Wintertime Fun with Fungi
The vegetable plants mostly are just chillin.' Slow growth means little harvesting, so we're keeping busy by cultivating mushrooms and doing other cold weather projects.
Here’s a rundown of how we made our mushroom logs.
A local tree removal company generously donated some freshly cut oak. It's ideal to use logs cut within about a month so that they still retain moisture and haven't become home to wild mushroom spores that will compete with your fungi.
We ordered shiitake and blue oyster spawn, or inoculate, from Mushroom Mountain in South Carolina. You can buy loose spawn in bags of sawdust and use a special tool to pack it into the holes, but we went with the quicker plug method. We drilled 1 1/4" deep holes, using a 5/16 drill bit, in a diamond pattern so the spawn plugs are about 6" apart. Our logs ranged from four to 8 inches in diameter. (If you plan to give each log a 24-hour soak twice a year, you don't want to be wrestling huge logs.)
After playing Whack-a-Mole with the mallet, we used a paint brush to swipe a light coating of melted cheese wax over each plug.
When we bring in a few wood pallets we'll simply stack the wood atop them in a sort of log-cabin set-up in the shade. Hopefully we'll get a small flush of fruit this spring. Our larger logs should produce for about 5 years.
Here are some good resources on growing mushrooms on logs:
Producing Shiitake Mushrooms (N.C. State)
Start Your Own Shiitake Mushroom Logs (Mother Earth News)
It's a fun process, and you'll reap many pounds of mushroom goodness in the years to come!