Shiitake Mushrooms

Thanks for the link.  Our process is similar.  The native trees that we can use do include sugar maple and oak, but also ironwood and hophornbeam (which are a lot more common here).  Also, we were taught that there's really two ideal times to cut the logs.  Just after leaf drop in the fall, and the days just before the trees begin to bud.  The trees have the most "energy" in the wood at those times.  (The FG article says you can do it any time in winter.)  And we didn't use the dowels shown in the article.  The spawn is cheaper if you buy it in bulk and use a special tool that the supplier sells to pack it into the holes yourself.  Then, just like with the dowels, you have to seal the holes.  We were taught to use a 50-50 mix of melted paraffin and bees-wax. 

The weekend that we inoculated the logs, we had a regular assembly line, with 2 guys drilling all the holes in each log (and there are a lot of them), another person packing the holes with the spawn (we just had one of the injectors), 1 or 2 people painting the holes with the wax, and another person to carry the finished logs away to their shady location.  The logs also got aluminum labels attached to one end, which included information on what species of log was used, which variety of spawn (we had 3) and the date.  We planned to use this to determine which combinations of spawn and tree were most successful, but we haven't evaluated this in any systematic way since then.

We have about 200 logs that we inoculated and keep behind the barn in a damp shady area under some spruce trees.  DH towed an old cast iron bathtub nearby (found in the weeds at the lower barn), and uses it to soak a few logs at a time during dry periods, so that we usually have a few logs fruiting.  I thought this was odd at first, so found it amusing that the FG article mentioned bathtubs also.  We have also tried leaving a sprinkler running on the logs when we have a prolonged dry spell, but it doesn't get them wet enough in our experience.  Leaving the water running isn't a cost for us because our outside spigots are gravity fed from our local spring.

Edited 5/28/2009 5:09 pm ET by Catskill Deb