Fall mushrooms

I had to take a walk around the gardens when I got home from the hospital and was really surprised to find these. I’d all but given up on both varieties, but these really made me happy. I’ll have to make three posts to get them all shown.

Here’s the biggest of the surprises. A Shitaki about as broad as my hand. The thing is huge….and fresh. I’ll call it dinner. The Shitaki mushrooms grow on Red Oak logs inoculated with peg spawn best but I inoculated this stack of White Oak slices to make a totem just to try the style using sawdust spawn but its been pretty dormant for two years so this was a real find for me. I’ll be taking the stack apart and giving each log slice a couple-day full dunking in water then restacking to see if it will re-bloom next spring.

Shitakis are one delicious mushroom. In a store this one mushroom would be in the $15.00-$18.00 dollar range.

****When I cut this one there was another almost the same size underneath it so I got a double whammy on delicious.

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Here’s a single stack at the end of my carrot bed. Its a bit more exposed to full light but still has a couple nice flushes of Oyster mushrooms.

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And here’s a double stack buried behind the end of one of my tomato beds where they get substantial shade from the tomatoes. Like corn, tomatoes off a huge infusion of humidity too. Next to the two shown but not seen is the Shitaki stack with the big mushroom seen in the first post just visible. These two stacks are covered with flushes of mushrooms all around each pile, top to bottom. Absolutely unreal.

Now if we’d get some rain today to sort of freshen the critters up. I like to cut wet, but if we don’t get rain I’ll be clipping these later today.

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Nice, payoff.

Here they are cleaned up and ready for the skillet. We’ll do the two Shitakis for dinner tonight and work our way thru the oysters over the next few days.