Growing Shiitake Mushrooms!

A few weeks before Christmas, I got a text advertising a mushroom growing kit from Territorial Seeds. That is something that I have wanted to try so I forwarded the text to my husband as a hint for what I might like for Christmas. He's good at catching my hints so I got a big block of some soil mixture infused with Shiitake mushroom spores for Christmas. I didn't have time to start it before a short trip we took after Christmas so I put it in the fridge as per the instructions.

About a week later, I got it out and set it up. I had to get it really wet first and then spray it with distilled water a couple of times a day to keep it at high humidity. This is what it looked like on January 5th with the mushrooms just starting to sprout:

Most of the time, I kept it under a plastic lid so it would stay really humid in there.

The other day my mushrooms were ready so I harvested them!

This is what the underside of a ripe mushroom looks like. Notice the "gills."

I sauteed a couple of them the other night and they were firmer than I expected. My sister-in-law who has a lot of Japanese ancestry tells me that Shiitake mushrooms are firmer than the white mushrooms I usually buy. So tonight I made a soup with them. You can't see them in the bowl but they're in there.

I also sauteed some tatsoi from my cold frame that I planted back in August. I decided to harvest everything yesterday since it's supposed to get pretty cold this weekend. It was all quite delicious.

This was a pretty easy but very expensive way to grow shiitake mushrooms. The block cost $50 with shipping and we got about 12 very large mushrooms. I had hoped to get a second crop which requires soaking in non-chlorinated water for 24 hours and then setting it out like before. Unfortunately the water we soaked it in probably had some chlorine in it so it probably won't work. And the second crop was not guaranteed to begin with. My son told me about a workshop where you can learn how to grow mushrooms at home which I would imagine would be cheaper than how I did it. So maybe I'll try again!

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