Signs of Spring
Early morning sights on Maitri Homestead. Wine cap and Lion’s Mane mushrooms, pear blossoms and baby blueberries, pea shoots and greenhouse starts, and mullien… I 💗 spring!
Winter Shiitake Mushrooms
We have a set of logs inoculated with a cold weather strain of sawdust spawn called Snow Caps. They have been fruiting on and off all winter. It’s a bit strange to harvest mushrooms when it’s cold outside.
Wine Cap Mushrooms Naturalized In Garden Beds
Several years ago we inoculated mulch in a few areas of our garden with Wine Cap mushroom sawdust spawn. We harvested a few mushrooms, but it has been a disappointing yield until this year. We’ve harvested several pounds of Wine Cap Mushrooms in the past month with more coming up now. As long as we
Shiitake Mushrooms In Winter
This past spring we inoculated about a dozen red oak logs with a cold weather shiitake mushroom strain called Snow Cap. They have been fruiting all winter long! We also inoculated logs with a warm weather strain called Halo. Between the two we should be harvesting mushrooms more regularly throughout the year. Picked almost a
Shiitake Mushrooms From Old Logs
I thought these mushroom logs from March 2015 were about done, but they are fruiting about 8 lbs of Shiitake mushrooms.
2017 Garden Harvest Summary
Our gardening is pretty much done for this year, but surprisingly there are still broccoli, cabbage, kale, spinach, cauliflower and lots of cilantro still slowly growing. In March of this year we started weighing our garden harvests and keeping a simple log that includes the date, fruit/vegetable, and weight of everything we harvested. We currently
Mushrooms Courtesy of Hurricane Harvey
We received about 6 1/2 inches of rain this past week as what was left of Harvey came through Tennessee. That much rain caused the Shiitake mushroom logs to start fruiting like crazy. We have yet to see any Oyster mushrooms from this years inoculated Poplar logs.
Oyster Mushroom Logs
We inoculated 18 Poplar logs with Oyster mushroom sawdust spawn this spring in addition to the Shiitake logs from 2 years ago. You can read that post, here. With any luck we will have Oyster mushrooms starting this summer or fall. Last year the Shiitake logs were prolific and we gave away, froze or dehydrated all
Fall Gardening – Mushrooms and Pears
The mushrooms logs are fruiting like crazy this fall. This days harvest was about 3.5 lbs. We eat as many as we can, and dehydrate or freeze the rest. Our pear trees are still too young to give fruit, but our friend George at Green Thumb Nursery has a large pear tree. Sarah and Ben
Shiitake Mushroom Update
Our first foray into inoculating our own oak logs can be viewed, here. That was about 15 months ago, and we have harvested some mushrooms since then, but this was our first sizable harvest of about 4 lbs. We thought we might have let our logs get too dry over the winter, but the boys