I decided to drive out to the Enchanted Mushroom Forest this morning to see if the recent rains have caused some interesting mushrooms to fruit. I was surprised at how few mushrooms I saw today. I expected a lot more. I did find enough small chanterelles to cook with dinner, though.
The other thing I was doing was testing my knee. A week or so ago I made this drive and my knee wasn’t so happy about it. This time, I was quite comfortable driving both ways. My knee also handled walking in the woods pretty well too.
27th Street 
The knee is sore this morning, as my body is reminding me to increase activity gradually. Overall, I think it’s healing and strengthening pretty well, though sometimes I get frustrated with how slow the whole business is.
If you really love shiitakes, there are mushroom growers who sell innoculated oak logs. They grow the shiitake mycelium and form it into what amounts to corks, which get jammed into holes in oak logs. It takes a season for the fungus to take over the log and for the next few seasons it fruits mushrooms, multiple times each year.
Congrats on the knee. There is nothing like that feeling when the beat up body part kicks back in. I just in the last 48 hours gained the ability to roll over in bed without making it into a ceremony.
It seems as if tissue damage of any kind — self-resolving injury or surgical repair or an A to Izzard incision like mine — takes six weeks to technically heal and six months to reach the point where you can forget it happened 99 per cent of the time. (You never entirely get free of reminders.) I wish I knew the technicalities of this but the medical people who ought to be interested and know don’t seem to care, just as long as it IS.
It’s dead dry here, so even if I knew enough about mushrooms to hunt them, we’re stuck with ordering in sliced shiitakes from the grocery chain. Sigh