There is always a risk of things like this. For example, to make my winecap bed, I had to get a bunch of woodchips. There is no way woodchips that one will buy in bulk are not contaminated with the spores of other wood-eating fungus.

What you learn is how to positively identify the mushrooms you intend to produce/eat. It doesn't take long. I've only had alien mushrooms show up once.

Do people ever try to irradiate or fumigate or however they’d treat the woodchips?

Maybe it would cost 10 times as much as the wood chips themselves… small batch spore bakeoffs…

Adding poisons (fumigation) is definitely not a good idea. In mushroom plants the compost/humus used to grow mushrooms is often steam boiled to sterilize it, to keep the yields high and the production safe from any dangerous contamination. It is seeded with the spores of the desired species afterwards.

you could probably autoclave it with a standard dental/tattooing autoclave (~500 USD and requires a gas stove)

Pressure cooking in small batches is the diy standard, I've had good results with a standard insta-pot

"I've only had alien mushrooms show up once" gonna be my reassuring quote of the day, thanks : )

On the other hand, the morels that seemed to come with a load of wood chips were great for the year or two we had them.

I tried growing a little wine cap bed once, and it hadn't gone well. Perhaps it was the chickens pecking at it, can't say. I do still get wine caps on occasion, but they have migrated to more far-flung parts of the yard.

> the morels that seemed to come with a load of wood chips were great for the year or two we had them.

You probably already know this, but for anyone reading, there’s a species of mushrooms that looks kind of like morels that is poisonous, potentially fatally so.

https://www.foraged.com/blog/morel-mushrooms-vs-false-morels

Yeah thanks, but it doesn't hurt to mention!

I imagine it would require the bad spores to be carried with the good ones. Typically you get a slurry solution that you carry in distilled water, injecting your substrates. That would need to have the bad stuff in it as well.

Don’t they float in the air?

Wild spores and such yeah. When you purchase spores for the intent of growing them, you generally get a kit to mix them into a syringe or they already arrive in the syringe ready to be used. I tried growing some culinary strains and they generally come in the mail like that.

only spores I think

So the thing about mushrooms is you pretty much have to stick them in your mouth and chew for them to hurt you.

There are plants that can screw up your life if you touch them, but people sort of have the two threat levels flipped in their heads. The scariest thing a fungus can do to your insides is horrible, but an insect or animal can do the same but also you die screaming. So... be careful out there kids. And don't go to Australia.