Mushrooms on pizza do not excite me. And happening upon a mushroom when I’d much rather find a fried sweet potato or cauliflower in my tempura is always unwelcome. But one Portobello burger can go a long way. Next thing you know, you are looking at seed catalogs from Maine and ordering what is known in shiitake farmer’s language as an “inoculated log.”
Of course, a log covered in shiitake spores is not cheap to ship from Maine. So, if you swallow hard, call the 1-800 number, and order a few other things you also want…you are on the line anyhow. A few days or weeks later, you open up all the packaging, and there it is, an oak log with a few holes in it that are stuffed with things that look an awful lot like Styrofoam peanuts shoved in each hole.
At this point, your family may laugh at you for ordering such a monstrosity, but you assure them that you will be the one laughing last once you are all swimming in shiitakes. Shit-what? Your husband asked. “Shee-TOCK-ee,” you enunciate. It’s a Japanese mushroom delicacy. Oh, he answers, shaking his head not one bit convinced.
Marching on, you head outside, set the log aslant against the Bayberry tree out back, in shade, just as the directions direct. Then, you patiently wait and water your log, every day.
At some point, you notice the plugs have been dislodged by the neighborhood feral cats, and it dawns on you that, by being so conveniently located near the catnip, your shiitake log is being used as a scratching post. A very, very expensive one. You spray them with water when they come near, and hope they will listen when you just yell at the to go away.
Toward the summer’s end, it is still hot and the daily watering appears to have amounted to nothing, but a log that attracts cats and is slowly beginning to disintegrate. And you conclude: “Watering a log is very non-gratifying.”
In December, six months after your special delivery, you see that not only have no shiitakes appeared yet, but that at $40 (1998 prices, plus cost of delivery) you may just have bought yourself the most expensive Yule log in history. And Yule log it becomes. In addition to the “rare-for-Virginia” falling snow on Christmas eve, your log is now adorned festively with greenery from the yard (holly, pine cones, etc.) Though it has added a very Christmas-y vibe to the evening, it is still, let’s face it, a very expensive-shiitake-Yule log- scratching post.
Years later, you meet a man at a farming conference from West Virginia and a place called Hardscrabble Farm. He somehow manages to convince you that you need this type of project in your life again. Ridiculous as it sounds, he assures you that it may take up to a year, for your log to actually begin producing but once it does, it has the potential to produce for several years, with no further effort. He tells you that he some that have produced for sixteen years now. He laughs at the post-story, nonplussed, and suggests this time you should protect the log somehow, but to trust him and his instructions, and all your shiitake dreams will come true.
So, this time, much wiser than the first go-’round, you pay your seventeen dollars in exchange for a light package that comes within the week. When it arrives, it is full of little beads of compressed sawdust, beeswax, and spores and ready to install into logs.
It seems so easy, but it can’t be just last year’s leftover firewood. It needs to be drilled into white oak cut recently…like, within two weeks. Better yet, if you can find Sawtooth oak, use that. It’s what Japanese shiitake farmers use.
For now, you don’t have any Sawtooth on hand, but you do know some people who just cut down 27 trees in their backyard, many of them white oaks. So, you see if it’s okay to maybe have a few of those. They are planning to mill many of them into decking or for furniture and framing for a cabin in the woods, but are totally okay with sharing some of their surplus for the opportunity to also have some of the spores.
Once the log supply and proper drill bits are found, it occurs to you that a shred experience may be the making of a unique (and hopefully productive) Mother’s Day party. So you invite some of your shiitake-curious mother-friends over one rainy day, and stoke up the cordless drills. Within a couple of hours and a couple of beers, almost twenty logs have been inoculated.
At first, you water these logs, too, and watch them do nothing. For a year. The following April, at a permaculture class in Pennsylvania, you wander about in the snow at the site of a future intentional non-violent community and listen as a very knowledgeable woodsman remark on the exceptional importance of whacking each and every log. Hard.
This draws some philosophical questions about nonviolence, and the intent of the intentional community, but one can surmise that something sawed and drilled into at this point will not have much to say about being whacked as well.
Aha! The missing link. You go home, whack the hell out of those innocent inoculated logs, and then “tent” them (covering them with plastic). To your surprise and delight, lots of little shiitake babies begin appearing all over your free-with-very-cheap-Mother’s Day spore-covered log. Dogs and roosters follow you as soon as you pick the first sizable ‘shroom. It appears that you aren’t the only one anticipating a shiitake harvest.
You make a note that the logs should be protected, and ten years after buying your first and only ever log in the mail, you harvest almost five pounds of shiitakes. More than you can eat, and more than you want.
Drying shiitakes takes time, and patience, and only after processing them do you realize why they are so expensive; one pound of mushrooms becomes one OUNCE when dried.
The best part of the story comes when you explain to your Japanese next-door neighbor what the pile of logs are next to the fence in the former chicken tractor (to protect them). She in turn tells you how fifty years ago, in Japan, her brother did this same thing. She had paid no attention at the time. Giving her a log, you invite her to try, and when you pass along some of your cache of dried mushrooms, she brings them back to you, in a delicious Japanese stir-fried dish. She also gives you eggs, and you return them as a pound cake. It is a good trade, and you suspect that maybe in a year or so, you may actually be living next to a shiitake farmer if you aren’t one yourself first.