A Shiitake Finally Showed Up Today

[LouNeo]

I inoculated this log last year with a local group, I dont know that its been in full shade though but it seems to have finally popped a Shiitake Mushroom lol. Im hoping it pushes some more Anyone else growing Shiitake or other mushrooms? Any recommendations? Also how long do you typically wait til you eat them?

[COGardener]

That is super cool Lou!!!

Shrooms will be in future but I haven't tried yet.

[LouNeo]

Someone that was doing this on a bigger scale brought in a bunch of small logs for us to drill out and inoculate during a hobby greenhouse club meeting locally. Was a ton of fun, made a huge mess of the hall as you can imagine and then 9 months later, BAM baby mushrooms starting lol. If you do get a chance to do it, its really easy and supposedly you get mushrooms for 2-3 years from the log I guess. If I liked mushrooms id be excited I just like trying to grow randomness.

[jrdewhirst]

In April 2015, I inoculated a bunch of white oak and red maple logs with shiitake, oyster, and lion's mane mushrooms. I won't claim to have been diligent about keeping the logs moist. They are piled on the north side of my garage. I've soaked them for a day 3-4 times. To date, I've gotten zero oysters, 1 lion's mane, and roughly 100 shiitakes. The shiitakes started in late spring 2016. I've attached a recent picture of some logs.

I've found that the shiitakes respond very well now to soaking -- a blush of mushrooms starts within a few days.

[cis4elk]

Looks perfect, great work Joe!

[figgrower]

Well, none that I've planted. Our yard is rather marsh-like this time of year, so mushrooms grow too well here. We even had some growing into our old LP siding before we replaced it. Yuck!! I would eventually like to actually plant the edible kind. Raintree Nursery has some growing advice for mushrooms. I believe that the wait time varies by species. You can look under the individual listings for mushrooms, but there is also a direct link to their growing guide. Mushrooms are toward the bottom. Here it is: https://www.scribd.com/document/2549...-Owners-Manual

[cis4elk]

Fungi Perfecti is out of Washington too, you should check them out. I pretty much consider them the mushroom cultivation authority.

[figwood1]

Nice, Ive wanted to try growing those also!!!

[cis4elk]

Nice Lou!
Next time, try get logs sized more like Joe has pictured. They are much more stable when it comes to moisture level, the ones he pictured are perfect size for growth and manageability. It's funny, when I call around looking for logs in early spring I always tell the tree service companies that I'm looking for logs "roughly the size of your leg", it seems pretty straight forward to me but they don't get it.

[LouNeo]

I will definitely do that. The one I have was from the meeting where the guy provided everything so I took what he brought I imagine he brought smaller because he had to actually get them all there haha.

[jrdewhirst]

I stated earlier (above) that I had gotten no oysters on my 18-month-old logs. Well, NEVERMIND! I checked this morning and, in addition to a bucket of new shiitakes on the white oaks, there were a few oysters just starting to pop out of a beech log. Here's a close-up of one eruption.



For me this is a great sign. I had inoculated white oak, red maple, and beech, all of which are probably harder wood than ideal. But I've seen lots of oysters growing on sugar maples around here, and oysters are supposed to be reliable growers, so I figured it might be just a matter of time. I also worried that I might have let the logs get too dry -- but the beeches seemed the driest of the three. I got the beech wood from a branch that had cracked off a tree in a storm, and it was partially rotted. I cut the oak and maple myself, roughly a month before inoculation.