Recycling of Vineyard and Winery Wastes as Nutritive Composts for Edible Mushroom Cultivation

Abstract

Every year, in Romania huge amounts of wine and vine wastes cause serious environmental damages in vineyards as well as nearby winery factories, for instance, by their burning on the soil surface or their incorporation inside soil matrix. The optimal and efficient way to solve these problems is to recycle these biomass wastes as main ingredients in nutritive composts preparation that could be used for edible mushrooms cultivation. In this respect, the main aim of this work was to establish the best biotechnology of winery and vine wastes recycling by using them as appropriate growth substrata for edible and medicinal mushrooms. According to this purpose, two mushroom species of Basidiomycetes, namely Lentinula edodes as well as Pleurotus ostreatus were used as pure mushroom cultures in experiments. The experiments of inoculum preparation were set up under the following conditions: constant temperature, 23° C; agitation speed, 90–120 rev min−1 pH level, 5.0–6.0. All mycelia mushroom cultures were incubated for 120–168 h. In the next stage of experiments, the culture composts for mushroom growing were prepared from the lignocellulose wastes as vine cuttings and marc of grapes in order to be used as substrata in mycelia development and fruit body formation. The tested culture variants were monitored continuously to keep constant the temperature during the incubation as well as air humidity, air pressure and a balanced ratio of the molecular oxygen and carbon dioxide. In every mushroom culture cycle all the physical and chemical parameters that could influence the mycelia growing as well as fruit body formation of L. edodes and P. ostreatus were compared to the same fungal cultures that were grown on poplar logs used as control samples.