9 Minutes & 20 Seconds of Shiitake Harvesting With Michael Crowe
Here we are in one of our grow rooms, and it's harvest day. Uh, these shiitake look amazing. They look basically like they're at their prime, and they're ready to go. Um, so it's a nice looking mushroom. I like to kind of harvest when the caps are still enrolled a little bit, so they're still a little bit curled under, and uh, it makes the mushroom last, or it holds up longer in the fridge.
You get more shelf life out of it, and uh, nice meaty, meaty texture. So, and I'll just harvest the mushrooms, um, just by simply cutting as close to the base of the block as possible. And uh, we have a lot of just like medium to average size shiitake growing, and a lot of uh, people are seem to seem to like our baby shiitake, or our smaller shiitake. This is a bigger harvest for today. shiitake always takes us more time than uh, any really, really any mushroom that we grow, just because you have to cut each mushroom off one by one, and uh, so yeah, it just takes a little bit more time.
See, every direction, 360° all the way around. So, I'll just kind of prune the bottom so I'm not ripping off mushrooms when I take the block off. Basically, the shiitake mushroom prefers prefers to grow without the bag, due to the fact that the mycelium uh, basically forms this real, it's called popcorn. It popcorns real heavy, and then it forms this real brown, brown layer to kind of kind of protect and insulate the melium, and then the mushrooms will just pop all the way up, all the way around. If you try Fring it in the bag, you'll get a bunch of mushrooms growing all up against the bag, and you'll get a bunch of deformed looking mushrooms, and basally mushrooms that are not good quality compared to just letting it grow all the way around like this.
So yeah, the grow room provides uh, basically the perfect balance of moisture, um, air. Flow and lighting, um, in temperature, in order to get the mushrooms in their optimum environment to produce the best quality fruit bodies. So usually, you we put the blocks in here, and, uh, the humidity is basically set to a higher level, um, usually about 90 to 95%, and basically the mushrooms will start pinning within a few days. You'll start to see a bunch of little baby mushrooms form Waring all over the block. We'll keep the humidity between 90 to 95% for a couple days, and then during the last last couple days of the fruiting cycle, we'll kind of drop it down into the 80s to let the mushrooms kind of dry out a little bit, and that increases the shelf life, so they're not kind of getting too wet and Soggy when you put them in the fridge.
Written protocol
The Mushroom Grower, Volume 1
From laboratory to first harvest, the whole beginning of the process.
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Pretty easy once you get it dialed in, uh, we make sure that we remove the old CO2 and and spores there, so those are exhausted out of our gr room into the outside, and then we bring in a bunch of fresh air, filter it two times, and bring it into our grow room and kind of condition it with the humidity to make sure that we're getting everything we need in here for the environment for our mushrooms. Without the gr room, the mushrooms would basically dry out. As the mushrooms grow, they extract water from the substrate, and the high humidity basically prevents the mushrooms from Simply drying out and evaporating as they grow. Currently, we can see like little clouds of spores just drifting off of these mushrooms. These mushrooms produce billions of spores to basically continue the Fring cycle.
The oyster mushrooms, the Spore load can be pretty harmful. It can cause like allergies and stuff like that, so we do wear Spore masks when we're in here. I'm just not wearing one right now so you guys can hear me and I can speak to you. shiitake spores, they're not too harmful. I haven't had any issues being in here with Them, uh, you can get, you know, a stuffy nose, maybe at the end of the day.
Oyster mushrooms, you do want to be aware of cuz they produce such such a high amount of spores that, if you are exposed to them over a long term, maybe 10 years, you could develop an allergy to the spores down the line where you just can't be around the mushroom at all. Otherwise, you'll start experiencing intense sneezing attacks and shortness of breath, and uh, it's just not pleasant. So yeah, make sure you're wearing your masks if you're growing your mushrooms so you can filter out all those spores and uh, protect your lungs. So yeah, with the shiitake mushroom, I mean, some rers don't do this, but we found that it increases uh, the efficiency of the mushroom and uh, also just gives us a better overall flush. In nature, um, it was first discovered that the shiitake mushrooms could be grown when they would uh, cut down logs which shiitake mushrooms were growing already on and uh, soak them in water.
So what we do is, as our blocks are ready to go in the grow room, we slap our blocks with our hands to basically simulate the tree falling in nature to shock the mycelium into growing. Once the tree or branch would hit the floor, the mycelium would be shocked into producing the mushrooms because it's basically thinking that the, its life cycle is coming to an end. So yeah, we give our blocks a really nice smack on all sides, and from there, we throw them in our grow room, and that gives us this really nice pin set where we just get mushrooms all over the block, and we're really happy with that. So yeah, and then when it comes time to harvest and we just basically cut each mushroom right off into our tray, and then from there, we can go ahead and pack everything in the next warehouse and get everything to the desired weights in our cases and get them into. Cold Storage to Takis have quite a good shelf life.
Once harvested, the mushrooms generally last 2 to 3 weeks. Um, oyster mushrooms have the shortest shelf life. Usually, we're seeing those in about 7 days. Uh, they're really no longer marketable. We can take those home and eat them ourselves, or possibly dry them and turn it into another product.
shiitake has a long shelf life, and lion's mane, that one goes for about 2 weeks, we've found. Um, so yeah, generally with most of our mushrooms, we're getting about 2 weeks out of the mushrooms before they are no longer uh marketable. So, we're just specializing in wood loving species, so species that basically decompose hardwood. In nature, you'll find them growing off like fresh trees or the recently fallen trees. Um, those trains are like shiitake, oyster mushrooms, more of the medicinal species such as reishi, turkey tail, lion's mane.
You find Mai growing on Oak or in certain hardwoods. We do king trumpet. We do two two varieties of like King Oyster. We do all of the oyster mushrooms throughout the year: Pink, Gold, Pearl, blue, white, um, so those are all grown on our hardwood substrate. shiitake mushrooms, of course, and, uh, crinis and button mushrooms and portabellos, those are secondary decomposing mushrooms, so those mushrooms desire, like, manure or compost based substrates that basically we don't really like to, we wouldn't want to keep that stuff under the same roof.
We wouldn't want to be growing specialty mushrooms in the same room that we're composting a whole bunch of manure, just because you don't want any kind of cross contamination getting into your, into your grows. We're able to get a really good entry into the mushroom industry with, uh, specialty mushrooms. A lot of people can start off with just oyster mushrooms, and you can grow those on really any agriculture waste, from straws to certain kinds of beddings to basically even newspaper and paper towels. I mean, oyster mushrooms are really aggressive. Coffee waste can be used, just like a simple pasteurization.
Of those substrates is always is really all that's needed for it to be effective, so it doesn't, uh, need to be expensive or a costly system to sterilize. But yeah, maybe one day we will do portabellas or buttons, but definitely, uh, really enjoy doing the gourmet and specialty mushrooms, all the colors, different shapes, sizes that you can get, and, uh, also the medicinal benefits that they offer are far greater than what you'd find in like a portabella or kamini mushroom or button mushroom. These are the mushrooms that contain those anti-cancer, anti-tumor benefits, those immunomodulating immune system enhancing benefits, so these are the mushrooms that I like to eat, and I hope you do too.