Growing Shitake Mushrooms

After several months of trial and error, the monks have learned a system to successfully grow Shitake mushrooms. Shitake mushrooms have many great health benefits as well as being quite tasty!

The process from start to mushroom can take 6 to 18 months. First the mycelium is grown on wooden dowels, this takes a few weeks.

Then a naturally fallen hardwood, in this case Ironwood, is cut into small sections and small holes drilled throughout the log.

The mycelium dowels are hammered in and covered in a food grade wax.

Then you sit back and wait, it can take up to a year for the mycelium to fully colonize the log. Once ready, the log is ready to fruit!

To fruit the log, you thump it on the ground a few times, then you submerge it in water for 24 hours and put it in the fridge overnight. This is fooling the log into thinking it has fallen down in a forest on a cool spring day.

Then 2-3 days later, little mushrooms start sprouting out of the bark, and 5 to 8 days later you have Shitake mushrooms ready to harvest!

These are twins!

Logs can keep on fruiting mushrooms every 6 to 8 weeks for up to 10 years!

This is one of our smaller logs that started fruiting, it will be ready to harvest in about 2 days!

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