Growing Shiitakes

We were part of a White Elephant gift exchange with friends over Christmas, and were thrilled when we unwrapped a Shiitake mushroom growing kit. Immediately, we vocally gushed and then gave the stink eye around the room to anyone who might consider stealing our present. It worked.

Having lived for two years in Kennett Square, PA, "the mushroom capital of the world," and toured a few mushroom growing houses in the area, I've always wanted to get a batch of mushrooms going, but it's been one of those simple and easy indulgences I've just never acted on.

If you're an apartment dweller or a city dweller and don't have a patch of soil to grow vegetables or herbs, this may be the thing to placate the primal urge we all have to grow something edible. It's so simple. Here we go...
Take your mushroom kit (basically a block of spore inoculated substrate) out of the box, and read the directions. The kit you get may have different direction, but below is what happened when we followed the direction with our kit. The block may already be sprouting, but in our case it was not, so the block still wrapped in the incubation bag went into the fridge for 3-5 days.
Then the bag was cut open at the top and the block was soaked in water (spring, well, rain, or boiled tap water) for 24 hours.
The block goes down to the basement (or any room with indirect sunlight and temps in the range of 60-80 degrees). The bag is turned upside down to form a humidity tent over the block. Skewers are poked in the block to hold the bag up. The surface of the block gets misted 3-4 times a day with water (spring, well, rain, or boiled tap water). This is what the surface of our kit looked like at the beginning or the misting — white, popcorn-like bumps.
Misting multiple times daily and with the humidity tent still on, after about 10 days, the surface started to blacken and blister, which are young mushrooms beginning to form.About two weeks into the daily misting program, a protuberance appeared (kind of nubby like the one on the top middle of the block), and over a few days developed into a full grown mushroom (like the one on the top right corner of the block).

Supposedly, we'll continue to get flushes of mushrooms for the next 6 months. Yay! I'll try to update about how many and for how long we got mushrooms.