Shiitake · Lentinula edodes

Hardwood dowels fully colonised with shiitake, ready to hammer into logs. We grow them from our own culture: the agar culture goes onto sterilised sorghum to make master grain, and the master grain colonises soaked, sterilised dowels.

Packs

100 dowels, or 250 at 15% less per dowel. A 60 cm log takes about 50 dowels, so a pack of 100 does about two logs.

Choose your strain

• Cold strain fruits at 7–18 °C. Inoculate from late April to June and the logs fruit the following winter (June–August).
• Warm strain fruits at 18–27 °C, for warm-season harvests.

Logs

• Deciduous hardwood, 15–20 cm across and 60–100 cm long, cut about 3–4 weeks before you inoculate. Oak is ideal; Karee and Vachellia are good indigenous options.
• Avoid pine, gum (eucalyptus), camphor and treated timber.
• Drill 8 mm holes, 30 mm deep, 10–12 cm apart in a diamond pattern. Tap in a dowel and seal each hole and the cut ends with wax.

Spawn run and fruiting

Keep the logs in full shade, raised 10–15 cm off the ground, at 24–26 °C, and water them twice a week. Colonising takes 8–12 months (12–15 months for larger logs). To fruit, submerge a log in clean, unchlorinated water for 24–48 hours, let it drip-dry for a day, and expect pins in 6–10 days. Rest the logs for at least two weeks between flushes.

Lead time and delivery

Stock goes first come, first served unless you have a production arrangement with us; if it has sold out, allow up to 2 weeks while the next batch incubates.

To keep dowels out of courier warehouses over weekends, we dispatch on Mondays and Tuesdays for regional deliveries, and up to Wednesday for Cape Town. Our standard courier (The Courier Guy, Economy) takes 2–3 days. These dispatch days don't apply to collections or to your own courier.

Full instructions are free in our Learning Centre: How to grow SHIITAKE mushrooms on LOGS using DOWELS. See how all our species compare on the fruiting temperature chart.