Abbott Farms - Sustainable Agriculture

In the spring of 2016 I bought 15 shiitake mushroom logs that had already been inoculated and had previously fruited.  I brought them home and successfully force fruited them once in the spring and again in the fall. It was an experiment to see if perhaps I wanted to try my own hand at preparing and growing the mushroom logs.  For Christmas of 2016 I asked for mushroom spawn and my ever generous husband bought me a three season kit for shiitake mushrooms and another one for oyster mushrooms. The culture of these varieties requires green logs from live trees which were cut when dormant. The shiitakes prefer hard woods, oaks being their favorite, and oysters prefer soft woods, cottonwood being their favorite.  We found and harvested selected trees off our property in the late winter of 2017. In early spring we proceeded to drill holes in the logs, which we then filled with sawdust spawn for the shiitakes and plug spawn for the oysters.  The next step for both types is to wax the holes.  Then we stapled a tag on the end of each log which identified the type of mushroom and the strain, as well as the date of inoculation. The finished logs were then placed in a stack behind our buck barn in a protected location to allow the spawn to fully colonize the logs.  This is called "spawn run".  It takes 4 - 6 months for the oyster mushrooms and 9-12 for the shiitakes. We had a wind storm that knocked a maple tree down on our buck barn in March of 2017.  We had extra shiitake spawn because we used all the oak logs we had cut.  Maple is also an appropriate tree for shiitake, so we harvested some logs from the fallen tree for the rest of the shiitake spawn.  We had also accidentally been sent plug spawn for an unusual mushroom (to us) called "comb tooth".  This mushroom also likes maple logs, so we were able to use the maple for the spawn for that.  We inoculated a total of 62 logs and made two totems with the shiitakes, oysters and comb tooth. I also purchased sawdust spawn for another type of mushroom called the wine cap. This mushroom is grown in wood shavings under garden plants or under trees.  I "planted" these mushrooms during early spring planting under some bushes on the east side of the house.  We got some oyster mushrooms in late summer 2017.  All my spawn and equipment and wonderful advice has come from Field and Forest Products.