In French, the transitive verb for grow is “cultiver.”
Bear with me here. I promise this week’s column is about mushrooms.
When I was farming in France a few years ago, I kept wanting to say that crops grow, using the same French word as you would for people. People grow, and people grow crops. But in romance languages, these are two different verbs. “Cultiver” is much more precise, and not a direct translation to the word “cultivate” in English either, which means to turn, prepare or work the soil.
Instead, “cultiver” embodies how farmers nourish, aid and raise a crop, but ultimately leave the building to the organism itself.
Now, let’s talk about mushrooms. One does not simply “grow” mushrooms, I’ll offer. You nourish, aid and raise them. You provide a home for them to grow themselves, helped along with some water, banging on the ground and slug-prevention techniques. Yes, they can become a predictable, prolific, enjoyable crop. But there’s something mysterious about mushrooms that you don’t find when growing a zucchini, or a radish, or even a bright purple potato.
Cultiver, rather than grow.
On Tuesday, I spent some time with Meg Athearn of Morning Glory Farm, who has been growing shiitake mushrooms recreationally for more than 10 years, and commercially for three. I also attended a farm tour of North Tabor Farm in June, where farm co-founder Matthew Dix shared the details of his shiitake mushroom operation. Both have offered shiitake-growing workshops through the Agricultural Society over the years.
Fungi feeds mostly on wood and organic matter, and different mushrooms take to specific types of trees. Both Meg and Matthew have chosen shiitake for its proclivity for oak trees, a common tree on the Island. The farmers cut down oak trees from their properties and slice them into logs. These trees are healthy and usually sterile, meaning they are not yet infected with a fungus.
“When I cut it, I want to rot that log with the fungus I want to rot with, not the billions of other funguses that are floating around the air right now,” explained Matthew.
Next, they’ll drill holes around the log in a staggered pattern. These are inoculation sites, where they insert shiitake spore, purchased from an off-Island company. Meg covers the sites with wax, a sort of “new bark” that protects the system.
Both Meg and Matthew stash their logs in piles in the woods, and forget about it for a while. Over the next nine months the hyphae — the root system of the mushroom — colonizes the entire piece of wood. This is called the “incubation period.”
“If you were to slice this wood anywhere and look at it under a microscope, you would see the hyphae, the little white fungus network,” said Matthew.
Once the fungus has a secure enough network in the log, it begins to feed on its carbohydrates. The fungus eats about an inch of wood a year, meaning after about five years, a five-inch log will have disintegrated into nothing.
For the log to bear fruit — what we know as mushrooms, or the sexual reproductive organs of the fungus, which release spores to propagate elsewhere — it requires water. Mushrooms are 90 per cent water, and would pop up naturally after a heavy rain, but Meg and Matthew both soak their logs in tubs to “force” the fungi to fruit. Most of the time, they do very well, producing a few pints per log.
At North Tabor Farm, shiitake growing is a good secondary use for the hundreds of gallons the farm uses to wash their produce, said Matthew. He takes his logs out and bangs them on the ground for a bit, a vibration which he says stimulates fruiting.
Soon, mushrooms are popping up all over the log, and mostly not at the drilled holes. They are cold to the touch, even on a hot day, and sheltered in a covered area. Meg’s workshop is covered in netting to keep out the deer, and the logs rest along an old, empty wooden bedframe from the farm’s bunkhouse.
“See, this one, this is about to go off,” she says, pointing to a log covered in little buttons of mushrooms. These are called “pins,” and they grow into open mushrooms with gills in just a day or two. Then, it’s a race to see who will get to them first: Meg, or the slugs. Sometimes she’ll be in bed and, remembering to harvest her shiitakes, go out with a headlamp to pick. Other times, she puts a “salt circle” of wood ash around her work station to drive off the slugs.
“And I try to share a little bit, but you don’t want them to get all the mushrooms,” said Meg. A little nibble, and she can’t sell it in the farmstand.
Both Meg and Matthew have tried to grow other varieties of mushrooms, like oyster mushrooms, using the same method. But oyster mushrooms like beechwood best, and it is hard to come by healthy beech on the Island.
I love this way of farming — listening to the environment, respecting the natural barriers it provides. No, this vegetable is not supposed to grow in this climate. No, this place is meant for shiitakes, not lion’s mane.
It’s that inaccessibility that makes fungi so much, well, fun. Then there are some that are famous for being un-farmable, like morels and chanterelles. I remember foraging for chanterelles in the woods of a farm I stayed at in France. We came back with pounds and pounds of that golden mushroom.
But these two have figured this one out. For Matthew, preparing shiitake logs is a good way to spend the quiet winter months, and it’s a good, easy use of space and materials already on the farm.
Meg said she enjoys the process, and she loves the product, too. I tried some of her shiitakes sauteed in olive oil, with a bit of fresh basil. They were delightful.
This article appears in August 28, 2026.
Fascinating!