Shitake Mushrooms at FarmLIFE

In addition to her animals and plants, Kirsty is also culturing the third major domain of life, Fungi. Specifically, she grows Shitake Mushrooms by cutting logs in the winter, drilling holes in them, inoculating them with shitake spores, and keeping them wet year round. After a year or two, the Mushrooms start growing out of the holes and other cracks, and keep coming every warm season for 3 to 5 years. Although she hasn't tried it yet, Kirsty says you can reinoculate the spent shitake logs with oyster mushrooms and get a few more years of production out of them.

Because these mushrooms will grow under natural tree cover, they make a great crop that can be grown in the woods. Not only that, but since the logs are best cut from young trees, they may be of great use when thinning a forest. You could thin the forest earlier than normal and use the logs for Shitake culture in the same patch of woods where the small trees were cut!

But enough writing, its movie time: