Elm Oyster Mushroom Harvest
All right, so at this point, just gonna get set up to go out and start harvesting some of the mushrooms that we have. Uh, they're ready to go, so we need to harvest them today. Otherwise, you know, we gotta catch them at their prime. Otherwise, they can, you know, just kind of lose quality and appearance and shelf life. Just get gloved up.
All right, I'll just wipe down tables, the disinfectant. Also, I'll keep one of these cleanup bends nearby. That way I can have something to toss any of the debris and any sawdust that we trim off of our mushrooms. Then I also like these reusable shoe covers. They come in handy for just kind of walking in and out the grow room, so I'll keep those nearby.
Also keep some hand sanitizer on hand and a box of gloves. I also change out my gloves, um, you know, between grow rooms and stuff like that, so we're not using the same gloves over and over. And we have a bunch of elm oysters today, so we're going to want to use one of these masks. That's, you know, while we're working in the grow room, especially for prolonged periods of times, due to the spores that these mushrooms do drop. They have a huge spore load that if you're in there working for a long time, breathing in the spores, it can cause just respiratory problems and honestly flu-like symptoms.
You'll find that you get like a stuffy nose and a sore throat, and it can be painful at times. I remember one time we harvested, when I was growing these in my house, we harvested probably like a hundred pounds of these oyster mushrooms, and we had them in a fridge in my kitchen, one of these commercial sliding glass door fridges. And we just put them in there and these kind of like trays like this, uncovered, and they just dumped spores throughout the whole house. And, uh, I was kind of new to growing so much mushrooms, especially oysters at once, that I remember throughout the house, we'd see this thin little film of dust over everything, and I didn't, I didn't really know at first that it was just all spores, but we quickly found out when me and the whole family developed these flu-like symptoms, stuffy noses, um, itchy back of the back of our throats were a little itchy. So quickly learned that you do need a mask for these things.
And then, yeah, if you're storing a bunch of them in your house in like a refrigerator, we found that just keeping them in bins with the lids on them kept the spores from flying out into the house. So really important important stuff right there. So these are just some reusable shoe covers that just kind of help minimize any kind of contamination that's on my feet. Make a clear entry into the growing room, and we'll just kind of harvest from this wall of oyster mushrooms we see in front of us. Just kind of grab them gently at the base and just kind of rock them right off, so it comes off really clean.
Written protocol
The Mushroom Grower, Volume 2
Scaling to commercial production, the economics and the room design.
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Minimal trimming as needed. So just, and just get them set in here until we can box them up. All right, so we'll put this in here and actually just take this off for now. All right, so probably hear me much better now, uh, due to the fact that I want you to hear me, I'm just gonna leave this off for now, but make sure to keep your mask on. Um, I can withstand working in here for probably up to like 20 minutes, and I'll be okay.
So the cool thing about the oyster mushrooms is it's, uh, not as labor intensive of a harvest. You can kind of just pull the clusters right off. You just get these really nice mushrooms. I can kind of just go in one pool and get everything that I need, and this is probably about two and a half pounds. Some of these blocks are up to three pounds.
It's. A tight, tight fit in the grow room, but we're able to really maximize. Uh, I can maximize the space in here, you know, to its full potential and, uh, pull hundreds of pounds out of these groomers every week. So, yeah, they have these nice branching clusters of these white to off-white mushrooms, really elegant in style and really great in flavor, and very versatile and much very versatile oyster mushroom. So it's a good one to add to the oyster family that, that we grow.
Then, as I move through the grow room, I'm really careful to, uh, as to not hit any of the mushrooms, damage any of the clusters with my body. So, thanks for trimming up the mushrooms. We got a nice piece of substrate that came off with this cluster. Just grab the scissors. Kind of just trim them down.
Some of the, some of the mushrooms might pop off, so be careful. We've got a pretty good trim right there. There you go. These, uh, elm oyster mushrooms are a really fast producing oyster mushroom. It's a super aggressive colonizer, I've noticed, and it's just a great all year round mushroom.
I found it grows in temperatures ranging from the 50s all the way up into the, up into the 80s. I've actually seen it growing into, into the 90s out here in Arizona during the springtime, which is really unique for hot climates. So, so with our oyster mushrooms, we'll just put them in the boxes, and since they're so delicate compared to like a shiitake or a king trumpet, or really a lot of the, just do the three and a half pound boxes. We'll just put them in there so they have a nice presentation. When somebody opens up the box, they get a nice display of beautiful mushrooms, and I'll try to go for like a three point 3.6 pound box, just to make up for any weight loss that might occur during, uh, just the next day or so while they're in the fridge.
So let's close. That up, just put it over here, get it ready to go in to the next warehouse, where we can get them all labeled and into the cold storage and off to the farmers market tomorrow, tomorrow morning. So we have a massive cluster. Sometimes you could just peel that substrate right off. The type of box, uh, is important.
You make, you want to make sure that it's vented. Mushrooms, uh, exhale more CO2 than any other crop. Our vegetables really don't need as much ventilation. So, yeah, we'll just put them into these boxes. These are actually wax coated as well, within basically FDA approved wax.
So we'll use these boxes, and we're actually about to try out another box for packing more weight for oyster mushrooms. So we'll be looking into like a six pound box and seeing how these work out for us. So, but yeah, you want a good box for your mushrooms, for sure, something that's to maintain the integrity of the of the mushroom. Also, it's been found too with the boxes, I've, I found without the wax coated ones, depending on how long you store them in there, some of the mushrooms will start to grow into the box. So you'll find the mycelium growing off from the mushroom and into the cardboard.
So to basically prevent that, you'd want to use a layer of wax paper in the bottom of your box and also cover the mushrooms and wax paper before you close it up. So you'll be good to go at that point. And with these boxes, if you know, we'll give them off to our restaurants and they, uh, they last quite a while. So if we take them to like markets or whatnot, we'll use the boxes to store the mushrooms, transport them, and then also they can get broken down like like this. We can just bring them back and just reuse them until they really aren't usable anymore, or we hand them off to like a distribution company and they get distributed to restaurants that we Don't get in touch with so they'll keep the boxes and do what they do, what they do with them. I'm gonna go grab some more boxes and get ready to harvest some lines made next.