Spent the morning working with the smaller of my two saws . Was able to harvest 70 logs from overtopped beech, sugar maple and black birch for our shiitake yard and turn the tops of those trees into a small pile of ready-to-stack wood for the wood shed. Burned through a lot so far this winter. The shed is looking a little hungry for more... Also hauled back a truck load of roadside maple left down the road just yesterday by the powerline crews. The scrounge pile also looks hungry for more. There is never enough! A good morning working with some wood. Anyone else out cutting or hauling today?
Nice score! I haven't gotten out much yet, it's rained all but 12 days so far this year. And the non rainy 12 days were/are a sea of mud. It's good to be years ahead on wood.
Didn't know what to expect from the title. But by me we have a thunderstorm attacking last week's snow dumping.
nothing worse than working on wood in the mud. Ground has been frozen and weve had minimal snow so its been a great winter for cutting here in Conn.
Hello fellow FHC member from CT. I'm mostly afternoon wood...nothing today, but i did score two good loads of red maple this week. Split maybe 1/3 of it Thursday in the mud. I haul wood in my work PU too only no toolboxes on the side. Nice rounds, one split and done. Fresh, green and clean. ice country up your way.
Awesome about the maple! Luckily it’s not been muddy here much at all yet. That season is coming though. Mostly been dealing with snow and ice covered wood which can be just as much a pain. All those logs in my truck were the 36 inchers I harvested for the shiitake yard. Smaller stuff. 3-8” DBH trees.
How do you decide what logs to take? Do you have any rules about scars from removed branches? When you introduce the fungi, do you cover over he hole? I read a bit about covering the hole with bees wax (not sure if it was you who wrote it). Ultimately how many pallets of logs are you trying to acccumulate and how many crops of shrooms do you plan to get from each setup? I imagine it is best to ensure that no foreign fungi are introduced into the logs. How do you do that? Treat the ends? What volume of fungi culture do you start with and do you keep it going to start fresh when setting up a new crop? Rainy day, so maybe you have a few minutes to answer a few questions... thanks..
If you Google “Log Grown Shiitake Best Management Practices” you’ll find an awesome resource - 58 page PDF about how to best approach starting a shiitake yard. For the logs I’m harvesting off our property to be used in our shiitake enterprise, I’m targeting specific hardwood trees as part of our stewardship plan as a means to help promote the health and wellbeing of our sugar maples in our sugaring lots. Trees that are overtopped by larger, healthier, more aggressive and genetically superior trees are a good example of what I’m taking. Yesterday, for example, I released five black birch, two beech and two sugar maple that were underperforming under the shadow of three of our “ol’ grand dad maples.” The maples are pretty huge. They’re well into the upper canopy of the forest and this prevents these smaller trees from gaining access to sunlight and resources in the soil (the neat thing is, most of these smaller trees are all the same age as the massive maples - look up “even aged stands.” It’s fascinating). There are many potential reasons why these smaller trees did not make it into the upper canopy. Perhaps they are genetically inferior. Or maybe they are stunted due to site location. They can be diseased or unhealthy for any number of reasons. Etc. So we look specifically for these underperforming trees and release them. This in turn opens up the resource potential for our bigger, healthier and more productive trees. At the same time, we are benefiting from the logs for our shiitake yard, a small amount of firewood from the tops of these smaller trees (the stuff that’s smaller than 3” - too small for a shiitake log) and we are leaving the brush from the tree tops in place as habitat for wildlife. The brush will eventually decay and turn into forest soil over time. So it’s a complete system where we are able to aid our forest in many ways, all the while getting something in return (in this case, we get syrup, logs and firewood). As far as scars on the logs. You do have to be cautious when cutting not to knick up the bark. You want the bark as in tact as possible to prevent competing fungi from entering the log. Where I cut off branches I just seal over the spot with cheese wax. Don’t use bees wax ever - you’ll find curious and hungry animals eating it off. All the inoculation holes also get covered over with cheese wax. I don’t cover the ends of the logs with wax. Cornell Extension has done a lot of research into log grown shiitake. They found that there is no benefit to coverin the ends of the logs with wax. This year I’m trying to get 200-300 new longs done. Right now I have 100 inoculated and another 70 freshly harvested. The target time to get the logs inoculate is really within a month of cutting the logs but the sooner the better. You can wait longer than this but the chances of the logs drying out or being colonized by a competing fungi are greater the longer you wait. As for the crop itself. I have three strains of shiitake going. The cold weather strain I used will fruit naturally in the spring and the fall. Can’t “force fruit” that strain. But the other two strains are “wide range” and they can be forced into fruiting by soaking the logs in cold water. My forcing logs are on a rotation where one set of logs will be soaked and ultimately harvested a week later, then the logs rest for 7 weeks before being soaked again for the next flush of mushrooms. So during the warm months I am guaranteeing myself a constant supply of shiitake by planning out my weekly log soakings and harvest. It sounds more complicated than it really is. Check out that Shiitake BMP resource. It’s full of information that answers pretty much all your questions much better than I did!
Doesn’t sound complicated at all. Thanks for the explanation of your operation. Studied forestry in school, so the silvicultural aspect of what you are doing makes perfect sense.. as for the use of the term “release” I think it’s used to refer to the trees that are left to grow.. as in you are removing (culling) undesired or competitive trees in order to release (allow to grow unobstructed) the trees that you intend to keep.. Again, thanks for the information. Can’t wait to see the first harvest!!! Glossary Release - An intermediate treatment designed to free young trees from undesirable, usually overtopping, competing vegetation.
Where did you go to school? Coming into forestry and managing my woods is all new to me. Looking back, if I had known where I’d be these many years after college I would have studied forestry. The entirety of it is fascinating to me. I recently took a woodlands management class through the Cornell Small Farms Program and since then I don’t think a day has gone by where I haven’t learned something new that I can use or see happening in my woods.
ZooMass.... great program there. flunked out of another major into that program... ended up working out for the best... Cornell certainly has tremendous resources...
Painting the house today. The sooner its done, the sooner we move in, the sooner I live at the woodlot
