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Hey, what are you doing this Valentines day?

Timing can make or break some crops. Luckily for us, Shiitake is a fairly forgiving fungi. Shiitake spawn grow best in mild temperatures. In the south, anytime in the spring or fall will do. Still, there are some rules of thumb to keep in mind to help your success rate.

The best time to cut your logs will be just before the sap starts running in the spring time. I’m talking about the last couple of cold weeks in February. Valentienes day is a great time to start fixing up the chainsaw.

In these coldest of winter months, the tree builds up sugar content in the sap. Mycelium will use the sugars as an abundant nutrient source to colonize the entire log quickly, before competitor fungi can move in.

Before I inoculate the logs, I wait 10 to 14 days. This allows time for the cell structures in the wood to begin to break down. The mushroom spawn takes much better to wood at this stage.

While everyone else is sowing turnip greens, I’m sizing up oak trees.

I grew up in central Arkansas. Crown jewel of southern U.S. bible-belt. Fried chicken is king. Mushrooms? The gray slugs on a pizza? No, thanks. I hear they taste like shoes.

Luckily, at some point in my life I found Japan, and took a look around. They are more into mushrooms than you would think. There are seven different kinds of mushrooms commonly found in any Japanese super market. No big deal.

I found Shiitake forests, rows and rows of logs set up, unfolding beautiful of shiitake bouquets. The catch was they were supposedly full of nuclear radiation. During the meltdown of the Fukushima-Daiichi powerplant, nuclear waste radiation had blown over the region was staying in. Mushrooms, I learned, absorb heavy metals such as uranium from the environment when they grow, making them store houses for radio active poison.

Fascinated by what I could not have, I thus began to notice mushrooms everywhere, edible or not. The Japanese country side is a biodynamic jungle. Island of ancient volcanos rising out of the sea. Rain, rivers, creeks, and streams are abundant across the forested mountains. These dewy, lush and shady micro-climates are the perfect environment for so many different kinds of mushrooms.

Moving back to the southeastern U.S. I brought my love and fascination of fungi back with me. I kept tabs on many of the same mushrooms and microclimates that I had seen in Japan. I was also itching to try some of the cultivation techniques I had seen while I was there. Particularly shiitake grown on hardwood logs was of interest to me because in my home state, Arkansas, forestry is a huge industry. There are saw mills, everywhere you turn. Drive a few hours. All you’ll see are trees and all you’ll pass is log trucks.

A neighbor of mine had a few logs leaned up behind his shed.

“Doug, these are supposed to be Shiitake logs but they’ve never put off any mushrooms that I can see. I probably let them get too dry.”

I took a look around and it was indeed dry.

“I’ll look into it.”

I’m a learn by doing kind of guy. In no time I had ordered some plug spawn and was gassing up my chainsaw. There were some oak trees out back that I knew were growing too close together. One had limbs hanging over our house. I sawed the trunk down into five, arm-length sections. When the plugs came I followed the instructions and inoculated my five logs. No big deal.

The next 8 months was the real kicker. I’m sure I must’ve looked silly out back with my water hose soaking down the five logs. I named them all after reindeer and imagined me Santa. I was making a list and checking it twice. These logs were not going to go dry!

So eight months, two weeks, and three days later (same gestation period of my first born child) there grew a perfectly upright shiitake mushroom right off Prancer’s back side. I was hooked.

Since then, my family and I have grown a lot of shiitakes right here in our back yard. Every year, our wood lot grows as we innoculate more logs. The tender, woodsy taste of freshly picked shiitake is unrivaled. Same with garden tomatoes verses some from the store. Once you get hooked on the taste, the annual work of preparing and planting happens all on its own.

This is the very first meal that I made with my home grown shiitake.

I could not believe that I was at my own kitchen table. The combination of flavors was telling me this restaurant was a five star, but it was I who had done the cooking. It had to be that mushroom flavor coming trough.

Combined with the tangy, sweet crunch of the greens, my woodsy fungi went over perfect. Sauté with onions and there is not much that can go wrong.

4 cups turnip greens
2 cups chopped mushrooms
1 yellow onion
2 tbl olive oil
salt and pepper

1. Warm olive oil in a skillet at medium heat.
2. Add onion (diced) and mushrooms (sliced) to the skillet. Cook until onions are translucent.
3. As the onions and mushrooms begin to brown slightly, add the greens on top. Lower heat and cook until greens tender but still have a little bit of crunch in the stem.
4. Sprinkle with soy sauce or salt and pepper to taste.

I like to serve this with an egg on a bed of rice. I like to eat this with chop sticks while watching the sun go down.

Just to get some ground rules in, here is a glossary of mushroom terminology I enjoy using on the regular. These words feel so dirty, in a good way.

Mycelium – These are basically the roots of the mushroom. They look like little white hairs that gradually spread throughout their nutrient source, or substrata.

Substrata – The nutrient rich substance that the mycelium grow through to get established. The mycelium waits for the right air, water, and light conditions, before it fruits, or produces its first flush of mushrooms.

Flush – One fruiting cycle. Most mycelial networks flush several times before their substrata is depleted of nutrients.

Fruiting – The tissue structure we know as the “mushroom” is the fruit of the organism. It is made to produce seeds: millions of microscopic spoors.

Spores – essentially the seed of the mushroom. Microscopic, they can sometimes be seen falling from the gills or the sponge of the mushroom as a fine smoke-like mist.

Gills – Thin layered structures underneath the cap of some mushrooms. This is where the spoors are produced and released.

Spawn – One way to cultivate mushrooms is by transplanting mycelial networks into larger sterilized substrata. The initial nutrient dense substrata that the spoors grow out on is called the spawn.

Lentinula edodes – This is the scientific name for the famously delicious species of mushroom known as Shiitake.