The Would-Be Farm: Starting Fungi

Mr. Linton keeps saying "There's a fungus among us," while we work on inoculating logs.

​My inner pun-generating machinery seems to be missing a cog, because all afternoon it's been hanging up on the near-relation of toadstool to footstool, shrooms to looms, shiitake and sciatica. 

Still, it's pleasant work, planting this spring's experimental crop of shiitake mushrooms.

No plows or tractors or harvest-combines required. ​

Instead, the mushroom field is contained within a log of about two feet in length and six inches in diameter.

Based on research, I thought we'd start with perhaps 20 logs and a single kind of mushroom. Mr. Linton picked the variety from the dizzying array of options from Mushroompeople.com.

The process seems pretty straightforward: shiitake mushrooms love hardwood, and while we could get a chipper and grow mushrooms in a sterilized chipped-wood substrate, why not just inject a chunk of wood with "seed"?  

Background info: living wood has a degree of anti-fungal protection, which is why dead tress are the ones really covered in mushrooms.  

So the first step to growing "tame" mushroom is to cut down the appropriate tree. There's a week's window as the tree's natural resistance peters out and wild mushrooms take over.

Bring on the chainsaw!

We cut down a couple of bitternut hickories, the unproductive half of an old apple-tree, and a maple, trimming the logs to an easy-to-handle length.  

The different kinds of hardwood are more experimentation –– this time for flavor and for production.

Will the apple log produce sweeter shrooms than the maple?  Will bitternut finally find its ideal job on the farm?   Stay tuned for these and other developments... 

Meanwhile, in the bottom of my sister's refrigerator, the mushroom spawn lurked damply.

It arrived via USPS: a shipping box containing a plastic bag of fine sawdust with some white stuff in it. It required refrigeration, and I hid it way in the back. It looked both vaguely alien and definitely like the kind of science project that deserves to be pitched from the fridge. 
 
On planting day, I kept the bag sealed and kneaded it until the lumps of white stuff (spawn, colonizing nicely thank you very much!) broke into pieces and mixed into the substrate. 

Ironically, it's important to maintain a sterile workspace when planting mushrooms. You don't want to grow the wrong kind of fungus, and you don't want bacteria to get a foothold.

To isolate the spawn from contamination, we made an outdoors working area as clean as we could. I used rubber gloves and boiling-water sterilization for the various pots and tools. The green bowl held a diluted Chlorox bleach disenfecting bath for the equipment. 

Of course we had a good supply of surgical towels courtesy of our pal Andy H. Love those things! 

Mr. Linton drilled a matrix of holes in the logs. 

(Why yes, it was snowy that day in April. On the plus side: the punkies did not bother us.)

I used a plastic funnel and a dowel to tamp spawn mixture into the hole.

The spawn has a texture very much like raw portobello mushroom: it's spongy and resistant to being jammed into a small space.  Next time, I'll squish the substrate-and-spawn bag even more aggressively before starting.

The particles need to be very fine in order to pack into the log. And air-pockets are generally bad. 

Each plug of spawn was topped with dollop of parafin wax (to keep moisture in and contaminants out). hen the log was filled and sealed, it went to a damp, shady corner of the farm to let the fungi do its collective thing.

We might see the first mushrooms sprouting as soon as the end of this summer.

A more realistic prediction is that the colony should be ready to start fruiting next summer. If the literature is correct, these logs should produce shiitake mushrooms for three to five years.  

Mushroom soup, anyone?