Choosing oyster mushroom logs
Oyster mushrooms are a
lot less picky than shiitakes, so you can put them in the easier to
come by deciduous softwoods rather than in the more difficult to
come by hardwoods.
Last year, though, we had a few extra sycamore logs leftover from
shiitake inoculation, so we went ahead and inoculated sycamore logs
with our oyster spawn too. As a result, this is the first year
we're putting oyster mushroom plugs into our ubiquitous box-elders.
You might have wondered
why Mark
was cutting down fresh trees on Friday when our woods is
full of deadfall from the December storm. We could have used some
of that deadfall for our mushroom logs, but it wouldn't have worked as
well. When the trees tumbled down in December, they were dormant
and were storing all of their sugars in their roots --- the deadfall
that resulted was very low quality from a mushroom point of view since
it lacked any sugars at all. Now that spring is coming, trees are
starting to push nutrient-filled sap up to the branches, a process that
maple syrupers take advantage of to fill their buckets with maple
sap. By waiting to cut down fresh trees in late February, we're
giving our spawn a higher quality substrate, full of sugars to help
them grow quickly.
Our box-elder logs were
completely coated with a dense mixture of mosses and lichens, unlike
last year's sycamores which were bare-barked. I can't seem to
figure out whether these epiphytes will help or harm the oyster
mushrooms' growth, but they sure are pretty!
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.