The end of inoculations and the beginning of force-fruiting

This has been a busy weekend for us! We are finally, soon, going to call it quits on inoculations for the year. The goal for the year was 5,500 logs. We are currently at about 5,368. So close! But Jeremy has decided to quit when the spawn runs out or the end of the day Monday (tomorrow) whichever comes first! We’ll have a few un-inoculated logs left, so really not too bad. 

We need to quit that so we can move all the rest of the new logs and all the inoculating supplies out of the high tunnel to make room for fruiting mushrooms logs. We started soaking logs on Friday!

Dropping racks of shiitake logs into the fruiting tanks.

We already have almost 500 logs set up in the high tunnel. We lean them up on racks, cover them up with blankets to keep in warmth and humidity, spray it all down with water, and then wait. They should start pinning in a few days and hopefully in another week or so we’ll start to see lots of mushrooms!

Row after row of logs, nestled under blankets.

You can do it shiitake logs! You can make shiitake!

The Almonds have new neighbors…

The Almond Agaricus have been living the single life, nestled in their side of the high tunnel, for the past couple weeks. But this weekend a new mushroom buddy moved in: Wine Caps!

Since we put landscape fabric down to suppress the grass, we first needed to put down a thin layer of soil in the beds.

Then we loaded up some of the beds with wood chips…

And some with straw.

A bag of spawn was mixed in with each bed.  Some little bit of spawn there!

We still have an old bed of Wine Caps (in a mosquito haven!) that have grown a few Wine Caps already. We moved some of that bed into the new fruiting house so those could start any time. The Wine Caps on straw should start growing in a couple months and the ones in wood chips another month or two after that. Now we just have to keep these mycelium roommates both happy!