Garden Accessories Page II
The Shaggy Mane is frequently found along roadsides and in meadows, lawns, park grounds, sports fields, old composting locations and newly planted grass. It favors nutrient rich soil. It can enliven a lawn, the bare rows between shrubs or vegetables, or may fruit gregariously in and around your compost heap.
Commercially obtained or home-grown spawn is mixed into the top layer of compost, wood chips or straw, and covered with a thin layer of peat moss. This mushroom may become a permanent resident of your lawn if you place spawn under patches of turf.
The Parasol and Shaggy Parasol are often discovered in grassy patches in forests and along their edges, on hillsides, along paths, in parks and gardens, sometimes under solitary trees. They prefer a somewhat sandy subsoil and adequate moisture.
In the garden, they are likely to flourish in composting areas of either kitchen scraps or lawn clippings. Mix the topmost layer of compost with some peat moss and mix in either cultivated grain spawn or the water and trimmings from last night's Parasol dinner. Cover with leaves to retain moisture.
The Amethyst Deceiver is often found in tremendous abundance in the woods, especially along paths, and would bring welcome color (a light, bright bluish-purple, as the name suggests), to shady areas around trees and shrubs in humus-rich soil. What it lacks in size, it makes up for in quantity, and is considered by some a highly prized edible.
The Wood Blewit is often found in duff under trees in the forest. In the garden, it is a charming addition to treed lawns and other wooded areas, along the edges of shrubbery or in fruit orchards. The soil should be amended with partially decomposed leaf or needle litter, and kept moist. Blewits will often form a brilliant ring of purple fairies around the base of trees.
The Oyster Mushroom is a saprophytic species which happily digests fallen wood in the forest. It likes high humidity and thus is often discovered fruiting from trees and logs which have fallen across a creek. In the garden, it may be grown on decorative arrangements of logs through inoculation via "plugs.
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