I don’t know what species of mushroom you are growing. Willow is great for oysters. So so for shiitake.
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they’re shiitake. my friend gives me some every other year or so, and I call a million places and look online for wood pieces for months every time with no success. I’m supposed to pick up willow and alder chunks logs on Sunday, in just going to try, worst case is nothing. which is what I’ll get if I don’t try!
I think my friend gives them to me because they don’t have any wood either lol
I would plug them in the alder and willow.
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I’m going to try, I’ll report back as I go and let yas know if it works out.
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I got plugs in the alder, and a single oak chunk. also have a bag of oak sawdust on the way for the basement, I didn’t have much wood so I have extra plugs. I soaked the logs pretty good then drilled and capped with warm paraffin. covered the whole pile with plastic and a shade cloth- the spot only gets about an hour of light a day. I hope it works all right like that.
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Question for mushroom growers here!
I’ve been using oysters to suppress growth on tree stumps and so far it’s been working amazing (plus mushrooms!). Now I have an unexpected fresh stump, but no more plugs. I do, however, have an older log that I inoculated a few years ago that feels very light. I think it might be about done producing, maybe a couple more flushes in it.
Can one move mycelium from an older log like this into new wooden dowels for new stumps? Can I just, er, chop up this log and stuff bits of it into a drilled hole in my fresh stump? Or likewise but in a mason jar with dowel rods?
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I’m trying a similar experiment, but I just did it and will not know for a while. Seems to me that you could kind of crumble up the log and use it like sawdust spawn. I’m still new in the game, so I don’t really know though. It would be nice not to have to buy more. Hopefully someone else responds.
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Nameko is an acquired taste. Pholiota adiposa is similar in that it has a gelatinous coat but it’s far less than what you’d see on a nameko. The coating on nameko is so gelatinous that you can use it to thicken soup. When young, P. adiposa coating is nearly nonexistent, and the shoots are more like Piopinno with a white halo. Taste is more akin to Piopinno, wild velvet shanks, etc…
Brickcaps are ok imo (the other chestnut you are referring to). I still prefer P. adiposa over them though.
There are shiitake strains that work specifically well for sawdust blocks.
There are no tree trimming services you can make a buddy buddy with? Put a bounty on the oak logs for the fall and winter. Or call up firewood suppliers (not dealers). In the PNW, there are loggers that are actually cutting down the wood they resell to others who sell the firewood. Get it at the source. Or have neighbors with oak that needs trimming? Indian Reservations also have their own forestry management, another place to try.
Oak is the gold standard for shiitake. Northspore and Field and Forest both have good charts.
Depends on when they were cut up. Old wood cut up in summer is useless. 6-12 months oak cut in fall/winter. They do that all the time in Japan.
Oysters are probably the only mushroom where this would work reliably because the mycelium is so aggressive. However, the mycelium needs to be well propagated throughout the section of whatever part of the stump you plan on chopping up to use as inoculation starter material. Forget the dowels. Get a funnel tube and a rod for the low tech cheap method of inoculation. Sawdust will inoculate and establish much faster than dowels will. Often the spawn run is months faster.
Glad I have oysters! 
Just to make sure I’m following, are you saying that I should cut up a part of the old log and then stuff the resulting sawdust/chips into a hole in the new stump? Or are you saying I should inoculate a separate bin of sawdust?
You could do either. The problem usually of transferring over spawn from a spent medium to a new inoculation is contamination, as the inoculated mycelium is competing with often other mycelium and other bacteria in the substrate. There’s a diminishing return going on. Like if I have a bag of mushrooms spawn and I use it to inoculate 10 x 1 pound bags of sawdust. Then when the 10 bags are exhausted or near exhausted of growing, I use 1/10 of a pound of those bags to inoculate another generation. The generation after, I may have to go to 1/5, then 1/3 then 1/2 to get the proper inoculation ratio due to contamination, but the problem is that every time you do this, with increasing chance of contamination you’re caring over from the previous spawn run so you could end up with earlier spoilage. There’s a reason why people do this in a clean lab environment.
So you could in theory take bits of the sawdust and chips from previous stump and throw them into the new stump. The other clean way to do this is to get mature spores from a spore print then grow on a petri (might be able to skip this) on the sterile medium (usually grain), then sawdust or dowels then punching it into the stump and logs. This would be the clean way to do it minimizing contamination. You’re taking a risk doing the spawn run transfer (assuming the mycelium has fully propagated of course).
If you want guaranteed success, you’re better off buying mushroom spawn if you don’t want to harvest spores and do the whole sterile clean bit.
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This makes a lot of sense! I may try both, since I’m sure I’ll have log leftover. Thanks a ton for the detailed reply!
I’m personally not very worried about the risk of contamination, as I already have a good number of stumps/logs inoculated with mushroom spawn and producing so even if these stumps aren’t perfect it’s not the end of the world. This log is also first generation (inoculated with plugs I bought), and I don’t think there will be many more stumps in my future.
I tend to use this more as a method of inhibiting stump growth without the need for Roundup, and the mushrooms are a nice bonus. Since oysters are easy to identify, I’m not worried about accidentally eating a bad mushroom either.
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting the contamination is from you. It’s from the fact that bacteria naturally will compete with the mycelium in the growth medium. The reason they do it in the clean lab is to make sure the mycelium has an established start.
Have you seen those mushroom bags on shelves people are growing on YouTube or in a commercial setup? The moment they open the bag, weeks or months after inoculating, to allow pinning, it’s exposed to the open air. It’s no longer sterile because the seal has been broken. The contamination won’t spoil the mushroom - what it does it causes the mycelium spawn run to fail or suffer a collapse. The oyster won’t be bad in that sense. You just wont ever see growth. In a sawdust block, you’d see the type of white green black whatever mold you expect to see from spoiled food if contamination happened.
I see, so what you’re saying is that there is a risk the mushrooms won’t ‘take’ due to competition?
It’s possible. It’s certainly what I’d expect from reuse of inoculated substrate from say shiitake, since it’s a much slower and sensitive mycelium. Oysters [are generally] more aggressive so they can outcompete other mycelium better, but there’s no guarantee. Even within the same type of oysters, you can have strains (think of covid-19 strains), where some are more aggressive than others.
There’s no way to give you a concrete answer to predict what will happen. Each situation is different, and we have no way to know how much bacteria or whatever is loaded in the current stump you’re referring to.
Also the other possibility is that it does take, but it stops producing earlier. Like my 10 bag example, your yield of mushrooms in every generation becomes smaller and smaller.
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