i'm Greg Judy here in central Missouri Clark and talk a little bit about our
shiitake log mushroom operation right now we're looking at the inoculating area
I built in inoculating table which takes a lot of the the repetitious work out of
doing it far as handling the logs we got turntables at the logs spin
on on each end and so on that end we drill them with a high speed grinder so
we drill the holes in them this whole table is loaded full of logs and then
on this end we actually inoculate them and we've kind of graduated we started
out with the plain old you know you put your spawn in the bucket and then you
set it over your hole and you push it in and that works fine if you're gonna do
you know maybe 100 to 200 logs but when you started getting into you know a
thousand or more logs boy this guy right here is the cat's meow
so what you do is you they come with these styrofoam pre-loaded cut clips
that goes in there and then you just it's got the end that
the spawn goes then you just hit it twice and set it over your hole when you
go down it actually puts a little piece of that foam over the hole so your spawn
goes in and it seals it with the foam all in one pass these things are awesome
I like to have my spawn bucket right here in front of me
so as I'm spinning the key to the log is you put your holes in about every
six inches and then you give the log about a third of a turn and you do it
again and as big as your log is you just keep doing that until you get the whole log
covered so this particular log has probably about 45 holes in it this is
the setting yard over here on the setting yard again you want to put this
where you want to store your mushrooms at you don't be carrying these things
around the log and so these are all being fruited right now in other
words the mycelium is traveling throughout the sap bark area of that log
and if you look there you can see it real well that dark ring that's what
that's where all the food is for your mushrooms okay this inner part is just
that's heartwood there's no food for a mushroom in there you're better off to
stay in the 4 to 5 inch they're a lot lighter
okay what kind of different from the industry we cut ours this is the four
about a four four foot four and a half foot log most people cut them three foot
we like to cut them tall so you'll see in a minute in our fruiting yard we
stack them like that log cabin style and so you can pick a third of your crop
without bending over when you cut your logs you've got to cut them in this in
the winter after the leaves have fallen off in the fall you can't use a dead log
to grow shiitake mushrooms and the reason you can't on a dead log there's already
fungi in there and it's gonna kick your fungi out so you've got to use a live
tree when the leaves are falling off cut that thing down it's all it's the limbs
it's not the it's not the trunk cut the trunk up into lumber but don't this is
all limb wood that's what I like about it so we're growing food on a piece of
wood that we normally would have cut up for firewood and it's another product
that we're selling on green pastures farm right now so we're kind of excited
about the shiitakes you know we've got lots of timber we're gonna create more
and more silvopasture which is going in and cleaning out some of these trees
where they're too thick guess what we've got a product here that we can sell now
this is another important step over here you need to make sure you protect your
logs until the mycelium has a chance to go through all that sap
wood okay if you don't put this netting on there the woodpeckers they'll go
around here and they'll pick out every single one they can reach that you
drilled and they'll pick out all that mycelium spawn that you just put in
there keep it in a shaded area you can see there's not hardly any sun in here
you can't put these things out in sunlight and expect to grow mushrooms
they've got to have a darker area they can handle a little sunlight on them but
you don't want full sunlight you don't want your log Moisture to drop below 25%
if it drops below 25% there's a good chance you're gonna kill the bugs in
here the mycelium and so we're very
fortunate we have a lake right here and it's a big like it's two acres I've
got a pump that I just drop in there and I can I can soak these dudes and I watch
it if we go two or three weeks hundred degrees maybe a month I'll just turn the
sprinkler on I leave it on for a good period of time and get him good and soaked
this is where we actually cut the mushrooms we let them grow here we've
got a really nice place here we got these great big white oak trees and they
kind of got some massive limbs that give us quite a bit of shade in here and so
we decided to do tipi style so we've got a steel post and we've got 20-foot long
steel pipe and we just cross them tipi style all the way across it makes it
really easy to cut the mushroom and we don't have to handle the mushroom so
there's some people aim on the ground when they're not fruiting and then they
stand them up and they start to fruit there's about twelve hundred logs that's
a whole lot of labor every time you move them up take them
down move them up take them down and so we basically cut mushrooms here every
time we get moisture so if we get a one or two inch rain we need to be out here
probably within two to three days there's gonna be mushrooms exploding out
of these logs you get about a half a pound to one
pound of mushrooms per log per fruiting and they'll fruit about three times a
year we've got several different varieties in here we have a wide range
which means from the basically this onset of spring all the way till fall
you can expect to grow mushrooms there is a cool season species in here they
only produce when it's cool and then I have a warm season that only produces
when it's hot and so what I'm trying to do is cover my bases as many months of
the year as I possibly can these mushrooms you know it's just an operation that I
played with I bought a five-pound bag and spawn I
did 40 logs and I saw what they did and I'm like oh my gosh I need to ramp this
up a bit and so you just buy you a bag don't jump in and do a thousand logs at
the start you know maybe do 20 or whatever and just see how you get along
with it again we can grow food on a resource on our farm we're all about
diversity here at GreenPastures Farm we'd like to have as many
come streams as possible so if we're gonna bring somebody a quarter of beef
or a half a hog why not bring them a couple pounds of shiitake mushrooms you
know you need to you need to have some products to offer you customers so with
that and I think that's pretty well wraps it up