Shiitake Village Taking Shape

Well already January 10. Where does the time go? Hope everyone is having a happy new year so far despite the weather. I can't believe we have the coldest winter ever in Georgia the year we decide to make our home into a farm. So let's hope we will see those pretty brown Shiitake late spring this year. Thankfully, our pipes did not burst. We know a lot of people who are dealing with that mess right now. We are slowly receiving all the equipment we ordered for our grow room. Vic has really put a lot of work into designing the environment. He constructed a glove box in order to inoculate the sterilized substrate blocks with shiitake spawn. We are waiting for the weather to warm up before our friends at Field and Forest in Wisconsin can send us the spawn safely. Meanwhile we have readied the special burner and pressure cooker to use for the sterilization of sawdust and wood chips to blend with rice bran and calcium carbonate to create the enriched growing blocks for the shiitake. Vic has built shelves and enclosed them in plastic sheeting. Each unit will have a fan, filter, misting system and drain. We haven't seen anyone create a sterile environment quite like this and hope that this will be sufficient to grow our shiitake. We had to use the back bedroom as a growing room but because the shiitake require 100% humidity at a certain stage for fruiting, we wanted to save the bedroom walls from the moisture, thus the enclosed shelf units. We are ready to start once we receive our shipment. If you do a search on the internet you will find People all over the world using whatever methods work best for them to grow their mushrooms. Here are a few pics of our endeavor.