Shiitake

A friend and colleague of mine, Luke McCormack, and his wife Carla, host a mushroom plugging party every year and thus introduce bunches of folks in State College to the possibility of home mushroom growing. And this is how I come to have this beautiful log starting to sprout this year's crop from a log I plugged in the spring of 2009.

Luke gets a whole bunch of oak logs and orders the mushroom spawn from www.fungi.com. Everyone grabs a log, drills holes all over the log, jams spawn in the holes, and then puts a wax coating over each plug. Fast forward a couple years, and shitakes start blooming all over the log - and all over town thanks to Luke and Carla.

And on the fungal thread, next time you have 20 minutes, watch Paul Stamets' TED talk on the possibilities of mycelium.