Hi Connie, it's been a while since you have posted this, so I wonder if you are going to see my message. Well, I hope that you do. I took a class on Guam at the university extention on growing mushrooms. They used the shiitake for the class. We used rolled up newspaper for the growing medium. The papers were tied up in rolls and then put into a big pressure cooker to sterilize them. We bought mushrooms at the store. We pressure cooked petri dishes to sterilize them, and then made the culture medium. Next, we shook and scraped the spores from the mushrooms onto the culture dishes. I seem to remember that we actually used glass bottles with screw on caps, and gave them a week to grow in the bottles with the caps on. Finally, we smeared this stuff on the ends of the sterilized newspapers and covered them with a tarp. Mine didn't come out, but some of the others had real good results. Of course, collecting all the old newspapers might be hard to do pretty soon with all the newspaper companies going down the tubes. chuck

Best to use logs a few weeks after cutting. Need them to weaken so they don't kill Shiittake. Also need shiitake to get in there early to give the best chance of it winning the log over other fungi.

Many hardwoods work so try it. Some production is possible on softwood but yield is low and it doesn't compete well there against other fungi.