What's going on, everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast. For the last

couple episodes we've been talking with Adam Wallace, who is the Natural Resource Manager

at the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company Mills River location, today we're switching topics

a little bit, and we're switching experts. We're talking with Mike Sommage, also known

as Mushroom Mike Sommage. He's a groundskeeper for this year in Nevada location out there

and he works under Adam. Mike, it's awesome to have you. We haven't done a lot of mushroom

content, so I'm really excited to talk about it.

Cool. I'm glad to be here, Kevin. Yeah, so at Sierra Nevada here, for the last five years

we started growing mushrooms for the property on the property and we're actually growing

them to use in our tap room that uses them in the restaurant and different, a lot of

pizza for sure, and then they use them in some other dishes. So, yeah, the best way for

growing mushrooms is the best time of year to start to grow mushrooms, especially on

wood is like middle winter to early spring here in North Carolina. I like to do it usually

in March, but you could do it from mid-February to April. You kind of want to do it before

the leaves start coming out on the trees. You do have to cut a live tree though to be

able to grow on logs or wood. I'll go into another way we can grow indoors later on,

but so what we do is go out in March and we grow oyster mushrooms and shiitake mushrooms

and oyster mushrooms prefer like a softwood. Out here we use maple or poplar trees,

tulip poplar trees that is, and then the shiitake we use oak, they prefer to grow on oak.

So, what we do is go out in March, we go and pick out some trees. You kind of want a tree

that's six to eight inches in diameter. You can go smaller, but you don't want to get too

big of a tree because you're going to have to move these logs around and I'll just say

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