divaqs's Blog

Growing my own Gourmet Mushrooms
May 31, 2007 | 10:49 AM PST
Tags: oyster mushrooms , log stairs , Pleurotus ostreatus

Yesterday I was responding to a forum post about mushrooms, which got me to reminiscing about my own experiences with growing gourmet mushrooms.

When I bought and moved in to my home a few years back I began the task of cleaning up parts of my yard that had been buried under blackberry brambles, refuse, and piles of old brush and sticks. I discovered these huge maple logs that had been covered over, which ran up and down some steep inclines on the side of my yard. Rather than cut them up and use them as firewood, I instead used a chain saw and cut steps in them, making them in to stairs.

 

I also purchased, via mail order, oyster mushroom spore dowels from a company called Fungi Perfecti. I drilled holes all over the top portions of these logs and inserted the mushroom dowels in them.

Last fall, I got two big blooms of oyster mushrooms

 

I was really careful to match the descriptions of the mushrooms with what I saw, referring both to mushroom descriptions in the catalog, and also the descriptions in a couple of books I have on mushroom identification.

I then tried eating just a little bit of one of the mushrooms and waited 24 hours to see if I had any reaction to it, since it is not impossible to have an allergic reaction to any new food. In the meantime I harvested and dried enough oyster mushrooms to last me over a year. I had roughly a couple of 5 gallon bucketfuls of dried oyster mushrooms.

Since then I have enjoyed being able to rehydrate my mushrooms when needed and include them in soups, pizzas, sandwiches, stir fries, and more.

Oyster mushrooms are best harvested and used when still small. I wasn’t expecting mine to have a bloom so soon after planting, so I wasn’t checking for them, so they got bigger than I would have liked. When this big, they can be kind of rubbery. I haven’t really been able to figure out a good use for the stalks, which got the most rubbery and can be kind of chewy. The caps still have enough suppleness that they are good in things.

 

The drawback to having oyster mushrooms in my log stair case is that it will cause it to degrade more quickly. The mushrooms actually feed on the log and cause it to decompose.

So as you can see in this picture, the top of these log stairs is in pretty bad condition, where I had the mushrooms bloom.

 

I figure that this is an acceptable cost if I am able to continue having great gourmet mushrooms for years to come. At some point in the future I will need to replace the logs, when they have degraded beyond use, with something more permanent.

In the past I've also grown elm oyster mushrooms in wood chips, but I'll leave that story for another time.