Modern Geekery

HeavyPetal has a quick HOWTO on plugging shiitake logs. Her version includes the cheese wax step, with picture, which I didn’t bother with, so I highly recommend checking her post out. My guide to plugging a shiitake log is, of course, here.

• Mowed yard, composted the clippings.
• Mowed clover in the garden area, mulched in place.
• Planted lettuce, basil, sunflowers, transplanted various seedlings
• Installed the last bits of the new hardwood floor in our craft room with my father-in-law
• Hiked about 2 miles with the family
• Weeded around the pawpaw trees
• Started research on a new idea for a self-directed research project at work.

Not too shabby.

Last year, I had to have a dying hickory in my yard cut down. While I paid to have most of the trunk hauled off, I still have a pile of the limb wood. I had decided a while back that I would plug these logs with shiitake spawn and make shiitake logs. Its best to do the plugging after the last hard frost, so I waited until yesterday to do the work.

I ordered my plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti, a neat company near Olympia, WA. They’ve got spawn for lots of different strains of mushrooms, but I love shiitakes and shiitakes love hardwoods. The spawn arrive in a little bag like the picture on the right. The spawn themselves are small dowels, about 1.5″ long, with a spiral groove cut into the side. You can clearly see the white mycelia from the shiitake in the groove. There is also some grain in the bag as well, which I surmise are how the dowels were inoculated.

I had ordered my spawn about a month ago, so by the time I pulled the bag out, there was plenty of mycelial growth in the bag, which you can see in the picture on the left as the white matting around the dowels. According to the instructions, this is normal and probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d used the spawn more quickly. Fortunately, no mushrooms had begun to bud, so I didn’t have to pull those off.

Continue reading ‘Shiitake logs’ »

After a a couple of months of moving the cold frame around, the structure had gotten a little less than sturdy. When I started putting it together, I figured that this would be the failure mode, since without corner supports, only the thickness of the wood would support the screws holding it together. I’d been looking for some untreated 2×4 or 4×4 scrap for a while to make the reinforcements, in keeping with my theme of “cold frame on the cheap,” but I finally broke down and bought an untreated 2×4. ($2.70 at Lowes.) Cutting the appropriate length pieces from it, I took the frame apart and reattached them properly to the supports.

And just in time too, since its supposed to be right at freezing tonight and tomorrow night.