We’ve got a mushroom-bearing tree!

This is a very short post with primarily one intention: to brag! I was so skeptical about the whole project that I didn’t even take pictures during setup, so all I have is the result:

Here’s the story behind this.

I don’t have a backyard, but my friends do, and in it they have an old decaying tree that they were thinking of taking down. So I went on a whim and got their permission to inoculate it with oyster mushroom plugs. I purchased some online, drilled holes in the tree trunk, pushed the plugs in and sealed them with wax. And then came the wait. The instructions for the plugs said that we’d have to wait at least nine months for the first fruiting bodies to appear – such a long time! Sure enough, we were really not thinking about mushrooms during winter break, but this is when they showed up – exactly nine months after! Needless to say, the Saturday dinner was delicious!

We also inoculated some logs at the same time as the tree, but no growth so far. Those logs weren’t in best shape, though (they were from a tree that fell down over a month before we put the plugs in, which is too old), but who knows?

Now I’m determined to find good logs, inoculate them and document the process! There are still many plugs sitting in the fridge…