Shiitake Mushrooms

Several years ago I decided to try experimenting with growing shiitake mushrooms in birch logs. I had seen a display about growing mushrooms in oak logs when down in Toronto for the Royal Winter Agricultural Fair. The display intrigued me and I looked into the possibility of using birch logs as the medium rather than oak or sawdust which is also often used. Though it isn't really done anywhere some studies out of Japan indicated that birch would work, just not as well as oak. "Shii", after all is the Japanese word for oak.

So back in 2009 Paul and I inoculated about 70 logs with Shiitake mycelium which came from a fungi farm near Toronto.

Mycelium spawn in a sawdust form, capped with styrofoam to deter infection

The work was tedious amongst what seemed like millions of mosquitoes but we got it done in two sessions with the help of a gas powered drill.

These logs were successfully inoculated in the first summer but due to their size (6"+ diameter) they never did fruit and the shiitake mycelium was overtaken by other naturally occurring fungi found within the log or bark itself. You can see in the picture below that the mycelium grew throughout the logs, visible by the white outline of mycelium.

Gladly, we did a second batch of logs in 2010, this time with much smaller diameter logs. Unfortunately, I never did take a photo of these ones. The smaller logs were the ones that eventually fruited this Spring. We had extremely wet weather in Thunder Bay in late May which "shocked" the mycelium into a fruiting cycle. This is usually done manually by soaking the logs which forces the mycelium to then propagate by fruiting and later releasing spore into the environment. Anyhow, I was pleasantly surprised to go to the sugarbush recently and find some full grown shiitakes growing on the logs.

They were a little worse for wear but I cut off the squirrelly bits and we made a nice meal with them. 

Delicious, meaty shiitake mushroom stir-fry. A great surprise as I had written off this experiment a while ago!