Turkey tails
My
mushroom identification skills are sub-par, but I know for a fact that
this little guy shouldn't be growing out of the side of one of my
shiitake logs. I'm pretty sure it's a turkey tail, which is a
medicinal species and a useful decomposer of fallen logs.
Unfortunately, the turkey tail's presence means that the shiitake spawn
probably lost the battle for that log.
We're still relatively
new to mushroom cultivation, and losing a few logs to invasions of wild
fungi is pretty normal. Nevertheless, we'll take some steps to
keep our other logs turkey-tail-free. It's good for our logs to
be close to the ground for humidity, but we've
propped them up on metal pipes to prevent direct
contact. After all, as I learned this winter, the
soil is jam-packed with fungi.
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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.
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We haven't tried indoor cultivation --- we don't have lots of space indoors and don't want to spend all the money on creating lab-like sterile conditions. So I can only recommend outdoor cultivation at the moment.
We've tried oyster mushrooms and shiitakes, and are also trying morels and king stropharia (aka winecap) this year. Oyster mushrooms are by far the easiest, and you can grow them on almost anything (logs, wood chips, junk mail, etc.) Also, we're about 50% of the way to figuring out how to propagate them so that we don't have to buy the spawn, and have discovered that oysters are the easiest to propagate. We also have found that we like their taste best. It's an all around win-win!
To get started, I'd buy some plug spawn and put it in logs. That's pretty failsafe and relatively cheap. After you get some logs established, you can start figuring out how to propagate them to expand them into anything else you want.