Growing culinary mushrooms and using fungi for ecological restoration is fun, easy and tasty! Growing gourmet mushrooms is an interesting addition to gardening that can provide you with numerous harvests containing more delicious gourmet mushrooms than you’ll be able to eat.
Shitake Logs
Growing gourmet mushrooms on wood logs and wood chips can be as easy as growing kale and best of all needs no sunlight. Those shady evergreens in the yard finally have a productive purpose! Oyster and shitake mushrooms grow well on wood logs that roughly measure 5 inches in diameter by 40 inches long, ideally cut or acquired at winters end. The logs are drilled and plugged with spawn (seed) sealed with wax and stacked in the shade. With good moisture and shade they will begin to pop mushrooms in 12-18 months and depending on the species of wood used can produce up to 8 years. Oyster and shitake are especially productive in our climate.
Does working with logs sound like a pain in the back? Wine Cap mushroom are best grown on hard wood chips and can grow up top 5 lbs! Once the mycelium (thread like structure of fungi) colonizes the chips they can be tucked under your vegetables to double your harvests and boost plant growth.
Gourmet mushroom cultivation is easy to learn and begin. Ecologia offers hands on workshops and installations.
Ruby harvesting oyster mushrooms
Recommended reading for both cultivation and restoration: Paul Stamets ‘Mycelium Running’.
