Edible Wood Farm Journal: 2018 (21)
Spontaneous
The recurrent showers and the lower daily temperature (20 – 25C) this past week had a refreshing result on a lot of the shrubs, grass and flowers. It was a relief to see the world at ground level start turning green again. The dry weather cracks at the end of the mushroom logs had more or less disappeared and many of the shiitake logs fruited spontaneously. The small brown button-like bulges should be ripe enough to pick next week. And all of that without having to soak the logs.
Artificial
The whole idea of soaking the logs is to shock the mycelium into producing mushrooms. Soaking replaces the appropriate natural conditions (warm and dry followed by cold and wet) and is handy when there is a need to “artificially” produce mushrooms. The shiitake fungus (mycelium) in the log will produce a mushroom (fruiting body) as a reaction to the sudden unfavourable conditions. Once an oak log has been inoculated it takes about 18 months before the shiitake mycelium is ready to produce mushrooms. The major task of an Edible Wood Farm is to induce the mycelium in the log to produce mushrooms. A log is deemed succesvol after the first harvest and is stacked apart with other logs that also have managed to produce mushrooms. These logs receive the title “edible wood” and are ready to find a new home.
Harvest happy
Soaking the logs after waiting 18 months is a gratifying occasion and heralds the opportunity of earning some income. I always enjoy seeing the mushrooms appear on the logs and I seem to have a well developed primal reflex of picking everything harvestable within sight. After the long hot dry period I was keen to start this phase but there was a hitch. The groundwater constraints were still in place as there had not yet been enough rainfall to lift them and would probably take many weeks before they could be lifted. The logs that had not fruited after the rainfall had still to be soaked and this was a puzzle that to be solved.
