Outdoor Mushroom Cultivation
Mika Miyamoto | Sustainable Mushroom Cultivation Consultant
What’s always drawn me to mushrooms is their elusiveness; they spend most of their lives unseen underground and pop up for a short period of time before disappearing again beneath the soil. Some are coveted for their flavors and highly sought after, but most go unappreciated, and yet, they are such a strong foundation to the forest communities. They work tirelessly to eat up dead material, recycling the nutrients to be available for plants and other organisms to use. They are the unsung heroes of the forest and at Wonka’s harvest we hope to give these little workers a bit of a spotlight while also supporting our community with delicious and nutritious foods!
Let me sum up outdoor mushroom cultivation for you in three simple points:
It’s easy
It’s cost effective
It’s really fun!
Let’s get to it, what does it take to grow mushrooms?
Well, it all begins with your food supply, or substrate, which in this case is logs from specific trees. This is the foundation for our mushrooms to grow on and eat from, so it’s important that we supply them with healthy logs so that we can ensure they will produce the best mushrooms. A couple weeks before spring hits in Southern Wisconsin, we’ll go out and chop down trees from hardwood species, such as: Oak, Sugar Maple, Beech, Ironwood, and Hickory. Once we have a supply of healthy trees that we have rested for about 2 weeks, we can begin to drill holes into the logs in a diamond fashion (see image below). Next comes the toughest part, inoculating the logs.
Drill-and-Fill Inoculation Method Drilling Pattern (for Shiitake, Oyster and all other log-grown mushrooms)
Image Source: https://www.fieldforest.net/category/growing-outdoors
To describe the inoculation process I will first need to provide a bit of background on how mushrooms are formed. Mushrooms, and more broadly fungi, spend most of their lives in a threadlike form called hyphae. When hyphae connect and form a mat, this is known as mycelium. You can imagine mycelium as a white, stringy, web found below ground or within trees. When fungi are in this form, they are happily surviving with plenty of access to food. Fun fact: one of the largest and oldest organisms found on the planet is actually located in the state of Oregon. There lies a single fungi’s mycelial web which spans an estimated 2,394 acres and could be 8,650 years old (Casselman, 2007)!!! Fungi rarely come above ground unless they are under some sort of stress, this can be due to lack of food, temperature changes, or other environmental factors. When this happens, the mycelium begins to come together to form the complex structure we know as mushroom. A mushroom is really just a flashy way for the fungi to release their spores. Spores contain the genetic formula to produce more fungi. Another way we can think of a mushroom is like a fruit containing seeds. When and where specific mushrooms grow is actually still quite a mystery to researchers and requires more studying, surprisingly!
Stringy web of shiitake mycelium
Now that you know the basics, let’s get back to our plan. When we buy our starting organic fungi, in our case shiitake mushrooms, it’s growing on a highly nutrient substrate, like hay/straw, oats, or rye seeds. Since the fungi is happy and has lots of food, it’ll be growing in the form of mycelium. And a little mycelium goes a long way. We plan on buying 5 lb. bags of shiitake mycelium, breaking it up, and then using a special tool to push the mycelium into the holes we drilled in our logs. Once the holes are filled with mycelium, we will cover them with wax to reduce any loss of moisture and boom! Inoculation complete! What’s even more amazing is that one 5 lb. bag of mycelium can inoculate 20-22 logs each with 50 holes drilled. Now if I do my math correctly, that’s about 1,100 holes which all have the potential to produce shiitake mushrooms for us! Oh yeah, and if you’re really lucky a healthy log can support and produce shiitake mushrooms for up to 8 years! Pretty amazing if you ask me.
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Drilling holes in diamond pattern into log
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Inoculating the logs—a little goes a long way!
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Covering with wax to reduce loss of moisture
But let’s talk maintenance. You might think it takes a lot of work to grow that many mushrooms. Honestly, it’s pretty hands off. The mycelium, the log, and the beauty of nature should take care of just about everything. What we will need to do is check up on the logs to ensure they aren’t exposed to too much sun or wind which could dry them out. If this happens, we may need to move the logs to a shadier spot and cover them with a tarp or water them every now and then.
After about a year of the mycelium fully invading the logs, we should see our first shiitake mushrooms being produced. It’s definitely going to be tough to wait, but once it happens we will know that we inoculated our logs properly and can expect shiitakes to sprout annually for the next couple years!
We’re all excited to begin growing mushrooms this spring at Wonka’s harvest, and even more excited to be able to provide you all with delicious food in the future. I’ve always loved the versatility of shiitake mushrooms with their unique nutty, earthy, aroma. Cooking with them really can’t be beat!
In the meantime, while we wait for our outdoor mushrooms to take off, we’re going to begin the process of learning how to grow mushrooms indoors which should provide a quicker, and more reliable way of getting mushrooms to your plates at home. Keep an eye out for more information about our indoor oyster mushroom set up!
If you’ve made it this far in this blog post, you will be surprised to learn that you now know more than the average person about fungi! I hope to keep providing you guys with more fungi knowledge and help everyone find their inner mycologist (a person who studies fungi)! If you just can’t wait to learn more, I highly suggest checking out the Madison Mycological Society. They are a wonderful group of enthusiasts who hold monthly meetings on different fungal topics, hosts foraging parties, and overall are a great resource.
Lastly, I would like to thank my good friend Ali Ballentyne for providing us with all these beautiful photos from her own shiitake log inoculation workshop out in British Columbia (BC). She’s embarked on a new journey through selling edible mushrooms to the greater Vancouver area in B.C. (check out her website at foraged.ca) and a side non-profit dedicated to mycology education (the fungi collective).
If you have any questions feel free to send us an email.