I took a class here in N Florida on shiitake culture. They gave us a handout from the spore provider nurseries. They are catered to your agric zone. They say type C17 is for our zone--8b. You have to use a deciduous hardwood (loses leaves in winter) log about 3 feet long and as big around as you can carry. Cut the log after first frost. Mine is about 5" diameter, and my son got about 9-10" dia. The bigger around the longer it takes the log to rot and completely stop producing. Deciduous hardwood here is turkey oak, water oak, laurel oak, southern red oak, hickory, white oak, white ash, black locust. Mark the tree during the summer when you can see the leaves, because softwood like pine will not do at all. cut the logs after the first frost when the trees are dormant (very important--no sap up in the layer that the spore plugs will be in) and up to the time in the Spring when the leaves begin to bud out. No more than one week before you will be innoculating them with the spores or spawn. Log should be free of internal decay, because poisonous mushrooms may have taken residence on a rotten log. Then drill holes 1 to 1.5" deep with a drill bit 5/16" diameter. The spawn are impregnated into dowels 1" long, which you buy. Hammer the dowels into the holes flat, not recessed. Melt your parafin wax in an ugly pot you bought at a junk sale or a fry-baby you won't be needing except to make candles or boil cinnamon at Christmas to smell up the house or something. Put log in the dark shade, like on the north side of the house leaning up toward the house on a cowboy horse-tying up place like in front of the saloon in westerns. You dont want it touching the house because you have to water it a lot. The old man who taught the class said he leaned his up to his block house ( that can't rot) between the row of azalea bushes and the block wall. Lean it up because sand will bounce up on to the mushrooms during hard rains. Twice a week down here on the coast, water the logs with a little sprinkler for 1 hour (up north where the air is dry: 6-12 hours). They taught us 1 hour is fine for all the coastal counties. It is drier up north where your nose bleeds just watching Oprah, so they need more watering. They brought a log impregnated in 2006, Spring to the class on Tuesday. Saturday before the class they put the log in a big cooler with 3 bags of ice and the log went into production and had eating size mushrooms by Tuesday to show the class. You can force them into production again and again by putting them into a cooler or something with a bag of ice. It has just turned a little cool here this past week, and my log is all popped out with mushrooms. Sauteed with garlic they taste like cooked oysters, only a little better. We served on angel hair pasta.

Hello, I'm hoping someone can help me or at least point me in the right direction. I'm trying my second home mushroom kit and am having some troubles. I grew 3 crops easily on a composite style log last winter. Now I am trying to do a real oak log, shiitake, inside my house. I started it just after the holidays and followed the directions closely for soaking it, misting, etc. but I ended up with an initial crop of only 3 small mushrooms that were hard. I also seem to be getting a fair amount of green and white mold. I initially cleaned the mold off with some vinegar, (I wonder if this is where I went wrong). Anyway, I did some online research and am now dabbing on alcohol to clean off mold. I tried to "let it rest" on a bed of moist soil, but again, it got moldy along the bottom where it was on the soil. Now I have a dry log, mold-free, and want to try to get a harvest out of it at some point, but not sure how to proceed. HELP!

AEGH... I am currently in the Ozarts and although all the pear trees are in bloom, my oak logs are still in the woods in Maine under the snow when I could be there moving them into the green house to produce and I wanna start sowing seeds.....AAArrgh well enjoy those mushrooms, I'll be home next week and those logs will be in that greenhouse as soon as I can. Thanks for sharing Jim. and thank you for the link Robin and Cindy. I would like to try some other mushroom as well...I am not brave enough to forage from nature quite yet- this feels much safer. :) Imagine fresh green bean casserole with onions and mushrooms all grown and harvested from the garden. Sounds happy to me. I like my shitakes right off the log and into my mouth as my harvests were poor and great for the chipmunk. Which reminds me, I need to keep those logs in the greenhouse during harvest season and away from the critters.

Do very gad you survived (but wasn't worried because you wrote back). I'm told there's few really bad mushrooms fruiting up in the air on wood logs, that get the size and appearence of a gilled mushroom up. Of course you don't want to discover a new one! The Amanitas on the ground (above buried tree roots) are quite nasty. No sign after eating, until many hours later. The victim starts losing water from both ends to try to self flush the toxin, but it is too late. If one eats below a certain totally dose, they might be able to save them they can be hydrated enough. Above a lethal dose the science gets interesting. Too much of the liver auto digests and between that and inability to hydrate the person, there's no saving them. Cells are always turning over protein and remaking it. The literature I read said that the the toxin stops protein production by liver cells. Cells then autodigest. Less liver less chance to pick more mushrooms. Happy to have no first hand experience with this. Many inoculation sites in shittake cultivation on logs are used to help ensure that it wins out over other wood degrading fungi. Note however that Shiitake can pop up quite a distance down the log from where the plugs were introduced it into the log. The mycelium runs from the that perfect placement of pegs down the sapwood zone and under the bark running pretty fast through the open plant vascular tissue. It's after the easy to get carbohydrates, in the attempt to secure them before other other fungi. Then can it compete quite well, slowly degrading the other wood for energy source. You can get more nitrogen (in protein and amino acids) in the mushrooms harvested over time than in the original log! No this is not alchemy! It just suggests that nitrogen fixing bacteria got in there and were eaten by shiitake or external nitrogen was tranported in. At times shiitake mycelium runs out of the ends into the soil or leaf litter zone and it can pump nutrients back. In the spring or wet fall periods I've lifted logs and some had a nice patch of leaves (1-2' diameter) sticking to log as you lift it! Tricky fungus is harvesting what it needs. It can compete a little at soil level because it's powered by a lot of log behind, which it can degrade to get energy. In a faster closed nutrient system, such as in sawdust culture you must add grain or other nitrogen sources to get good mushroom yield. Luckily the mushrooms are more valuable than the grain. Are you just letting rainy weather make mushrooms or stimulating production 3 to 4 times a year by submerging logs under water and then restacking for fruiting? The idea is to let shiitake degrade wood a few months, then stimulate fruiting and repeat. At least some dim light is needed to grow shiitake indoors. This is because light is needed to initiate fruiting. And then it gets more complex. In nature on a log, the mycelium knows where to pop up. Light and lowered carbon dioxide levels are required to fruit, and bark extractives are stimulatory to fruiting. This how shiitake can choose to fruit on the log surface, rather than futility inside the log. Light, an increased rate of carbon dioxide loss, and bark are all at the surface. The expanding mushroom then uses gravity, light and perhaps carbon dioxide or surface water dehydration sensing? to know where to aim the cap and get the its spore holding umbrella up into a better place to cast spores to the wind. Rather than just let them get washed down right under the fungus on the ground that umbrella cap helps ensure it. The spores are trying to be deposited on newly fallen trees during fall, winter, spring weather. I think a chain saw works "more better". Nature is neat huh? Some of the above mushroom expansion phase needs more research. I did some of the early work in an earlier career on initial light trigger, carbon dioxide trigger, and bark stimulators. This was way back in the later half of the 70's through early 80's. Much fun.