We are going into mushroom production!
La Taillede is famous locally for plentiful mushrooms in the forest after the rain, mostly in the spring & autumn. We are not mushroom experts, but we often find chanterelles and Robson also found some black morilles; delicious! There are lots we are not yet confident in recognising; some can look very similar to poisonous ones! So we thought, why not try cultivating some other popular species and see how we get on.
We have inoculated a large stack of freshly felled silver birch & poplar logs with shiitake and blue/grey oyster mushrooms with plug spawn. These sterilised birch plugs are spirally grooved and fully colonised by pure mushroom mycelium. This is a permaculture technique; Luka drilled lots of holes in each log, then Dani hammered the dowels in and then sealed each one with wax. About 40 logs were inoculated with 2000 dowels, and we have put them in the perfect shady, damp spot in the forest. Hopefully we will be harvesting mushrooms on and off for the next fifteen years so well worth the initial effort! Luka also planted some luminous mushrooms which you can't eat; but he thought they would be quite fun! We were lucky to have our young friend, Dylan's help to hammer in the plugs with Dani. We love it when our guests like to get involved in projects. His sister, Rosie was busy looking after the animals.
Here are the logs in situ. We hope to have mushrooms in about 1 month!
