Garden Pictures

I mentioned before that I inoculated some logs with Shiitake myself.

The first challenge was to find the right wood. While I have a lot around, there are some specific requirements to be met. Oak and beech are perfect woods, they also last the longest and will produce the biggest harvests over 5-7 years. Apple, maple and sweet chestnut are also suitable. I did not try hazel and alder. Logs should be 2-4 feet long and ideally have a diameter of 4-6 inches, so the fungus can occupy the log as fast as possible, which prevents infections with other (competing) fungi. The bark has to be intact. The log should not be too fresh (4 weeks+ after cutting, so the tree’s immunity mechanisms are not fully at work anymore) and not too old (less than 3 months, not dried out).
There should be also 6-10 weeks time left before major frosts.
Among the logs potentially fitting those criteria, I mostly got birch. For Shiitake supposedly not ideal, but possible.

I drilled the holes, filled them with mycelium substrate, kept everything clean and then moist. Next summer, nothing happened. All the other logs produced lots of mushrooms, nothing on the birch. Its rings started to look whitish, which I took as a sign of the fungus spreading.
Earlier this summer, again – nothing. I kept the logs moist like the others, regardless.
Suddenly, this September, the first little Shiitake mushroom appeared on a birch log, 2 years after the inoculation.

Now there are more, and very nice ones.
So, if you try that yourself, and it looks like a failure, don’t discard the logs too early.

The fastest results I had by growing Shiitake on sawdust.

A pressed block gave me mushrooms regularly for 2 years. Less and less with each wave, but one can even activate it indoors. My first oak logs are going strong, and show no signs of fatigue.

Autumn is mushroom time. A wet August and September with mild temperatures are ideal, but that doesn’t happen every year. October and November can usually be relied on. And cooking is fun again, the body craves a warm meal. Mushrooms must have been the surprise eggs of the early human hunter.

I used to (and still do) go for lengthy walks to find them. Get up early (better before the ones in the know) and spend 3-4 hours in the forest scanning the ground. One develops a sense for mushrooms and their preferred places after a while. One might actually smell them, like a truffle dog, but it’s more likely that experience signals that a pretty birch tree with fresh moss underneath is just the place one would choose to live in if one were a mushroom. There’s also the weather component – a warm rain, and they pop, often overnight.

After such a day, I tend to dream of mushrooms. It’s like finding rare books in a library without catalogue, wandering along the shelves with the head tilted to one side, examining titles. Over a few hours it’s draining in a weird sort of way.

While good days fill the baskets quickly, more often than not there’s none, or only the grandpas, mushy and wormy inside.