Shiitake
Shiitake mushrooms are the most known and recognized gourmet mushrooms. They really showed up in America in the ‘70s, and they were initially grown on solid wood logs outdoors. This made it pretty low tech and simple to produce a few shiitake mushrooms.
We still do a 100 or so logs the original way, but they have a few drawbacks in terms of commercial production. The mushrooms “pop” when they want to (spring and fall), they take 12 to 24 months to even start to fruit, and there are bugs that just love to move in.
Our primary method of shiitake production is indoors and on sterilized hardwood sawdust, where there are no bugs or dirt. Best of all, we can generate harvest in eight weeks, from inoculation to fruiting.
We use supplemented hardwood sawdust, made in our own sawmill, for shiitake production. By sawing our own trees, we can actually select just one species of tree, which has produced some interesting results. Check out our blog for updates on our sawdust experiments.
Sawdust culture is a sterile process. We pressure cook the sawdust in special poly bags, inoculate it in a sterile air stream, then heat seal the bags for their eight to nine week incubation run.
After the blocks ”brown", the bags are removed and the blocks are moved to the fruiting room. This is where the shiitake mushrooms really start to grow!
