Day-time temperatures staying above 40 F --- check.

Beeswax hunted down (from a neighbor who keeps bees) --- check.

Time to innoculate the shiitake logs!  We actually only innoculated about a third of the year's logs Thursday since it's very wrist intensive work.  First, drilling holes in a diamond pattern.

Next, hammering in the shiitake plugs so that they sit just below the bark surface.  As instructed, we'd kept the plugs moist in their bag in the fridge, and as I pounded them into the log, liquid bubbled up out of the holes.

Third, melting beeswax and painting it carefully over each shiitake plug.  It's essential that the logs be kept moist and also free of wild fungi --- plugging up the holes with beeswax helps with both.  (Other types of wax are too brittle and tend to flake off.)  This works best as a two person job, with one person turning the log and the other painting so that the wax goes on quickly and stays hot.

Finally, labelling the logs.  The first year, we labelled the ends with sharpies, and the numbers became illegible in short order.  This year, we screwed little pieces of old flashing into the ends and wrote the numbers on the metal tags, pressing down hard so that the indentation will remain even if the ink washes off.

We'll poke at the rest of the logs over the next couple of days.  Innoculating shiitake logs is a joy in the type of weather we've been having, so I'll be looking forward to it!

This post is part of our Innoculating Mushroom Logs series.  Read all of the entries: How to choose backyard mushroom varieties Preparing for your mushrooms --- cutting logs Shiitake innoculation Useful tool: Spade drill bit How to melt the wax Recording mushroom logs And don't miss the related series How to Cultivate Edible Mushrooms for Free

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.

Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.