Producing oyster mushrooms in our small, urban farm has proven a rewarding experience. The above photo was taken several weeks after inoculation into freshly cut elm logs. Inoculation was done using plug spawn, or wooden dowels heavily colonized with oyster mushroom mycelium. I used a high powered drill to perforate the inoculation sites in the log, and then hammered the wooden dowels into the log, covering it with cheese wax to protect the inoculation site from drying.

One thing I quickly noticed was the tenacious nature of the mycelium where the inoculation points made contact with the moist soil. The location was ideal for maximizing mycelial growth, as it is shady and well-watered. The photo above shows a robust and diverse community emerging in the micro-climate beneath the log: arthropods, decaying leaves, mycelium, and other micro-organisms flourished in the moist habitat.

After only five four or five months, and an intense cold spell, the mushrooms began fruiting prolifically from this soil-log interface. In some areas, the mycelium was clearly penetrating and emerging from the bark higher up on the logs. I anticipate future fruitings will sprout higher up on the logs themselves in years to come. As this species of mushroom sporulates profusely, in the late afternoon when the sun is at the right angle and after a nice watering, we could see the smokey haze of the spores floating from the undersides of the fruit bodies. Beautiful.

Of course, the real beauty in all of this were the pounds of mushrooms that have been an absolute culinary delight for my family over the past week or so. We’ve been adding them to soups, eating them sauteed, mixed with pasta sauces, and fried. Yum.

Other inoculations, thus far, have been less successful. I’m quite sure that the moist soil-log interface is what made the difference here in provoking a short time to fruiting. In the extremely dry climate of central New Mexico, outdoor mushroom cultivation demands strategies somewhat different than those developed by folks in more humid climates, where rain and ambient humidity alone seems to be enough to provoke primorida formation and fruit body development.

True, there is always the risk that in an outdoor environment like this our oyster mushroom mycelium will get overwhelmed by competitor organisms in the soil. I’ve mitigated this risk somewhat by inoculating the plug spawn at very high rates and incubating it outdoors, so that the mycelium already has a somewhat natural resistance to local competition. In future experiments, I plan on using cardboard spawn to re-inoculate logs via the soil-log interface. More on this in the future.