New mushroom logs from older logs

Hi!

I recently purchased some mycelium-inoculated plugs to start growing some mushroom varieties on logs.

I plan to inoculate these logs next week to get (hopefully) a first mushrooms harvest next spring.

This Is my first time trying this, so I needed the plugs to start with, but I was wandering if in the future I will be able to inoculate new logs from the existing ones (for example putting them close to already-colonized logs or something similar) or if I will need to by plugs again.

Any experience about this?

Thank you!

I don't know much about mushroom propogation, but starting new logs from the olds ones should be possible.

I don't think simply putting it next to it would be the best way... as it might give other fungus time to invade before the one you want takes over. I suspect you would need to inoculate using spore from your old log. Maybe make your own plugs?

Alessandro,

If you intend to use old logs as a substitute for plugs, then, yes—it can be done.

But it is not quite as simple as putting one log next to another.  It might work, but varies widely with time of year and mushroom species among other things.

For starters, what type of mushroom are we talking about?



Eric

I looked into this a while ago as I had a very similar question. Why can't we just use bits of old mushroom mycelium from a grow bag to inoculate another grow bag? My understanding is that the mycelium grows vigorously when fairly freshly developed from spawn, but after it has reached maturity and fruits, it loses vigour and is slower to colonise and develop, and more prone to being outcompeted. This is why commercial growers bother with maintaining cultures of spawn to rather than reuse their mature colonised grow bags.

Can you make this work in practice? Yeh, probably - your results are likely to be it and miss, but if you are tossing the used logs or grow bags anyway you have nothing to lose. I tried this a while ago by burying a spent grow bag of oyster muchrooms in a pile of fresh woodchips. Nothing developed.

Hi everyone and thank you for your ideas.

The varieties I will try for this first attempt are blue and golden oyster and poplar mushrooms.

The fact that the mycelium seems to loose vigor along its growth process is very interesting.

My idea was to exploit someway the fact that, as I suppose, in natural conditions mushrooms would attempt to propagate themselves while growing, so why don't we make them to propagate inside some medium we can use to continue their cultivation in an easy way?

Eric, have you tried using old logs as a substitute for new plugs? That would be great if it actually works

Thank you again!