How to grow your own mushrooms by local resident Phil Rogers — Grow Batheaston

Patience……. Something I have had to develop as I have aged. After discovering Permaculture in practice in 2005 and then completing a Permaculture Design Course (PDC) in 2008, I have tried constantly to produce my own food.

Mushrooms hadn’t played a big part of my diet up to now other than button mushrooms on a fry up or a large field mushroom baked with Blue Cheese and served with a steak. But after helping in the inoculation stage of shiitake into oak logs on a field trip as part of my PDC, growing mushrooms is something I’ve always wanted to try.

The first experience growing mushrooms was buying a kit after a trip over to Shift Bristol for a talk by the legendary Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawson. The kit was for a lions mane mushroom. Another attempt was with an inoculated old book with oyster mushrooms as a Christmas present.

Then I was lucky enough to acquire a fresh oak limb from a friend for the venture, so set about searching the internet for suppliers of the mycelium, and more importantly what to do with the logs once inoculated. The internet is a wealth of information with different techniques which I then followed.

For those still interested enough to be still reading this my method was as follows:

I found a suitable fresh oak log and cut it into lengths of about a metre of which I got ten of varying girths, from small wrist width to large thigh width in size. Inoculation happened within the next few days by drilling holes a few inches apart in a zigzag fashion across the log then filling each hole carefully with the shiitake spawn mixture (you can also buy inoculated dowels) then sealing with wax to stop contamination.

drilling and inoculating the logs then sealing with wax

The logs then went into storage under our decking in the hope that the magic would happen! It was quite some time before signs that the mycelium had colonised and could be seen on the end of the logs, maybe 6 months, but once visible the excitement began to build. However, as I have since found out there can be many different variables when growing mushrooms which ultimately decide when and if you get the prize.

After a hot dry summer and almost neglecting the logs I thought I’d better dunk them in water. We have a vessel large enough to put all the logs in (our wood fired hot tub) so they spent about 48 hours submerged then came out to rest again. I put hooks on the end of each log and hung them up under the kids pirate ship.

I have become rather addicted now, looking at different methods such as trying out lions mane but using biscuits of wood and sandwiching the mycelium between each layer. Saving up coffee grounds to use as a base to grow on, trying bags of sterilised sawdust for oyster mushrooms and experimenting with cardboard. The only thing we need now is more space to keep going!

If you want to find out more about mushrooms and the amazing world of fungi in general I cannot recommend enough the Merlin Sheldrake book ‘Entangled Life’ How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures, and also if you’re not much of a reader the Netflix documentary ‘Fantastic Fungi’ and listen to the BBC sounds podcast - Late Junction “Fungi Power” with Merlin and Cosmo Sheldrake on how fungi can fight carbon emissions.

Warning mushroom growing can be addictive!

one of the hanging logs developing the mushrooms

Author - Local Resident - Phil Rogers