Description

Cultivation Difficulty: Easy-Moderate
Type: Edible
Substrate: hardwood chips and sawdust, hardwood logs
Colonization/Fruiting Temperatures: 75-85F/50-65F
Available In: petri or slant

An excellent decomposer of wood, these mushrooms can be grown outdoors on logs or stumps or indoors on fruiting media.   The rapidly growing mycellium requires lots of water. Outdoors logs can be laid in “rafts” on the forest floor and covered with woodchips to keep humidity high.

Nameko are an essential ingredient for making authentic miso soup and chinese hot pots with noodles.

Fruiting formula by volume:

• 100 parts hard wood sawdust/small woodchips
• 10 parts bran
• 1 part gypsum (calcium sulfate)Water until moist and well soaked through. Drain or squeeze out excess water. The substrate should be damp but not wet. Pack into autoclavable bags and sterilized from 1-4 hours at 15 psi depending on the volume of the substrate. Larger volumes need a longer sterilization time to heat the core enough for complete sterilization. Depending on the type of bag and method of inoculation, the bags can be sealed before or after sterilization. Colonization is slow and may take as long as 1-2 months.Fruiting requires removing or puncturing the bag and providing a cool, well ventilated and humidified environment with indirect light. Hand misting daily and covering the bagless sawdust block loosely with a light plastic grocery bag (to maintain humidity) gives acceptable results on the kitchen counter.

*Note: Culture supplied as living mycelium in a test tube slant or grown on sterile media in a petri dish. Culture can be stored under refrigeration for several months. Slants are best suited for long distance travel, international shipments, or long term culture storage. To ensure freshness of culture, slant and plate requests are made to order, please allow 2-4 weeks for processing and shipment.