A Smattering and Sprinkling of Spring Shiitake Shrooms - the first EcoEcho Forest Cultivation Harvest is a "sample" run

Shiitake shrooms dried in storage

My first Shiitake Shrooms harvested from EcoEcho Forest Cultivation!

Growing on the Birch logs - Birch is softer wood so the mycelium grows faster and then fruits earlier than the harder Alder logs

 from the underside:

So then I dried the shrooms in the sun - to soak up Vitamin D - Shiitake shrooms will store Vitamin D.

Yep - it's said that at first you don't get many shrooms. Well we only got 40% of normal rain this spring - hence the next to no first harvest! Still they're real shrooms!! You gotta start somewhere.

So they started out kind of big:

The cracked one is called "Donko" - meaning it fruited in the cold morning - and is called a "flower" (Donko) - style.

So you can see here - Donko - for $30 a pound

The reviews of that Amazon link - it says they are hard to rehydrate and need to be boiled to soften up. Yes I did an extra drying process in the oven at 170 degrees - the lowest temp - to make sure the shrooms are very dried out (to prevent going bad). So they will need EXTRA hydration - boiling - to soften up. But there's no preservatives nor lead poisoning (like the above link complained about those shrooms from China)..... Also my shrooms are LOG grown - whereas those shrooms are certainly grown on pesticide treated bags of sawdust...

So I have an order for $50 - so I said it was two pounds - that is then dried down to about a quarter pound. So I'm working on that order. But I'm not going up north again till I get a couple more orders to fix the car rust. I am waiting on the Cosmoline wax - RP-342 and the gallon of phosphoric acid.

I got the Eastman Internal Frame Spray and a separate better sprayer nozzle - to ensure covering the whole insides of the chassis frame.

We might get some rain up north but - I'll know tomorrow when the weather is recorded for precipitation. I think there was rain up north this AM - I'm positive - the radar showed it - maybe some strong rain but not for long. So that should keep the logs surviving.