Olive Oysterling / Mukitake Agar Plate

Description

Olive Oysterling, also commonly known as the Mukitake, is a thick-gilled mushroom with an oyster shell shape. Its velvety olive or toffee colored caps are excellent culinary mushrooms, fresh or dried. Fresh Olive Oysterling mushrooms, when sliced and sauteed, are buttery in texture, very much like Chicken of the Woods. Olive Oysterling is also widely known for its medicinal properties; use them to transform a basic vegetable soup and at the same time, help those who are at risk for metabolic syndrome when fall weather (and football watching) settles in.

Cultivation: Olive Oysterling grows on hardwood logs; especially sugar maple, beech and oak. Logs can be inoculated just as you would for Shiitake. After 18 months of incubation, or when the logs are ready to fruit or are nearing that stage, lay logs horizontally and low to the ground, as Olive Oysterling loves high humidity for fruiting. It may also be grown in the Totem Method if logs are placed in protected areas in fall for fruiting. This cool weather loving, fall bearing mushroom fruits when temperatures dip near 40° F.

Some photos on this page have been sourced from iNaturalist licensed under CC-BY-SA3.0, taken by Casey H. Richart, Alexis, Larry Jensen, John Brew or others.