDPE) - this is a reliable and cheapest system of pipes and fittings.

The irrigation pipes were laid at a height of 2.2 m above the ground with the help of vertical posts made of reinforcement with a diameter of 12 mm. This allows you to mow the lawn and care for the mushroom plantation without interference. The water is sprayed from the watering cans directed upwards. Watering cans are plastic bottle sprayers with 0.05mm holes. They were sold in hardware stores for 15 rubles. a piece. To mate them with HDPE fittings, you need to cut an internal thread 1/2 on them. A piece of padding polyester is placed inside each watering can, which additionally purifies the water.

Switching on the pump produces a household timer. For watering the entire mushroom plantation (15 acres) 2 times a day for 20 minutes, approximately 4 m3 of water is consumed when water flows from the spring from 8 m3 / day to 16 m3 / day (depending on the season). Thus, there is still water left for other needs. Some watering cans sometimes get clogged with clay, despite the sediment and filtration system. To clean them, a special water drain was made near the pump into a pipe section with fittings for 5 watering cans. In the absence of water flow, the pump develops a pressure of more than 1 atm. This is enough to clean the watering cans by screwing them onto a piece of pipe and turning off the water supply valve to the irrigation system. Simultaneously with watering the entire mushroom plantation, compost heaps, raspberries, cherries and apple trees are watered.

Five watering cans spray water over the ring plantation. The total size of the beds is 3 x 10 m. Irrigation water gets on some of its sections, others remain without irrigation. As my experience shows, the ringworm prefers to bear fruit in those areas where irrigation water does not directly enter. An analysis of the moisture content of the substrate in the fruit-bearing bed proved that it is not necessary to water the entire surface of the bed. The mycelium of the ringworm distributes moisture from irrigation in some parts of the garden over the entire surface. This proves the undoubted benefits of having mycelium in the garden.