My husband and I were outside harvesting crops and tending to the garden (as we do every day). And while harvesting some tomatoes, I decided to take a peak under our rain barrels to see how our shitake logs were doing (the answer has always been 'nothing' before).
Me: 'Holy Shitake!!!'
Husband: 'What??'
Me: 'You've got to see this!'
Husband: 'Is there a shitake?'
Me: 'Seriously, you've got to see this!'
Husband [peaking head to see logs]: 'Holy Shitake!!!'
This is what we were seeing:
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| Shitakes on oak logs--finally producing! |
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| Shitakes on oak logs! |
We harvested the ones in the bowl below the first night, and were pleased to see this amount was about a pound. We spent about $60 on the supplies to inoculate our shitake oak logs last year. Shitakes in our local grocery stores are in the $12-14 a pound range. So far, we've harvested over 7lbs:
so it looks like they have paid for themselves in their first flush!
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| 1 lb harvested shitakes. |
Now we are enjoying shitake egg scrambles, shitake omelettes, shitake and rice, shitake EVERYTHING.
We have more than I can eat, so I'm also drying some to use later:
more on that to come!!!
Congrats! That is way cool. We have some wine caps that I have neglected so I am not sure they will result in anything. We also have shitake plugs in the fridge that we need to find logs for. Maybe I will leave this post up so hubby can read it and he will get motivated.
ReplyDeleteHow exciting. I have always wanted to grow my own mushrooms, but it keeps dropping down the list because of the initial start up cost. Seeing your bounty makes me want to do it even more.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing.
Hi, Found your blog via Adventures in Agriburbia. Looks like we're neighbors (we're in southern Orange County).
ReplyDeleteNice shitake harvest! We tried doing shitakes and oyster mushrooms a couple of years ago but it didn't really work out for us. Seems that perhaps we got some bad spores, since none of the people who took the class we did really got the much-anticipated mushrooms...