Mushrooms in Logs

These spotty looking logs are part of our new mushroom growing adventure.  A few weeks ago mom and I order some shitake plugs and some spores of red cap mushrooms.  This inspired a friend to order some shitake, lions mane, and hen of the woods plugs, and team up with us for a day of mushroom planting.  I've never cooked with shitake mushrooms, but I think I have had them at restaurants and seen them at the grocery.  Whew - expensive!  I've never even seen red cap, lions mane, or hen of the woods for sale.  My mushroom hunting friend has shown me pictures of them, and may have pointed them out to me when we were hiking, but I've never eaten any.  I love mushrooms though, so I'm sure they will be delicious if we manage to harvest some. 

"Everybody, point at the tree!"  At least Jamie tried to humor me.  Our first step was to find some suitable trees to cut up into logs.  I love a project that starts with a family hike in the woods.  I hate to cut a live tree though, but it had to be done, so we looked for trees that were mushroom friendly, which meant they were the recommended species and size, that were growing so close to other trees that they didn't have enough room to get bigger.  This way we could do a little forest management as we harvested by thinning the crowded trees.  We ended up cutting down two small white oaks and a small maple tree, and cutting the trunks into thirty-six inch sections.   The hardest part of this project was hauling the log sections out of the woods and to our work station.  Next time I might not be so concerned with forest management and may just cut down the trees closest to the front yard! 

You can see the mushroom inoculated plugs in the bag in the picture above.  The plugs are short pieces of dowels with grooves in them and white stuff in the groves.  The white stuff is the mushroom that will spread throughout the logs and eventually send up the edible mushroom caps.  Drilling the holes wasn't a quick task, and I almost got a blister - from a power tool!  Pathetic, I know. 

Fortunately for tired adult log haulers and drillers, the kids loved to pound the plugs into the holes drilled in the logs.  It's amazing how fast they learned to move their fingers out of the mallets way.  Don't worry, there were no tears, at least not from the kids. 

The last step was to paint the inserted plugs with some melted cheese wax that we melted in an old crock pot.  The red color of the wax gives the logs a weird measly look, but it did a good job sealing the plugs and made it easy for me to see if I (or my assistant) got a little sloppy and didn't get a good coating. 

The red cap mushrooms were planted in wood mulch on the asparagus bed.  The idea is to mulch the asparagus and grow edible mushrooms in the mulch, so you get more food in the same amount of space.  The mushrooms are also supposed to help vegetables grow better, by breaking down the organic material in the mulch.  As more wood mulch is added to the bed, the mushrooms will spread to it and keep coming back year after year.  I think it's a great idea, and I hope it works.