Mushroom Update

My husband wanted to grow more mushrooms this year. We innoculated a bunch of shitake logs back in 2023, and we did some more earlier this year. Here’s the post that I did on that this spring: https://cathyathomeontheriver.com/2025/03/24/making-mushrooms/

We recently got a bunch of rain and my husband noticed that our shitake logs were starting to sprout some mushrooms.

So he hauled about half of the newest logs up and we soaked them to force them to fruit. We soaked them in our big garden wagon for about a day, and then my husband pounded some stakes in the ground and put a board across them to support the logs. You want them off the ground. Last year we did a log cabin style stack, but it made it hard to get to all the mushrooms.

I was silly and picked the mushrooms before I took the photos. The mushrooms below indicate that the log really could have used a little more water.

We will keep these logs up and fruiting for about 2 weeks and then we will cycle through the rest of them over the next 10 weeks or so–until it gets too cold for them to grow well.

We also innoculated some logs with Maitake mushroom spores at the same time. Here’s that post: https://cathyathomeontheriver.com/2025/03/27/more-mushrooms-maitake-edition/

In that post, I mentioned that the logs have to be buried to get them to fruit. My husband cleared the gulley (and it was COMPLETELY overgrown) behind our house and used the tractor and a shovel to prepare a spot for them to grow.

We have a couple of piles of topsoil up by the barn and he used that to bury the logs.

He thinks that everything is going to settle and the tops of the logs will become exposed (the instructions say that the tops of the logs should be sticking out of the soil) and if that doesn’t happen, we’ll have to dig them out. I have never had maitake mushrooms (hen of the woods), so I will have to figure out what to do with them since the average maitake mushroom is a whopping 10 lbs and they can grow much larger. As you saw, we have a LOT of logs, so it could be interesting.

This is a HIGH value gardening project because shitakes go for $10 or so per lb and that’s with the stems which you can’t eat because they are so tough. I would put herbs and mushrooms way up there as things you can grow relatively inexpensively in your own garden that provide a fantastic bang for your buck when you can harvest your own instead of buying them from the grocery. I also really like flowers as a high value item, but you can’t eat those….