Growing Mushrooms on Logs I How to Grow Mushrooms I GroCycle

welcome to this video where i'm going to show you how to grow mushrooms on logs [Music] so mushrooms have been grown on logs for a really long time in asia in japan and china it was first developed as a method whereby people really just watched what was happening in the natural world where mushrooms grew out of logs that have fallen in the wild and they learned that you could somewhat copy that process and cultivate them this is the first way that humans ever learnt to grow mushrooms and these days you'll see large commercial mushroom farms in asia grown mushrooms on logs and really all across the world we personally don't choose to grow them in this way because it's quite a labor-intensive method but if you do happen to have you know a load of wood that you've failed from your woodland or perhaps you know someone tree surgeon or woodsman you can source some hardwood logs and it's a really nice way of growing mushrooms either just as a hobby or maybe on a semi commercial basis so in this video today i want to share with you the method and walk you through step by step how to grow mushrooms on logs all right so the first step is you're going to want to source the correct logs and generally speaking most mushroom varieties that you're going to want to grow prefer to grow on hardwood logs so that's species like oak or older maybe beech or birch most hardwood logs work pretty well for this but you'll find that certain varieties like other species more than others so just have a little look around and do a bit of research on that the best time of year to get your logs is in the winter all the sugars and energy accumulated during the growth in the summer months is locked up in the wood and your mycelium is going to feed well on that it's also when uh most felling of trees is done so try and source your wood kind of through the winter as you're coming out into spring and you want to be making sure that the from healthy trees no disease or existing fungi grown on the wood at all and you want to be inoculated then within two weeks of when the trees or the wood have been felled in an ideal world and that's because if you leave it any longer the logs start to dry out so you want to look for logs that are about four to six inches in diameter that's about 10 to 15 centimeters or so and in lengths of anywhere between two and six feet whatever is easy for you to carry most people find around about three to four feet or around about a meter is about what's easy to move around and carry so once you have your log source there's a few other things you're going to need you're going to need some dowel spawn and that's got the mushroom mycelium growing on some little pieces of wood dowels you can also use a saw sawdust spawn for this but you need a separate tool for that so in this video i'm just going to talk you through how to do it with wood dowels which is probably the most common way that people tend to inoculate mushroom logs you're also going to need a drill bit that is um purposely made for going through wood and that's probably going to be an eight or nine mil drill bit piece depending on the side of your dowels there are other ways you can go about this like if you've got an angle grinder you can get an adapter that's going to make it much quicker if you're doing larger batches of logs but in this example we're just going to show you how to do it with an electric drill and an eight mil drill bit with the wooden dowel spoon in addition to that you're going to want some kind of wax because we're going to be sealing over the holes after we've drilled and plugged them with the spawn so for that you can use you can use beeswax it's quite expensive way of doing it but you can use beeswax or you can use any kind of cheese wax paraffin wax and you're going to want something to warm the wax in to melt it so you could use either like a slow cooker crock pot or just a small stove and pan like we have in this example here along with a brush which you can use then to paint the melted wax over the holes finally then you're just going to want something to position all of this on so that you can work it at a nice easy height so you could use something like a sawhorse which is often used for cutting wood or you could use any kind of workbench that you can just place the logs on at the right height so that you can work on them and hold the wood in place so once you've got everything that you need the next step is to drill and inoculate the logs with your spawn so the method for this is to drill holes along the length of the log and you want to space the holes around about four to six inches apart it's around about 10 to 15 centimeters apart all the way down each row and then you want to drill another line of holes slightly offset so you've got a bit of a diamond pattern and you're going to want that next row to be spaced around about two to three inches around the logs so that you have a little bit of space between the rows with this offset diamond pattern between them so continue to drill all the holes in the logs once you have all the holes drilled and ready next step is to plug them with the spawn so you're going to place the inoculator dowels over the holes line them up along the holes and then you can just come along and knock them in with a hammer or a mallet until they're flush with the surface of the log finally then you're going to want to seal the holes up with some melted wax and the purpose of this really is uh twofold one is just to seal the inoculated log into the wood and to stop it from drying out so the wax stops it drying out but it also stops any insects getting in and nibbling away on the mycelium which some of them do like to do there's also an option to seal the end of the logs with wax if you have enough wax and depending on how many logs you're working with you may decide to seal the end of the logs it also again helps to seal in the moisture on the log and stop it from drying out but it's not absolutely necessary we haven't done that in this case here once all your logs have been inoculated at this point you've introduced the spawn into the some freshly cut hard wood and you really need to position them in a spot now that's going to be beneficial for the spawn run so that's the period during which the mycelium is going to run its way through the length of the log and start consuming the wood as its food before it's able to produce mushrooms so the most important thing in this stage is to position the logs in a spot that they're not going to dry out so a couple of options you might have here if you happen to have access to existing woodland just placing them in the woodland underneath the canopy is the ideal environment likewise you could just choose a shady spot underneath a large tree like we have here and you want to make sure that it's up off of the ground a little bit so it's not in contact with the soil we like to use pallets for this purpose and you want to stack them in a grid like pattern fairly close together but with a little bit of space in between each log just to allow for a bit of air circulation and then depending on how well shaded it is already you may choose to cover the logs over with something like shade netting you don't really want to cover it with plastic because that's going to create too much humidity inside and you may have problems with competitor mold growing so make sure there's a little bit of air exchange but not so much that you're getting big winds and draughts blowing through which would dry the wood out another important consideration you may want to make sure that the logs are positioned somewhere near a kind of water source that might be near an existing pond or perhaps somewhere where you have access to a hose that you can fill up a container with water which will be important for the next step when we come to initiate fruiting so during this incubation period it's going to last anywhere between 12 and 24 months it takes quite a while for the mycelium to grow its way through the wood during this time your main task is just to make sure the logs don't dry out so you can water them frequently throughout any dry periods either with a hose or maybe some kind of sprinkler system like we have here and you're monitoring the logs for signs of colonization the first sorts of things you may see is little bits of white showing up at the end of the log or perhaps around the holes where you've plugged and you should see bits of white mycelium or sometimes it might show up as black or brown depending on the variety that you're growing and you'll see that pattern start to emerge and grow and cover up the face of the log and at that point you know that it's pretty much fully colonized throughout the log you can either just leave it and wait for it to start fruiting naturally which it will tend to do in the autumn or the spring when it's kind of naturally damp and slightly cooler conditions or you can try and force them to fruit by soaking them in water overnight so that's what we've done here we noticed that our logs were already fully colonized on the end we started to see little signs that some of them were starting to produce tiny little mushrooms so we initiated them and forced them to fruit by soaking them in water overnight draining them out and then stacking them up vertically in a line for the mushrooms to grow you can stack them in different ways you can also stack them in a grid like a fashion as well with a bit more spacing than you did during incubation but the key thing is you want to be able to get in and harvest easily we prefer uh with shiitake logs which we have here to stack them vertically lent up against the pole other varieties like reishi and namiko for example prefer to actually be buried under the soil to fruit so if you grow in other varieties do just check on how they prefer to fruit because it does vary slightly so after you've soaked them with water they're now red primed and ready to fruit and you should see mushrooms start to emerge in the next one to two weeks after that they'll grow at whatever speed depending on the temperature normally so if it's very cold they'll take a lot longer to grow if it's warmer they'll grow much quicker but once you see little baby mushrooms starting to form they grow really fast and as you can see here they develop from very small little pins into fully grown mushrooms beautiful process to watch and do check in on them regularly during this phase because it it could be as short as just four or five days in the warmer weather might be as long as two weeks in colder weather but keep an eye on them and in particular you want to make sure you don't harvest them too late if you have us in too late by that point they're dropping a load of spores they tend to attract other pests like slugs or flies who will come along and eat your mushrooms instead of you so do get there earlier it's much better to harvest too early than it is to harvest too late and at that point you've harvested your first crop of delicious mushrooms off of your log and really you've got a choice here you can just leave the log in situ and it will fruit again when it's ready and the conditions are naturally right or if you want you can try and force them to fruit around about six weeks later you go through the process again of soaking in water putting them back in the fruiting position and if they're ready they'll produce another crop for you then if you're wondering your log will continue to produce like this for between three and seven years depending on the diameter of the log and the type of wood and the variety that you're growing but it'll keep going for quite a few years keep throwing out mushrooms throughout the spring to autumn time if you manage them well producing you a lovely crop of mushrooms so that's how to grow mushrooms on logs and i hope you found that information useful go ahead and give it a try sauce some wood and see how you go and if you're interested in finding some other ways to grow mushrooms in a kind of low-tech simple hobby way check out our video on how to grow mushrooms at home you might also want to watch the other video we made on how to grow mushrooms outside in a wood chip bed both of which are nice easy methods to get started growing mushrooms and if you've enjoyed this video do subscribe to the channel for future videos like this thanks a lot for watching we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: GroCycle

Views: 17,455

Keywords: mushroom cultivation, mushroom farming, low tech mushroom growing, how to grow mushrooms, mushroom garden, grow mushrooms outdoors, growing mushrooms on logs outdoors, growing mushrooms on wood logs, growing mushrooms on oak logs, shiitake mushrooms, shiitake logs, shiitake mushroom time lapse, Reishi, Pioppino

Id: oOPjCM_Z-Eo

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021