Did you ever wonder how mushrooms are produced by growers? If you’re not foraging for them and want to have a steady supply of mushrooms, it takes some doing. Andrew and the vegetable crew were busy this week doing just that: innoculating logs with shiitake mushroom spores to secure future harvests.
First you have to drill the holes for the innoculant.
These wooden plugs are soaked in shiitake mushroom mycelium (that would be the vegetative part of a fungus, to us laypersons). They look like gnocchi!
Then you have to hammer the wooden dowels into the logs and seal the holes with soy wax. Here is Ian hammering and Dori using the soy wax.
Finally once the logs are all coated with soy and ready to go, they can produce mushrooms for up to seven years. Seven years!?
This kind of longevity makes the mushroom crew happy!
I can almost smell the saute now…
Thanks to Stephanie for the pictures!
