First fruit from homegrown mushroom spawn

The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

First fruit from homegrown mushroom spawn

Oyster mushroom totem I'm probably far more excited than this small cluster of mushroom merits. But here's the thing --- this is our first ever batch of fruits from spawn we grew ourselves.

This strain of mushrooms --- Pohu --- came to the farm in February of 2010 in the form of bought plug spawn. We inoculated box elder logs and enjoyed our first fruits that fall, then more this spring.

In March of this year, we saved some stem butts from the oyster mushrooms and used them to create cardboard spawn. Then, on April 13, we pushed the mycelium-filled cardboard into gashes in the sides of box elder log and covered the spawn up with melted beeswax. (That link shows us inoculating the stump, but we repeated the process with logs.) We buried the logs partway in the ground as mushroom totems and hoped the oyster mushrooms would do their thing.

The brilliant part of our plan was putting the mushroom totems where we pass every day walking Lucy. I'd long stopped checking on the totems when the first fruits appeared, but my eye is trained to mushrooms, so I saw the moist clusters Tuesday morning even though I wasn't really looking.

This experiment is only a partial success because the two sister totems --- one with wild oyster mushroom spawn we collected in Asheville this spring and one with Blue Dolphin spawn --- haven't yet fruited, and neither have our two experimental stumps. However, we inoculated the logs late this spring and I think I see a bit of mycelium on each one. So maybe we'll see fruits from all three next year?