The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Sycamore mushroom logs

treeToday was a good day for cutting down trees.

It's that time of year when fresh sycamore logs are needed for shitake mushroom inoculation.

Some folks use oak trees, but we had excellent luck last year using sycamore.

The two medium sized trees came down with no troubles, and I thank them for their sacrifice. Anna had me leave a taller than normal stump to encourage new sycamores to sprout out in the future.

We got them cut up into three foot sections and hauled to the kiddie pool area where they are patiently waiting for the next step.






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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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I just bought a DIY kit off of ebay to start some shiitakes. I'd love to see how you do it from scratch!
Comment by Fostermamas Tue Feb 10 17:40:12 2009
I've never used a shiitake mushroom kit, but I figure it's probably a lot like a small version of our logs, so should give you lots of good mushrooms! I was hoping some people were interested, so I've written up a three part guide to starting your own shiitake logs --- I posted the first part this morning and am going to post the other parts whenever I can tear my head away from spring weather long enough. :-)
Comment by anna Wed Feb 11 08:08:06 2009
Thanks for your post. I rescued some sycamore logs from someone about to shred them and wasn't sure if they'd do for my mushroom spores. Gonna give them a go now I've read your post!
Comment by Jen Fri Apr 16 07:03:29 2010
Now's the time to inoculate, before summer really hits. I suspect you'll be very pleased with the results!
Comment by anna Fri Apr 16 07:22:34 2010





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