Composting versus stacking of selenate-supplemented spent mushroom substrate: Effects on soil selenium transformation, DOM characteristics, and bacterial community response.
Zhou F, Qi M, Ren R, Liang D
Composting
If you grow mushrooms at home or source spent substrate for your garden beds, how you treat that leftover material before adding it to soil determines whether the selenium it contains feeds your plants steadily or flushes away — and possibly into groundwater.
Mushroom growers sometimes enrich their growing medium with selenium, and the leftover substrate can be reused as a garden fertilizer. Scientists found that properly composting this material first causes the selenium to bind tightly to stable organic matter in soil, releasing it slowly. Just piling it up without composting does the opposite — it makes the selenium loose and easily washed away, which is both wasteful and potentially harmful to soil life.
Key Findings
Composted selenium-enriched substrate reduced soil selenium mobility by 12–13%, while stacked (uncomposted) substrate increased it by 17–18%.
Composting increased the humic acid-bound selenium fraction by 30–40%, locking selenium into stable organic forms that resist leaching.
Composted fertilizer shifted soil bacterial communities toward active metabolic functions and strengthened microbe-organic matter interactions, while stacked fertilizer triggered stress responses in soil bacteria.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Composting spent mushroom substrate (the leftover material after mushroom cultivation) before using it as a selenium-enriched fertilizer locks selenium more safely into soil, while simply stacking it makes selenium more mobile and potentially leachable. The difference comes down to how composting transforms the organic matter and shapes the soil microbial community.
Abstract Preview
Selenate-supplemented spent mushroom substrate (Se(VI)-SMS) requires stacking or composting pretreatment for safe reuse as a selenium (Se)-enriched organic fertilizer, yet how these pretreatments i...
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A mushroom is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or another food source. A toadstool generally refers to a poisonous mushroom.