Cut tulip popular for oyster mushrooms, found this inside -- safe to innoculate?

Hi there, I cut down this tulip poplar (leaning over house) hoping to innoculate with blue and golden oysters plugs, but found runs of black/green inside. Can anyone ID what this infection is and/or does it seem worth to innoculate still? I'm inclined to add extra plugs to each log and let the oysters gang up on the invader, but would love some outside perspective here. Never grown oysters (and I don't want to cut any more trees!)

Not sure, but the infection seems to be fairly small and oysters are strong competitors, so I'd say you have a good shot. Good idea on the extra plugs, especially around the infection.

I cut a lot of tulip trees and mill them with my alaskan saw mill. It is extremely normal to see this. Since I mill the wood, I am frequently cutting straight down the seam, and I can see the discolration all the way down, and eventually I hit the starting point. It is caused by a foreign object. It can be anything. The most common things are walnuts and bits of metal. Tulip trees grow extremely fast and straight, so any object that gets lodged inside (more likely an object that the tree grew itself around) will slowly leach its minerals and colors into the wood. The wood just grows and stretches each year, and the coloration spreads with it. These seams of color can run 20 feet long, easily, from the starting point to where they fade out.

I do not know how walnuts get into the middle of a tree, but it is fairly common. I blame the squirrels.

As for the effect it may have on your mushrooms I really don't know for sure, but it seems harmless to me. Mushrooms growing out in nature, without your intervention are probably soaking up trace elements of various things as well, for better or worse. Unless you have been shooting enriched plutonium into your trees, I wouldn't worry about it.

Edit to add:
If you are really curious where it came from, look at the tree stump left behind. If the discoloration is in the stump, you know the source is somewhere in the stump and you can dig/cut it out and hunt for it. If the stump is normal, then the object is somewhere in the trunk of the tree. It looks like you cut it up into sections. Start at the fattest thickest section (the bottom part of the tree) and see if the color is in that section. If not, go to the next section and look there, and work your way "up" the tree segments. Find the bottom log where the color first started and split it open. Somewhere in there you will find a foreign object.

Hi Caleb,

I am looking at those log ends and while they have have some growth on the center section, the total area in question is fairly small.  Personally, I would go ahead and use those logs.  It looks like you have a whole lot of material so I would go ahead and use them!

Eric