Cleaning Day At Our Indoor Mushroom Farm
All right, so this is the girl room too. We just harvested a bunch of shiitake in here yesterday, about a hundred and ten pounds, so we're gonna go ahead and clean up the grow room. Usually after harvest, you're gonna get some mess, a little bit of just mess from harvesting in your grow room, so we're gonna clean up any debris that's spilled onto the ground, remove any water, wipe down the shelves, and get it ready to be restocked with more shiitake. So I'm going to turn down the humidification first. I'm just gonna turn off the humidity controller.
That will keep my humidity down, and you know, so basically, behind each guram I have different controls sort of thing on the grill room. I can kind of set the humidity to the optimum condition for the strain our species that's in there, and we just have a little humidity controller that's hooked up to a sensor, and then those are hooked up to these transducers, which are connected to these transformers down here, and I keep a computer fan blowing on them to keep them cool. And also, we have water that goes into our humidification system, so these are automatically refilled whenever they're needed. So that keeps it basically optimum for me to manage. I mean, there was a time where I was manually filling up the humidification reservoirs daily, and if you know, there's also a time where I didn't get to it in time, and you know, you can break your equipment, and that's what happened.
So, so it's really nice having everything automated. We also have just our air system, so we have air coming in to each grow room. Then we also have air evacuated through ducts that blow outside, so we remove any spores and CO2 from our facility. I used one of these top backs for my system since I'm just reducing a rented space. I rent these warehouses, and I thought about building some, some grow rooms that have drains in the floor, so we'd have to install like drains into the ground.
And so for right now, these are really nice for me because I could just break them down and and move with them if I have to, and I don't have to do any damage to the space that I'm renting. So I think utilizing these tents is a great option. You can also grow tons of mushrooms in them. So I'm gonna go through and kind of pick up any of the larger pieces first before I do run the shot back. So we have like just some mushroom pieces in here and stuff that's falling on the ground.
All right, I got a keep a little sprayer here handy, and I add like a five to ten percent bleach solution, and you can use this to clean and disinfect your grow room, really anything for that matter. So I'll just do a pre-soak, and you want to do this between every, I do it between every harvest. If you don't, yeah, if you don't do this between each harvest, or if you don't regularly clean your girl room, then you're going to experience a some contamination in your grow room where it's just, you see mold growing on your racks. Again, it's also a optimum environment for our mushrooms that grow, but it can be an optimum environment for all kinds of contaminants to also develop. So we don't want anything.
We just grow rooms are destined to contaminate, so these aren't completely sterile rooms, but you want to just maintain a cleanliness in them. In a sense, you should always look at the grow room as it is contaminated, and it's just something that you're always going to be cleaning. I'll go ahead and run this guy for a minute. I miss getting all the water I can, as much of it, much of it as possible, and I'll come over with the moss and mop everything else stuff. Usually this will be like a 20 minute , and I'll finish it off with this wine head.
So the scrubber rooms been Vacuumed. I'll hit it with a quick mop. I also took this away for for use here in a minute while back in this next grow room to do that. Laughs. All right, so now I'm just gonna take some bleach solution and some rags and just do a nice wipe down of the racks and humidification reservoir, as well as the, as well as like the fan and stuff.
Written protocol
The Mushroom Grower, Volume 1
From laboratory to first harvest, the whole beginning of the process.
Read the guide
And after that, mop the floors, and I'll hit the ceilings real quick with the, with a wipe down. We'll be good to go. So these microfiber cloths work really well for wiping down racks and stuff like that. I found that the fibers don't get stuck on the rack, just makes for an easy wipe. Yeah, just get into those little crevices and it's really easy, just as long as you stay on top of it.
That rack is good to go. Yes. So this is a job that a lot of people don't think about when, you know, when they want to get into growing mushrooms. A lot of it is cleaning, you know. You got to keep clean all the time, and it's a lot of cleaning, so something that you got to get familiar with, just being able to make yourself enjoy.
But it should be enjoyable, keeping your keeping everything clean so your mushrooms can develop optimally, optimally and without any contamination, and you want to feel good about eating it. So, maintenance on Clément. Maintenance and cleanliness is key, so just having a nice, just a nice operation and consistent results. But if you don't like cleaning, then, you know, it could be a wake-up call for you, or if you don't like cleaning, you're not gonna like growing mushrooms. So, yeah, we I like to do a light clean of the grill rooms almost every day, but these kind of more of a deeper clean, where we actually wiped down the each rack really good, we do that about once every week with between harvests, but we do clean the girl rooms every.
Day with a vacuum and a light mop just to keep them nice and fresh this is a bleach bleach solution so 10 percent bleach and that does the trick right there some people can use soap whatever you prefer but if I'm bleach is a pretty effective this sides done getting every little crevice on these racks top sides it's important that you have like kind of like a wire rack for your growing room um some people do like plastic racks like if you have like flat or porous surfaces it could be even more an invitation to like contamination and stuff like that to develop on your shelves so I like these wire rack shelves some people do conduit shelving where you just have a couple bars those are easy for cleaning so if you have flat shelves then it could be harder for like shiitake and stuff like that to grow and just more of a more of a mess I think especially for colonization you want to have open wire Rack shelving, because the mushroom blocks do produce heat, so you want the heat to be able to escape, and with, like, flat shelves, you can, especially, have shiitake mycelium won't colonize on the bottom of your block if it's not open, an open wire shelving.
You don't really see too many people growing in tents. A lot of people will build their own grow room out of, like, lumber in in plastic sheeting, so that'll work. I just chose to use the tents because I can just break them down really easy when it's time to go somewhere if I need to move, because I've had to move in the past, so it's really nice being able to break down your grow room in 30 minutes, pack it up, and take it with you. So I actually like growing the tents until I get to a point where I can really settle in somewhere and just build something custom. That way, I can have drains in my floor and stuff like that one of The things I was thinking about would be like an old refrigerator or old walk-in cooler that can be converted into a grow room, stuff like that.
The lighting I use is just some LED strip lights. They're waterproof, so they're encased in a tubing, and it's mainly for the mushrooms. It's a blueish spectrum lighting and kind of trying to simulate that shaded lighting that they receive in the forest where they grow, so they get a little bit of light stimulation. That also helps mushrooms develop their color, so if you don't have proper lighting in your grow room and you're growing like blue oysters or pink oysters or even golden oysters, then they'll be pretty pale if they don't have proper lighting, and you won't get that color. So lighting is very necessary for like pigment development in your mushrooms, color, stuff like that.
Once harvested, you can also lay mushrooms in the sun, and that can also increase vitamin D levels drastically. So yeah, just light, humidity, air, and temperature, those are all crews, crucial to getting optimum mushroom crops, and requirements can vary between species, so definitely do some research and figure out what we're expressed with your environment and your geographical location, and go from there. So yeah, this is my humidification system. It's just a simple setup that I built myself, and I just got parts from my Casa Hydro. They sell like fogger units and transducers, so just get those, and I got a tub, just drilled some holes in it, connected some ducting, and put a pipe in here so the humidity can basically be blown in whatever direction I choose.
And it's hooked up in the back with some other stuff that I picked up, like humidity controller and stuff like that. Humidistat is what's what it's called, and very simple and very effective. So it comes on and turns off when it's needed, and for cleaning right now, I just have it shut off, but yeah, very nice DIY system. They do sell commercial hydro foggers that are pre-built for you. They're called like a hydro fogger, and it's kind of like this.
You can also do like a high-pressure misting system where you put hoses and mist heads through your grow room. A lot more expensive though. So this girl room is for like my shiitakes and reishi. I have a really low low low powered exhaust fan compared to my other girl rooms, where it's much higher power exhaust and they exchange exchanges, they're a lot a lot more frequently. I just want to wipe this thing down as much as possible and then occasionally take it apart and like run a hose through it so you can clean off the spores.
Spores correct collect drastically in a grow room, especially during like maturity, once mushrooms reach full maturity, so every six months or so, you'll probably have to replace exhaust fans or do some deep cleaning. A lot of mine have luckily lasted about eight months to a year before they either go out, the motor dies because so much spores collecting them that it just kills the motor. So I run in a mushroom farm as a business. You kind of just want to keep keep a lot of these in back stock, a lot of backup parts, replacement parts for humidification, replacement fans, placement everything that you think you'll need, because you don't want to have, you know, 500 pounds of mushrooms in your grow room and have the fan go out on you. Go replace my water and exchange it out with some fresh cleaning solution.
We'll find a lot of spores and stuff like that in this water, especially from the chestnut mushrooms. Let us fill this up with about 2 1/2 gallons of water and just add a little bit of bleach, about 8 ounces, and we have a nice cleaning solution. All right, so next, I'm gonna clean off my humidification reservoir and also just wipe down the roof that collects, or you know, the roof can collect a lot of humidity and spores, stuff like that. It's also good. To replace the water in your humidity reservoir, or whatever a humidification system you're using, at least once a week, just to maintain fresh water.
Even if you have a refill system, I always chase change your water, because could just be just not fresh water after about a week or so, and especially if you don't have positive pressure in your reservoir and you're sucking air in from your grow room, then the water will get cloudy with spores and stuff like that from in your grow room. So it's best to pump air in from outside your grow room into the humidity reservoir. That way it creates a positive pressure, and my water always remains pretty clear for the most part. Just about a week now, so I'll replace that today. The water is pretty clear.
We'll see some calcium buildup and stuff like that sometimes, because the water is a pretty, it's not too, you know, it's just city water. So these are just chestnut spores. They produce these brown spores and grow rooms. I'm just gonna wipe that off, and also, you'll probably be replacing ducting about every like a few months, six months or so, as I started getting a lot of buildup on them or just breaking. We've seen it happen quite a bit.
That's good for now. No, it's time to wipe down the roof. I just use one of these little, basically like a little floor floor mops. It's really nice for cleaning up the roof, making it easy for me. You could just find these that are like a grocery store or something.
The little mop head comes right off, and you can clean it as needed. So just use this to get the harder to reach spaces. It makes it really easy for me to clean every crevice of my girl room, and I'll just step out, kind of mop over the places I was stepping. That's it for now. Swip this thing up.
Turn my exhaust fan back on. Let hit this next girl room, which is girl room 3. I'll back him this one out next, and it's actually was already deep cleaning the other day, so turn the humidity down. That with running a mushroom farm is the cleaning just never stops so.