Maybe We Could Do This (or How the World Changed When We Learned How to Inoculate a Shiitake Log)

So I was at an all-day mushroom growing class at Gaia Gardens, an Atlanta urban farm, yesterday, when I had the feeling I have at most of these classes at one point or another.

Not for me.

When I attended a beekeeping class at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, it happened right around the time when the instructor talked about what it felt like to get bee stings on your eyelids. Yesterday, at the mushroom growing class, I started glossing over when Daniel Parson mentioned the word "chainsaw." Much detail followed, regarding the recommended diameter of the white oak and sweet gum trees for the optimal inoculated shiitake logs. Phrases such as "spores are liberated," "spawn run" and "colonization of the substrate" started to fly over my head, and the whole idea of running out to Home Depot to get a 2500 rpm drill that would work well with a specialized high speed shitake drill bit had become nothing more than theory at this point.

I turned to Rebecca, the chair of the Dunwoody Community Garden (and yes, we have a space behind the cistern in mind for the "mushroom operation"), and whispered, "The oyster mushrooms will be easier, I think."

And then, of course, they weren't. I had been hoping I could repurpose the waste stream from local coffee shops to use coffee grounds for the oyster mushrooms in my garage or that little shed in my yard, the way these Berkeley grad students do on a much bigger scale.

But the oyster mushroom part of the lecture involved phrases such as this big red-light one, "make sure you keep them away from wood because they will eat your house." Gosh, is it really necessary to tell you any of the others?

So we had pretty much ruled the mushroom growing thing out, until we went out past the community garden, the stand of blueberry bushes, the bees, the bags of leaves being saved for compost, and the rows of cover crops and lettuces at the urban farm part of the land to where we were going to inoculate shiitake logs and oyster mushroom substrate (a bale of wheat straw was practically boiling in a huge wire strainer in a garbage can, if you can picture this) to bring home.

Daniel said that the process for inoculating the shiitake logs--drilling the holes, inserting the spawn, and applying hot wax to seal--was best done as an assembly line but that he found at these classes that everyone likes to do their very own log, so he had set it up that way.

This is when things took an interesting turn.

Our motley group of 10 (the other ten were currently tossing hot hay to cool it and then crumbling oyster spawn to add to it) somehow, without words, proceeded to completely reject this notion. Not one person grabbed a log to claim it. No one hugged a drilled log close to his or her heart, following it through to solitary completion of the process. People drilled when (and if) they wanted to. People took turns stabbing the spawn tool in a coffee can of spawn (which looks like crumbly compost, sort of) and then inserting it in the holes (this is shockingly fun, by the way), and dipping the round puff in the melted wax and rubbing it over the holes in completion.






The logs stacked up, no one seemed to care if they got the fat one or the long one or the one they had drilled.

I stood back, looked, and listened for a minute. At all the heads leaned in together. At the conversations among strangers. The laughter. The smiles. The sharing of tools and tender patience. And I looked at Rebecca, who couldn't believe she had changed so much in the last few months that she was actually attending a mushroom growing class, as she donned goggles and grabbed that drill.



And we both knew.

This is something good.

And we both went from "no way" to "how can we do it?" And the world changed, right then, right there.

Maybe we could work with the City Arborist or the arborist who provides our free wood chips to get the logs.

Maybe Tom and Rick and Bob, who love to build, could help with the equipment and the drilling.

Maybe we could get a crock pot at Good Will for the wax, or maybe someone has a hot plate and an old pot they wouldn't mind us using.

Electricity? Maybe we could figure that out . . .

Maybe, maybe, maybe . . .

I asked Daniel how much it would cost. 50 logs. Yes, that's a good, solid number that we could do. How much would it cost to do 50 logs? He estimated that, even with the one-time purchase of two of those spawn inoculators and the high speed shiitake drill bit, plus the cost of the spawn and wax, it would cost about a buck or two per log. And, guess what, each 40" log is estimated to produce approximately 5 pounds of shitakes, which have a retail value of up to about 20 bucks a pound.

Hmmm.

Maybe we could do this.