Yesterday we spent the day preparing to have mushrooms in the fall. Friends Joanna (who interned at a farm out here last summer) and Jacob came out for the day, bearing safety gear and two giant bags of plugs (basically dowels) inoculated with shiitake mushroom spores from Fungi Perfecti.
The first step (after eating delicious cinnamon rolls) was to find and cut down suitable hardwood trees and/or branches of 3-6 inches in diameter. I stayed out of the way for that, so no dramatic photos of timber falling (also no photos of Garth in his silly-looking hardhat with attached ear protection). But there were no chainsaw-related casualties, so that’s good.
The process is simple, if somewhat time-consuming, but once you get a rhythm down it goes pretty smoothly, assembly-line style … though we learned it would work better with a corded drill; the battery life on our 3 drills was our limiting factor.
You take your 5/16″ drill bit and put a bunch of holes in your logs, about 4 inches apart, in a diamond pattern. After you drill up a log, hand it over to the hammering section, where the next person puts one little plug into each hole and hammers it in. This was my favorite job.
Garth inserts inoculated dowels into drilled holes
Log with plugs
After it’s all full of plugs, the next person uses a little plastic syringe to suck up cheese wax from the dedicated wax-melting crockpot, and puts a little puddle of wax on top of each plug. This helps protect the log from being colonized by other, non-delicious spores.
Plugged log, with wax
And now, we wait, and keep them from getting too dry (water them or cover with burlap or shade cloth). And in the fall, we harvest (we hope) lots and lots of organic local shiitake mushrooms! I’m already planning lots of beef stew …
I love living vicariously through your photos of Learning New Things! Being Agriculturally Curious! Bold and Fearless Investigation! Carry on, chums.
I loooooove shiitake mushrooms! how very exciting!