Every spring Resilient Roots of Cape Cod offers Shiitake Mushroom cultivation workshops. We took one in April 2025, and the photo above is the result.
We brought home two oak logs, which we’d inoculated in the workshop, placed them under a cedar tree, and mostly forgot about them except for occasionally aiming the hose at them.
After a recent rainstorm, we noticed a couple of mushrooms on them—mostly gone by, but mushrooms nonetheless. So I dug out the instructions the Resilient Roots staff provided, which offered instructions for taking spore prints to positively identify mushrooms and “forcing” them, which means submerging them for 24 hours in cold water to shock the mycelium into blooming.
Why take a spore print of a mushroom that has grown from a purposefully inoculated log? Well, it’s remotely possible that some other fungi could have hijacked my mushroom log. Unlikely! But worth taking a print.
We set the log out to bloom and an adorable set of mushrooms appeared on our logs as seen above.
There were delicious and truly fresher and firmer than anything I’ve bought.
The total time from inoculation to bloom was about 17 months, but Resilient Roots says they can be forced 14 months after creating them.
If you enjoy these sorts of experiments or just love growing your own food give it a whirl!
