It’s been a week since the massive tree limb fell off my gum tree.
The powerful gusts last week managed to peel this massive limb off the tree. About 7 meters long.
The sun finally came out by noon, I considered procrastinating (my neighbour said I’m the laziest farmer in the world) but eventually, got to work.
There’s something therapeutic about farm tasks, especially chainsawing. For a fleeting moment, you don’t think about anything else – just the sound of the saw and the line you need to follow. Absolute clarity and focus.
It’s very physical. I keep cutting until I can’t cut anymore. It’s time to stop when I am no longer able to lift the little chainsaw.
Cleanup always takes longer than expected – branches get tangled, bark peels off, whole ecosystem around your ankles.
Smaller pieces will be next season’s firewood. The rest will be mushroom logs.
There’s no hard and fast rule on the length of mushroom logs, but the wider diameter – further up the limb – gets cut down to 1 metre lengths. Not because it’s a magic number but because that’s about the limit of what one person can (wo)man-handle. Even that’s a stretch for me, I have ZERO core strength. I also made shorter logs with smaller diameters.
The logs now need to sit aside for 2-3 weeks to dry out a little before they’re inoculated with mushroom spawn. That’ll be a bit of a process, maybe three weeks from now when I have time. More on that later.
For anyone curious – gum trees can be used for shiitake mushrooms (they’re not great with oyster mushrooms). You need hard wood for mushroom logs, therefore soft wood like pine are out.
The thing is, you have to plan ahead. I’ve wanted to do mushroom logs for years – but suitable branches often fall at the wrong time and I simply don’t have the time or energy to get to it quickly enough. I was also very reluctant to take risks and climb up to cut massive tree limbs.
But hey, nature helps out sometime. Work with it, not against it. Good that I had the space this week and the limb was already down.
At least the limb won’t go to waste – it gets a second life as firewood, food and fungi. 🪵
(I need to lie down.)
