It appears things are finally slowing down. We soaked our final batch of shiitake logs over the weekend of the 8th to 10th. During the height of the season, those mushrooms would start pinning (the initial baby mushrooms growing) within a few days. We'd take off the fruiting blankets and it would be an all out picking frenzy within another couple days. That batch we soaked over a week ago? We still have blankets on most of them! They've just barely started to fruit. Hopefully they'll pick it up a little with the warm weather today and tomorrow, but temperatures fall after this so we may be out of luck with the rest of this last batch. It was a bit of an experiment anyway; we've never forced 17 batches before!
Pinning! This is how big the shiitake are when they first start poking out of the log.
Getting bigger...
And bigger!
While force-fruiting is over and outdoor mushrooms slowly stop growing, lots of other work is ramping up. We have a couple big log-moving projects. All the 2019 logs are now 4th year logs so we need to collect them all out of their various areas and stack them up elsewhere. They are now available for sale! $5 a log, four-feet long, lots and lots available! We have also decided to move around the configuration of our logs so the force-fruiting ones will move up to the north side of the shade structure and the natural fruiting ones will move south, more to the center. And we're hopefully, finally, going to be building racks for those so they will be easier to pick in the future.
If anyone wants to come out and help us move logs for a day, it's a great arm work out! It's also a great time of year to do it because it's so cool outside. You can get to feeling pretty toasty moving all those logs. Drop us a line, let us know if you're interested - we'll gladly put you to work!
We are also ramping up making pates and butters as we have run out of many of those. And we have a few minor construction projects, some reorganizing in the pack-shed, and some planning for bigger projects to come.
There's never a dull day on the farm!
This is the (somewhat blurry) face of a kitty who was so, so, so happy when all his people came home! Our employees were around during the day when we were gone, but it's not the same. We're still trying to make up for lost cuddle time. 😊
