January 6, 2023
Not unlike a couple of vegetable farmers pouring over seed catalogs and dreaming of summer, Anne and I have been making our annual mushroom plan. We picked the types of mushrooms we want to grow, selected the various strains of each and ordered the bags of spawn we’ll need for inoculating next month.
As we do every year, we’ll replace 100 of our 700 active shiitake logs and retire the older, less productive ones. We picked a new strain to try this year. It is supposed to produce well during the hottest months of the summer, so hopefully we can better keep up with the demand in July, when a lot of our other shiitakes take a break. Once we’ve inoculated the logs (by drilling holes and filling them with shiitake spawn), it takes the mycelium a year to completely incubate inside the log and to start producing mushrooms. So, the new strain won’t help us until next year. Patience…
We’ll also be expanding our collection of hericium mushrooms. Both the “lion’s mane” and “comb tooth” varieties of hericium take 2 years to produce mushrooms, so the logs we inoculated last year (for the first time) still have another year of incubation before we’ll know if it worked. In the meantime, we’ll keep our fingers crossed and inoculate more logs. We’ll know next fall if all our efforts are going to pay off. More patience…
We’ll also be adding maitake, “chicken of the woods”, and “turkey tail” mushrooms. They apparently are much harder to grow than shiitakes, but we find them growing wild all around us so I don’t know why they are so difficult to domesticate. I’m sure we’ll find out.
We will also be growing almond agaricus, and wine cap stropharia. To date, all our mushroom growing has been done on freshly cut logs but the “wine caps” and “almonds” like their wood slightly decomposed. The wine caps prefer wood chips and the almonds like compost. We’ve been stockpiling both and are excited to try something new (and relatively easy!).
Growing mushrooms outside is unpredictable at best and growing them on logs is extremely labor intensive. But just as the taste of a hot-house tomato can’t begin to compete with one grown outside in the elements – a mushroom grown on a log tastes very different than a mushroom grown in a plastic bag. Somethings are truly worth the extra effort!