Edible Wood Farm Journal: 2018 (16)
It is Sunday evening when I am writing this blog and I am still wearing my my work clothes and my muscles are tired from an afternoon shifting logs. Mushroom logs don’t particularly like hot and dry conditions especially when there has been no measurable precipitation the past six weeks. Combine this with an often present breeze and then you get a edible wood farmer spending a Sunday afternoon with a poorly functional garden sprinkler at the Edible Wood Farm. The current focus is no longer on producing mushrooms but on increasing the humidity in the forest in order to prevent the forthcoming supply of mushroom logs from drying out.
Too dry
A couple of weeks ago I was happily soaking the logs so that they could produce mushrooms. The sudden and sharp temperature change from warm (air) to cold (water) is with this weather more than sufficient to “shock” the mycelium into producing mushrooms. After that the young mushrooms needed enough air moisture in order to grow into harvestable products. The shiitake logs had reacted really well to a soaking under these weather conditions and last week there was an exceptional abundance of young shiitake mushrooms. Unfortunately they dried up on the log before they had reached
the picking phase (photo). They felt more like snail shells than soft mushrooms.
Sprinkler
The next batch of mushroom logs was treated to a number of sprinkler sessions after the soaking phase and the results were much better. But… it was a lot of work, a lot of water and was (and is) not a good way of working with the elements. It is worth mentioning that the external watering options were better suited to a garden than to a forest. Investing in a better system was certainly a good idea but I had to use what I had at that moment.
Close together
The past week had been spent in working out how I can efficiently and effectively use the sprinkler until rain has arrived. Stacks of logs in different growth phases widespread over the area have been restacked close together so that the sprinkler can be used more effectively. The shiitake log stacks now get sprinkled for a short period every second day and the moisture content in the logs appears to be increasing or is at least stable. The effectiveness of these extra measures will, of course, only be known after several months when the shiitake logs in spé do what they are supposed to do … and that is to produce mushrooms.
