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!