Woodchips are a decent idea for low-maintainance gardening. Depending on the wood, you can use them to grow various mushroom species.
I once (by accident) even got MORELS growing, at the old house, after my mother, before she died recently, ordered a load of woodchip mulch to be put down over their section of the garden, and later, up sprang a truly vast crop (and several subsequent crops too:)) of Morchella elata, one of the black morels. These are some of the very best wild mushrooms that can be found to eat anywhere in the world, and you'd pay top whack for even a few dried morels in a little plastic packet. They have a lovely meaty, smoky flavour. They MUST be cooked or they can be to a degree, toxic. But once cooked are perfectly edible and absolutely deeeeee---licious. They fruited for weeks, crop after crop after crop after crop and even started invading the surrounding area of the estate, sprouting out of the wood of people's fences, dead branches and the like. So for weeks I went out walking round the estate on 'morel patrol', searching by garden fences, in the woods etc. and harvesting everything i could find, if it was growing from the external side of somebody's garden fence, on the outside, then I considered them fair game. Better I grab 'em than they go and get left simply to rot.
After the effort to clean them out (the are hollow and the inside is a perfect home for slugs and the like), for the next..well I don't know how long, but a long time, I was making morel soups, morels pan-fried in butter, morels just impaled on a fork and roasted over the flames of the gas stove after being seasoned (sometimes, sometimes I just ate them as they were without any condiments, although a little black pepper and soy or worcestershire sauce or both, maybe a drop or ten of tabasco habanero sauce is just lurvely. As are morels stuffed with whatever you can do with meat, be it minced beef, roast beef, stewed steak, fried steak, roasted steak, whatever your imagination can conjure that involves spices and primo-quality beef fillet or rump steak, or best quality lamb, once marinated/spiced or whatever to one's personal tastes, and used to stuff the hollow cavity within the morels (sliced in half first, to enable cleaning out the woodchip bits, the muck and debris, plus the inevitable slug or two and other little insects, small snails etc. etc.) they are the basis of a dinner to commit murder for. They are, along with parasol mushroom (Macrolepiota procera), giant puffball, sulfur polypore (Laetiporus sulfureus, aka the sulfur shelf, a bracket fungus, which unlike most brackets which are woody and inedible, the sulfur shelf is tender especially when young, juicy and delicious. Also called 'the chicken of the woods') Slippery jack and the larch bolete (Suillus luteus and a related Suillus species, I forget the second half of the binomial for the larch bolete, but its similar to the slippery jack, although more gracile in build, and smaller, whilst slippery jacks grow to the sort of size where one mushroom is best picked by simply grasping the stem in a fist and yanking it from the ground. I've seen those about 10 inches across at times, and the delicious Camaryllophyllus pratensis, the meadow waxcap, and Hygrophorus punicea, and another bright red species, the scarlet waxcap and the scarlet hood, my absolute top favourites of any mushrooms to be found, that I have ever eaten in my life. (and considering I'm 31 now, and I've been hunting wild mushrooms since about age 4, I have sampled rather a wide selection of different wild fungi. And those morels, they are definitely in my top 5 of all mushrooms ever tasted, quite probably in my top 3.
If I had to pick just five, it'd be, in no specific order, morels, giant puffballs, the sulfur polypore, Lactarius deliciosus, the saffron milk-cap, so named for its saffron orange color, its delicious taste and the fact that like the others of the milk-cap family which when the flesh is wounded, bleed a milky liquid. They are absolutely top notch nosh, and I'm going to go hunting for those in delamere forest (if anyone else goes and finds some, please do tell me, and please leave me at least a few, its a big forest, and there are more than enough when they fruit for them to be shared), so good that they have been most highly esteemed since roman times, and indeed are thought to be the first fungus ever to be depicted in art, as a roman mosaiic.
Found bagfulls the other year, absolutely loads of the buggers. They are not common but not extremely rare or threatened, and DEFINITELY worth eating. There is one mushroom with which its easily confused, Lactarius deterrimus, which tends to go more green with age than does L.deliciosus, and is slightly smaller as a rule, but confusion does not present a danger to the person eating L.deterrimus in place of the saffron milky, they look very, very similar but the only downside to L.deterrimus is it doesn't have quite the scrumptiousness of the saffron milkcap. Perfectly edible and worth bagging, or even impaling them on a bit of wood, whittled clean with a penknife and roasting them right then and there on the spot. like a mushroom kebab/satay stick. Good enough for sure just not AS good as the wonderfully delicious L.deliciousus, and no harm will come to the mushroom hunter who does mistake the two and eat L.deterrimus, they just aren't so satisfying and scrummy as what they are thought to be. Good, but there is better to be had.
and since I can't quite decide, either one of the three favourite of the waxcaps (meadow waxcap, scarlet hood, and the crimson waxcap), the hedgehog mushroom (a peculiar little fella, that instead of having the typical gills, or pores underneath the cap it has little spines (not sharp or capable of hurting a person) that disperse the spores), and are real good eating, or the slippery jack, fried in garlic butter and splattered in mixed lemon and lime juice.
Also, if you put down alder wood chips QV, you could get some Psilocybe cyanescens or P.azurescens spawn online (or if its spores you have to get, I'd be happy to do the culture work for you, I've already the agar, the petri dishes, and can prepare spawn ready to use starting from spores, and since they are a living organism, that grows, I'd just gain a sample of the mycelium myself and culture and subculture it, so I'd have some too, without the slightest loss to you and the PR, and both you and her royal cuteness could then enjoy, with either species, one of the most potent kinds of psilocybin mushrooms around. P.azurescens and P.cyanescens are both closely related, P.azurescens is the most potent of the two, but whilst the latter doesn't grow natively here, cyans do, aka wavycaps, and they are so potent that I've ended up, after harvesting a wild-found batch and picking pounds of the things along with my psychobitch former housemate, we both set to cleaning them, and whilst neither of us had eaten so much as a single mushroom, they were a little damp and needed drying, as well as sporeprinting to give me more to work with the year or two after, and root out anything that wasn't P.cyanescens by spore color and appearance under the microscope, after about 20 minutes, I'd guess, roughly, we both noticed that each other's eyes were dilated massively, and then that we were both spontaneously breaking out into bouts of laughter, and that that the walls were beginning to wave and weave and wiggle up, down side to side and all around in directions that probably shouldn't exist in a 4-D world, the kind of weird twists and shapes that would puzzle Cthulhu himself.
The spores for these are available online easily enough and from one print, I could easily grow you many many lots of spawn, effectively infinite (they are a cold-loving species to fruit them, so some DIY climate control is called for, or I could do it over here and send em over for you if you wanted, if you were to get the alder chips, I wouldn't mind paying for the spawn. So you, me and the PR could all have a big jar of some REALLY strong trippy shrooms:)
(seriously, with the less potent of the two, Cyanescens, one gram is enough to feel it properly, although not TOO intensely, two grams will hit big time, and 4-5g you won't even know who, or even WHAT you are.
