It's So Easy! How to make Shiitake Mushroom Logs!

hey there folks this is Josh Stoney Ridge farmer and welcome to another beautiful day here on the Stoney Ridge farm fall is in the air we've got cool weather and today we're going to be cutting down some small trees here in this thick brush E area to make shiitake mushroom logs so we're gonna show you how it all works exactly what you need to do to have success at growing shiitake mushrooms on your farm or your place or your little homestead so come along is we have some fun teaching you how to make shiitake mushroom logs alright [Music] so what better place to start this video than right here beside our old shitake mushroom logs and these are hardwood logs that we harvested about three years ago and they've been producing shitake mushrooms for about the past two years what we're going to be doing is inserting these plugs and these are a hundred mushroom plugs this is what they look like and you'll get to see them a whole lot more here in just a minute but these are shiitake mushroom plugs they come with a instruction manual these are called mojo plugs but there are several sources I'll post a link down in the video description I've had good success with this company and they're out of Salt Lake City so what we have here are shitake mushroom logs that I cut like I said maybe two or three years ago and we've had some heavy rains and whenever we get a heavy rain we start producing more shiitake mushrooms and you can see these mushrooms are starting to come in right there they'll come in and they will blossom out and all of these logs will be covered with big nice shiitake mushrooms now when you harvest these mushrooms they're gonna come out as a bunch of mushrooms so you can take a dehydrator and dehydrate these mushrooms and they keep forever and when you're ready to eat them you just soak them in water for about 30 minutes and they plump right back up to the mushrooms and they lose no flavor they're absolutely delicious so first thing we're gonna do is get in this little area this is down by our waterfall area and we're gonna cut out some trees that are undesirable that we don't want what I have found is that maple does a good job and white oak and or red oak does a good job we're gonna cut them into links I'll talk about that and I'll show you how we insert the plugs all right first things first we're gonna drop the tailgate here on the Kubota this is our steel ms1 70 it is an awesome awesome homeowner grade saw we carry this saw on the Kubota a lot of times and it's really lightweight it's very handy it's a good saw to have and I'd see best saw that I can recommend to a homeowner that wants to buy a good saw that uses it fairly infrequently you can cut a load of firewood with this saw it'll do a good job but this is what the guy needs that just has a few trees in his backyard it's clearing up some land or cutting another maybe one load of firewood per year so we're gonna fire up the MS 170 we're gonna put our safety gear on and I'm gonna take you over here I'm going to show you the types of trees that we're looking for for our shitake mushroom logs what we're looking for is a tree that's about six inches around in other words about is round if you got a big ol arm about as round as your arm or about as round as your leg about halfway between your knee and your hip depending on how slim a person you are we're looking for logs about this big around and about four feet long something like that this tree right here is a red oak and this red oak needs to go you want to pick a tree that doesn't have a very coarse bark if it has a very coarse bark it's harder to hammer your plugs in so we'll take a look at this tree real quick so you can understand why I'm cutting this tree you can see it is bent over it winds up like this okay some people might call this a post oak this tree needs to go we want tall pretty straight trees for good timber like this not what I call scraggly trees like this guy you can see it's just kind of weaving through the brush and what's happened is this was a tiny sapling and it got a lot of shade so it grew up straight really fast we're gonna knock this tree down we're gonna cut it into links [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] good deal as usual this saw cut like a champ so we've got all our shiitake logs laid out here on the back of the Kubota and what we're going to be doing here is inoculating in other words we're gonna knock in those little plugs I just showed you what we're going to use is a 7/16 inch drill bit and we're going to go about every six inches and what I'll do is three rows on each log so one row here rotate it another row and then another row and then we'll knock them in and we'll cover them up with wax we'll seal them off with wax okay now you don't need to worry about washing your hands or anything but you do need to know if you're gonna use different types of mushroom spores only use one type on each log in other words don't mix mushroom spores with different types of logs before we start drilling holes I want to talk to you a little bit about this I've got some electrical tape and I've got my drill bit right here and it comes with instructions on what size drill bit you're gonna need you want your mushroom plugs if I can get them out of this Houdini plastic bag here there we go what you want to do that's a good bag is you want to drill in about as deep as the plug plus a quarter of an inch I'm going to take my plug I see what depth I need to go and I'm going to take some tape and tape around my drill bit just like so so now I know the depth that my drill bit needs to go so I'll have it appropriate for my shiitake plugs then we'll go every six inches or so this isn't an exact science guys just drill okay so we got one row across we'll just rotate it a third of the way over and do it again then we'll rotate it one third over again and do the last side and we want to check make sure just halfway in between there and we'll drill them in now we're all set up to start driving our plugs in to all these individual holes this is the easy part so you just take your shiitake plugs and you shove them down in your holes and you give them a little tap with a rubber hammer just like so just like that and remember guys when this gets wet it's going to swell okay so it'll hold them in place and you're going to be putting wax over top of each one of these to seal them off so probably put I don't know 15 or so per log 15 to 20 I'm gonna rotate it over and we'll do it on this side now you got to be careful when you rotate that you don't flip it all the way upside down because the ones you just drove in will pop right back out so here are our holes okay just going to set them in there first then I'll go back and drive them all in like they should and they should be driven about a quarter-inch deeper than the bark and the reason we use this red oak is because it doesn't have a very intrusive bark in other words it's not really really rough so we can get them down in there like they need to be hammer these guys down very nice so that's one complete log it took me all of 10 minutes now the reason why you use a log that's this size is because it's so heavy and cumbersome you'll be moving this log so you may be soaking it in water at some point and you need to be able to pick these logs up that is why you could do it in a much larger log however you're gonna have to move that log so if you want to inoculate a stump or something like that you wouldn't need to worry about that get our plugs in okay then we'll tap them in the instructions say set your drill bit depth to an inch and a quarter I like to hit them extra hard right here so that kind of mushrooms out so that they don't fall out in transport we're going to transport them up to the house where we've got our wax heating on the stove already I find this kind of activity pretty soothing pretty fun pretty simple and just interesting because you can watch these logs over about a year period of time the first logs took about two years to to bloom I guess you call it blooming with mushrooms the first logs took about two years and you really got to keep an eye on them so in other words you got to know when your shiitakes are getting ready to bloom or to grow out of your log so at about twelve months you want to check on this about once a week and make sure especially after a really heavy rain or you can set them in water overnight take them out and they will sprout folks there's a specific time of the year that you want to do this you want to do it when the sap is not in the log in other words you want to do it when the leaves start to fall you want to try and do this before danger of frost you'll have better success if you can get it about three weeks before the first frost folks if this is your first time to the Stoney Ridge farm welcome to the YouTube channel I appreciate you being here please consider pounding that like button subscribe to the channel we'd love to have you here all the time lots of fun stuff going on on our farm here we've got a 200 acre old dilapidated tobacco farm that we're bringing back to a working cattle farm it's gonna be great we're up here at the house get the chainsaw out of the back of the Kubota here and we'll drop your tailgate and the next step we're gonna do is we're gonna instill wax into each one of these little holes we'll get you some close-ups but before we do that I want to talk about placement of your logs because it's getting a little bit dark on us so you want to place your logs in a place that you go by frequently you want it to be a shady spot somewhere either on the edge of the woods or in the woods that stays fairly cool and moist okay so if you've got a place on your property that you're thinking about that's a good idea or you can put them right beside your garden put a big old tub of water down there and that way you can soak your logs as needed we won't need to soak these logs until it's time for harvest so at about a year to a year and a half probably sometime in the spring a year and a half from now we'll soak these logs overnight and water down in the creek and then we'll pull them out in two days later they'll be loaded with shiitakes they will continue to produce shitake mushrooms for years and if you stack these inoculated logs on top of other logs that are not inoculated in a moist area they will spread and you'll have shiitakes forever pretty cool let's get the wax this is specifically designed for wax our waxes in there and basically it's like a double boiler system so I have warm water or almost nearly boiling water and I have an el cheapo paint brush and we'll just take that paint brush and we'll dab it into the wax and we'll dab it on to our inoculated logs okay so a little dab will do you you want to make sure we've got cardboard laid out right here because I know this gets messy we just dab it right on there and you can see that wax to dry you can err on the side of putting a whole lot of wax on there if you want to you can see I'll get you a little close-up here just like that just dab it on there you can use a sponge type brush but just go get a cheapy brush from the dollar store or whatever and you just dab it on there and that's it all the way down here's a close-up of what we're doing just dab it on there very very easy very simple and just slide it out dab a little more you just want to fill in that crevice right there so that you don't get any contamination and you don't lose your spores so folks I got some work to do but I hope you enjoyed learning how to inoculate logs to grow your own shitake mushrooms if you buy the kit the kit comes with a hundred plugs if it were me I'm gonna order four more kits okay so go ahead and you spend a hundred bucks and you get shiitake mushrooms forever you can share them with your family you can share with your neighbors you can sell them there's all sorts of stuff you can do with shitake mushrooms a lot of people make a living with them but that's how you inoculate logs for shitake mushrooms who knows we might be making a living at this one day thanks a lot guys we'll see you next time on the Stoney Ridge farm [Music] appearance we've had some ways opposed Denise Tony Reed