Hardwood logs
Shiitake on logs
Lentinula edodes
- Difficulty
- Straightforward
- First harvest
- 9 to 18 months
- Keeps producing
- Five or six years from the same log
- Substrate
- Fresh-cut oak, beech, maple, hornbeam or sweet chestnut, 10 to 15 cm thick and about a metre long
Conditions that actually matter
Deep shade, off the ground, somewhere it will not dry out. A north-facing fence line or under evergreens.
The method
- 01Cut logs in late winter from a living tree, and use them within two to six weeks. Too fresh and the tree's own defences are still active; too old and something else has already colonised the wood.
- 02Drill 8 mm holes about 5 cm deep, in rows 15 cm apart along the log, with rows offset so the pattern is a diamond.
- 03Tap a plug of spawn into each hole with a mallet until it sits just below the surface.
- 04Seal every hole with melted cheese wax, and seal the cut ends too. The wax stops the plug drying out and keeps competitors out of the wound.
- 05Stack the logs in deep shade and leave them alone for a year. Water them in a drought, otherwise do nothing.
- 06When the ends of the log show white mycelium and the bark starts to loosen, it is colonised. Soaking a log in cold water for 24 hours will then force a flush, which is how commercial growers get logs to fruit on schedule.
What decides whether this works
Species of wood and freshness of the log. Shiitake will not colonise conifer, and it will not out-compete whatever has already moved into a log that has been lying around since last year.
What you need for this method
What this step needsPlug spawn and grain spawn$21.99
What this step needsDrill bit with depth stop$24.99
What this step needsCheese wax and dauber$11.99
What this step needsRubber mallet$13.95Some links here are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through one we earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes what we recommend. Prices were read from Amazon when this page was built and will have moved since.
Slow and then generous. Drill, plug, wax, wait a year, and harvest from the same log for five or six. Almost no ongoing work and almost no contamination risk, because the log is not sterile and was never meant to be.
The species, in the wild
Choice
Shiitake
Not a foraging species outside its native range. This entry exists because it is the easiest species to grow on logs at home.
Other methods