Have just bought some oyster mushroom dowels, are they any good?
Can i use freshly felled timber?
I seem to remember my instructions said inoculate 6 weeks after cutting the timber. The oyster mushrooms are great and are one of the easier ones to get to grow. Still a bit hit and miss though.
Quote from: philistine on April 01, 2013, 00:43:46
Have just bought some oyster mushroom dowels, are they any good?
Can i use freshly felled timber?
Yes..it needs to be fresh to avoid 'foreign' mushroom spore invasion before the dowels have taken over the logs and as being fresh, there is still plenty of moisture to allow the spores to grow in. That is the most difficult 'job' ..to keep the logs moist...putting the logs into bin liners and keeping them in shady place will be good remedy for that.
I find oyster mushrooms reasonably easy to grow..but haven't had good success getting them to 'fruit' more than one season.
I must admit I was suckered into buying a yellow oyster kit at £9.99.
If you've never had yellow oysters - they are much tastier than the grey ones and equally meaty though about half the size.
Unfortunately they (and the pink ones) disappeared from the supermarkets over 5 years ago.
The Taylors kit turned out to be a different species entirely - they are more cream/white than the yellow shown on the packet, and they have much less flavour than the ones I used to buy, they are also smaller and much less meaty.
It is possible that some of these differences are due to compromises made to produce a home kit - but I doubt it, and anyway it still means the kit is still extremely poor value except as a novelty.
Does anyone know of a source of the meaty yellow ones? I'm mean but I'd be quite happy to pay up to £7 a kilo for them - that's at least 7x cheaper than the yield I got from the kit.
Cheers.
When you've got one log going, can you use bits of it to seed another?