Grow Your Own Mushrooms

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Shiitake

The full, smoky flavor of shiitake mushrooms is matched by their texture, which is so dense that they’re downright meaty when cooked; together, the taste and texture make them especially well suited for use in stronger-flavored dishes. Shiitake also dry well, which is fortunate because they often produce in large flushes. These mushrooms can be grown on blocks of sterilized sawdust, either plain or enriched with cottonseed meal, or on freshly cut hardwood logs. The mycelium runs faster in sawdust because the abundant surface area between sawdust particles provides such easy opportunities for colonization. However, growing shiitake on logs produces a better mushroom, and shiitake logs also can be pretty. “In China, people may find a river and partially bury the inoculated logs vertically on the sandbank, so they become a beautiful landscape feature,” says Frank Michael, producer of shiitake spawn at Mushroompeople in Summertown, Tenn.

In your own yard, you can stack inoculated logs into tipis, angle them against a fence or lay them on the ground on a bed of straw to create what Stamets calls a “land raft.” After three years or so, when fruiting falls off, you can lay the logs in the woods where they may continue to produce a few mushrooms. “We have piles of old, ruined logs that sometimes produce after 10 years,” Michael says.

An ideal inoculated shiitake log is a 40-inch-long chunk of oak or other dense hardwood, 4 to 6 inches in diameter, cut in late winter or spring when the wood is rich with natural sugars, and with the bark left intact. Use a drill to make 1-inch-deep holes 5 to 6 inches apart all around the log. Into these holes insert plugs of spawn, which can be tapped in with a hammer. Each hole is then capped with a thin coat of melted wax to prevent drying and seal out contaminants. Once inoculated, the logs are stacked in a shady place where they can be watered heavily twice a week to keep the internal moisture level of the logs at about 50 percent.

One summer must pass before the logs are ready to fruit. If you inoculate logs in the spring, when fall arrives, you need to immerse a few of them at a time in cool water for 24 hours — the best way to induce fruiting. You can put them in a water trough or old bathtub, or tie them to a concrete block and place it in the shallows of a creek or pond (make sure the logs are completely immersed). And sometimes, if you’re lucky, heavy fall rains will take care of the mandatory soaking for you.

Two to four days after the logs’ soaking, mushrooms will appear. Harvest them with a sharp knife. By rotating a few logs at a time through 24-hour soakings followed by six to eight weeks of resting, you can have fairly reliable, daily harvests of shiitake.

Michael says you can keep shiitake logs fruiting through winter in a greenhouse by strategically soaking a few along and putting the soaked logs in the shade of taller plants. For steady home production, the best strategy is to inoculate 12 to 25 logs, and rotate them so that small groups of two to four are being soaked and brought into production at six-week intervals. Start a new crop every year or two, whenever good logs become available, and you never will be without shiitake.

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