Mushrooms

There is good news and bad news.  All those mushroom logs we put up in spring of 2011 never produced but a few Shitakes.  The good news is - while looking for wood to cut for our woodstove, we found a mother lode of wild oyster mushrooms.   Although we have been eating lots of them, there were so many, we decided to dry some.  Here is a beautiful plate of fresh oysters.

This is the log they were growing on.  It is a Poplar tree about 2 feet in diameter and 40 feet long that fell down on our property about 2 years ago.  You can barely see our truck in the background.

Below are the drying racks, which are small window screens held up by plastic corner braces that originally were used to hold the corners of our solar modules when they were shipped.  The corner braces stack, so we can make this air dryer many layers tall if we wish.  These are drying by the woodstove with the ceiling fan above them on low.  This picture is after drying them overnight and they are already much smaller than when they were fresh.

We have spent most of the last month chopping and splitting wood for the stove.  We have cut up only trees that were already down but off the ground.  Nevertheless, most have been too wet to use this year.  We recently bought a moisture meter to tell when the wood is dry enough (less than about 20%).  So, we have put away for next year about a cord so far, plus about a month's supply for this year.  This is our wood splitting station.

Here is our wood stack as of about a week ago.  The pile is a lot bigger now.