My parents bought us a Shiitake sawdust spawn starter kit as a Christmas gift from Field and Forest Products. We had to wait a little bit before we could actually inoculate the logs because they recommend that daytime highs stay consistently above 45 degrees. We had planned to fence in the garden area and cut down some trees which shaded the east side of the garden. Some of the trees that needed to be cut down were oaks, so I just timed felling the trees with the pre-spring warm up. They recommended inoculating newly cut logs within two weeks of felling. I’ll post updates to the blog as we harvest mushrooms, which should hopefully be this fall.
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| The inoculated logs are stacked in a shady area while the spawn fully colonize the logs. We inoculated 26 red oak logs using 5.5 lbs of sawdust spawn. These logs should hopefully produce mushrooms for 3 to 8 years. I’ll walk through the steps we did to inoculate the logs. |
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| We timed our order with the weather, which has finally warmed up enough to inoculate our oak logs. The sawdust spawn comes in a 5.5 lbs bag that can be kept in the refrigerator if needed before using it. |
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| I built a work stand for rolling the logs as we are doing all of the various steps: drilling, inoculating and waxing. I think if we do more of these next year I’ll build another one of these so that one person can drill holes, while two people inoculate and wax at the other work stand. |
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| We use an angle grinder with a special adapter and drill bit to greatly speed up drilling all the holes, which are spaced 6 inches apart on a row, then staggered 2 inches between each row. You’ll end up with a 6″ x 4″ diamond repeated around the entire log. |
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| A close up of the angle grinder with adapter and 12 millimeter drill bit. We bought our angle grinder at Harbor Freight for $10, which was cheaper than the adapter or even the special drill bit….go figure. |
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| We put the sawdust spawn in a clean coffee can and jabbed the inoculator tool into the spawn to load the inoculator. |
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| The bottom of the inoculator is placed over each hole. Depressing your thumb on the top of the inoculator pushes all the sawdust spawn into the hole. |
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| Once a row was filled with sawdust spawn we sealed each hole with wax using a dauber. We bought an inexpensive electric single burner cook top to keep the cheese wax melted. We used a metal coffee can to melt the wax in. Once we’re done we will put the lid on it until next time. The cook top and pot for the wax will get incredibly dirty with wood shavings and wax, so use items that you’re ready to get dirty. |
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| A completed hole that has been inoculated and sealed with wax. |
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| Ben is sealing the ends of the log with wax….Bandit is supervising. |
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| Aluminum tags with the date and shiitake strain are nailed to the end of each log. Finally, the logs are stacked as shown in the first picture. |
