Fast Fruiting Mushrooms Indoors | How We Grow Top Yields
All right, so yeah, we're putting the lion's mane in our girl room today, girl room 3 actually, and we just have some different stages of mushroom mycelium growth for lion's mane. This bag was actually inoculated just about a little over 24 hours ago. You could barely see the mycelium. With the lion's mane, it's a lot harder to to see the mycelium than with most species, so this, this one was actually inoculated 5 days days ago. So around day 5, we can see the mycelium starting to take off and really ripped through the substrate.
Then we have another block that's 12 days old. At this point, it's fully colonized there. We can even see little lion's mane primordia or pre fruiting starting to form at the top of our block, and then here's another block from the same day but a little bit more developed, and we're actually going to cut this down and fruit this right off the side. I like doing it like that. I get really huge flushes, and after that, I can roll it back up and and make side fruiting Zoar, what not, off of this block.
So that's some different stages of lion's mane for you. I know this mushroom can be sometimes of a challenge because it grows so quickly, but yet, you know, some people get a little discouraged that for the first few days of inoculation because you really can't see the mycelium for quite some time. Today, we have not too many blocks going in, but just about like 10 or so of the lion's mane that I see that already we have a few different, two different strains that we're currently growing, but we carry three different varieties or lion's mane strains of the same species. All right, well, what will will these over, get them in there. So what the Lions made, a lot of people, you can do a couple of different things to fruit this mushroom.
You can just kind of deflate your bag like this. I just cut a little little snip it off the corner right there, and you kind of like fold it in like this, and you can put it in your grow room like like I have here, and I just cut three little quick incisions on it, and from there, the lion's mane will start to grow, and I'll just get a nice giant head of lion's mane that I can harvest. So that's another way that I like to grow them, and here we have some lion's mane that's like fourth flush. So these men grown for quite some time, and you can see the little lion's mane just coming right out the side of the bag. So that's another popular way to grow lion's mane, but today we'll be doing it a different way.
I'll just take the bag, cut the top off, quick incisions down the sides, then I can just roll the bag down just like this. There we go. I'll just load that right in there, and we'll get these cascading beautiful walls of lion's mane. I like this like little one-inch collar that I can create around the bag, and then on top of it, after my first flush, I can actually take the bag and re wrap it over, and then for my next flush, I could actually slice a few lines on it and grow the mushroom right out the side. So I like to, I feel like I'm AXA Mize my yield when I do it like this.
I get really good yields on my first flush, sometimes four pounds, so that's just why I do it. Sometimes, you know, I'll just cut bags like this and let them grow right out. So that's why I do it. So when I'm done with my first flush, I can kind of just fold the bag back over, and whether I'm gonna side fruit it again our beside our top fruited or side fruit it, it creates a nice little microclimate in here where it keeps the block from drying out after you do harvest, and I can grow This mushroom off of, well, eats. I'll just grow off one level like this, but you can put them on each side like that and grow lion's mane off of both sides.
Sometimes I've stacked blocks just to maximize my fruiting space. I also like growing them this way because I get their mushrooms a lot quicker than if I were to do my side fruiting. So, if I really need lion's mane in a pinch and I have a lot of requests for it and then sorts, I know that when I put them in there like this that I'll harvest lion's mane within one week, compared to doing it the other method. Usually it takes about two, two to three weeks before you can actually get your first harvest. So yeah, we see these nice little fruiting bodies that are just starting to grow inside our bag.
Lion's mane is a little famous for that. Once it reaches full colonization, you can expect to see top footings really quick, and I kind of started fruiting up fruiting my mushrooms like this on mistake, where I left blocks colonise way too long, and I had this really thick mass of pre growth of lion's mane, and I put it in my girl room and was surprised to see that they grew out beautifully. I had cascading walls of just beautiful lion's mane that had wonderful looking teeth and beautiful mushrooms, great yield as well. Now we're looking at our blue oyster mushroom, or alternative blue or green oyster. We see different stages of mycelium development here, and this block was actually just slot inoculated 24 hours ago, and we'd see the mycelium just starting to take off.
Then we have another block that was inoculated five days ago, and the mycelium is just ripping right through the substrate. So that's five days. Then here's one that is twelve days old or fourteen days old, and it's ready to go. It's starting to pin, so we're actually just gonna throw this in the grow room right now and get some really nice-looking blue oyster mushrooms here within the next week. I'm gonna be just getting all these blue oysters that are pre fruited like that.
Well, always stirred mushrooms, I find, are the easiest to grow. Very little maintenance for the initiation process, very quick yield, er, get these loaded in there. So with this strain, or with any of the oyster mushrooms really, it's the same thing for all of them. I'll just cut the top of the bag, a little corner at the top of the bag, so I can deflate it. Make sure to cut at the top.
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If you cut too low and like at the bottom, I found that the oyster mushrooms might grow out of that hole. So at this point, we'll just deflate any air or excess air inside of this growing environment, and I just kind of fold up the top like a paper airplane or like you're wrapping a present. Just fold that in there like that, and it's ready to go. This one, there was a little bit of under a little bit of growth left on the bottom, but that won't be a big deal. We'll put it in the grow room anyways, even since it's been in about two weeks, and it'll end up colonizing that space while we while the mushrooms continue to grow.
Also, you can notice the oysters are really famous for producing like an orange yellow metabolite. So this is another waste product that the mushrooms produce from devouring their food source. You could drink it if you wanted to. It's, I'm sure it'd be healthy and pose no risk. It's just, you know, made up of compounds that are produced by the mushroom mycelium, so it could have some novel anti antibiotic or antibacterial and sigh microbial benefits.
So this is an oyster mushroom. This one specifically is our blue oyster, but as a lot of people know, there's a lot of different range of colors, as it goes for oyster mushrooms, and really, the only difference is they all kind of originate. From different parts of the globe where you'll find the blue oyster really really thrives in colder climates, and the pink oyster is actually a tropical species, so it thrives in tropical climates, and you'll find it growing throughout like Asia and places like China and Japan where this mushroom originated, and you'll find like white and temporary oysters kind of growing throughout a lot of temperate forests around the around the world. Phoenix oyster is another popular one. It's a brown one.
It's a super aggressive mushroom, and it also grows on softwood. It's one of the only mushrooms that can grow on pine and, you know, stuff like that. So it's an interesting mushroom that can even be used to recycle old Christmas trees and stuff like that. So it's a good idea if you live in an area where there's a lot of pine. Phoenix oyster could be the oyster for you.
So a lot of differences and but for the most part, you know, your oysters are gonna grow on a lot of agricultural waste ranging from straws. They can grow on cardboard, newspaper clippings, straw, all kinds of stuff. Oh, we like to utilize just the oak hardwood sawdust and just really nice for our our procedure and process. This strain right here is known for us to produce at least three and a half pounds on the first flush with with nice blocks this size. It's my favorite oyster to girl.
I always fold my bag with the filter patch facing in. There's been times where I when I first started and I accidentally folded a bag like that. I've found that the mycelium was actually able to creep up and grow throughout this filter patch, and I found mushrooms growing throughout the filter patch as well. Same with lion's mane. A lot of these strains, if you do, if you are like side fruiting, make sure you're folding this filter patch inwards.
That way the mycelium the oxygen and stuff like that is blocked off. With the mycelium grows up here, it's not going to produce any fruit bodies, so that won't deduct from any of your yields, and your my team won't be utilizing any or exhausting a an unnecessary energy producing those with the fruit bodies that really are no good and have no market value. Another thing you can do is stack your blocks like that. So we like to do that, and we can kind of get these walls of mushrooms. That's if you have a lot of blocks in stock and we really need to maximize our space.
That's why I like growing on hardwood sawdust, because you can just make blocks, and you can build with them, stack them, and make walls, walls of mushrooms. So much better for me and for people that are growing in small spaces and you don't have access to tons of space to grow. Sawdust works great. That's all those oysters are done, and like I said, the oysters are really easy to load compared to shiitake where it takes more work. I also have this pink oyster.
We'll go in and put that in grow room one today. That's it. That's everything for today as far as loading into the grow room. Will periodically step into the Incubation Center every day and take a look to see what's gonna be going in next and try to plan accordingly. So you'll also notice that each mushroom mycelium gives off a smell that's really really fragrant, and each species has their own unique characteristic type smell.
So you find like the oyster mushrooms are kind of like some what was reminiscent of like annecy or like like a vanilla extract, and like shiitake smells like crushed fresh shiitake mushrooms. Lion's mane has like a nice Pleasant smell, and it smells like fresh lion's mane mushrooms. So you'll be able to smell your spawn or your fruiting blocks, and you can kind of tell how healthy they are. As you can see, they are they're just really ready to go into the grow room. We noticed there's some nice little clusters of baby.
Oysters mushrooms popping up all over the place. These literally just popped up within the last day, so we're gonna get them in there, and within a week these will be ready for harvest and for eating. All right, start placing them in here. Just doing some stacking in here to make room for a few extra blocks. That way I can get everything on one rack.
I'm just gonna make a simple cut, two on each back. So we'll start from the top row, just come straight through, and I'll also make a line right here and right there. And that, for me, has given the given the best opportunity for the mushrooms to grow and develop without them getting caught in anything, a plastic. So I get really good yields by making my cuts like this. It also doesn't make it to where your block is too exposed, like if you were to cut an X, you can kind of open up a little bit more than this.
Very easy, easy initiation process with the oyster mushroom. So it's crazy how these oyster mushrooms, or any of the mushrooms, can can produce so much, so much food in such a little space here. Just from this one rack alone, we have five, so we have they have almost forty blocks. We'll get about three pounds of block. This will be 120 pounds just coming from one rack, so not much space required to grow lots of lots of mushrooms.
It's one of the things very unique about them. You just take these small spaces and maximize them. And that's it. I'll just double check to make sure I didn't miss anything, and it looks good. So at this point, I will seal up my grow room so I can let this humidity stay stay in there, and these mushrooms start to get the get what they need as far as environmental conditions and stuff like that.
Also take a step into the pink oyster room or girl room one. Try to get this pink oyster block in there so we can get these mushrooms off of it. So just cut a little hole at the top and press all the air out. What you could do, let's just take it. It'll come off your bag, and you can see all these pink oysters that we have growing in there.
We can just go ahead and take those out and remove them. The way it's easy to put our block on the rack and it's not uneven. This could be cooked up and use this food, or it's usually really tough and not really desirable, but you can also dry it and powder it. Use that for like a soup or something like that. Now we'll just go ahead and fold up the block as usual, and I just go ahead put it right on top of one of these blogs, just like that.
Just go ahead and slice that up. Let that grow. And as you can see, this grow room is looking pretty good. We have some pink oysters in here growing out and a different couple different varieties and trumpet-like, the black pearl King trumpet growing on Alger sada, and it's about it. I'm gonna get some stuff harvested in here, and so these will be ready in about 24 hours.
These have been going in here for about four days. I put these in here, actually they've been going for about five days now. I loaded these up on Saturday, so now we're on we're on Thursday, and they are quite well developed, some of them more than others. So we'll look look back here, say this one, for instance, and we can see the mushrooms are developed pretty well. Well, let these grow it another day, because they're definitely going to increase in size.
The pink oyster compared to like the blue and white oysters, you don't get as much biological efficiency, meaning the yield isn't quite as much. So usually we average about two pounds on these, but they're just beautiful mushrooms for their color, and they do taste pretty good, and. Really, it's the color that dazzles people, but it's just like an another Oscar mushroom as far as flavor goes. You can utilize them in recipes that call for mushrooms, but they grow very easily, so that's what. Plus, and they love the warm temperatures, so if you live in a warmer part of the world, then pink oysters are our mushroom for you.
We have some third flush Pia pianos back here, so these have been, these were actually in our last one of our growing videos, but we flushed them a couple times already. Some of these a little bit. Well, those were overdone, so yeah, these were actually ready yesterday, but I didn't get to them in time, so they're a little bit over mature, and that means that they're basically just a little overripe, so the caps are starting to curl up, and they're a little bit wavy, and we also notice that there's a nice for deposit, so they're starting to produce a lot of spores. So this is a good stage to go ahead and take a spore print, if anything. I mean, we could see all the spores that are coming out, and really, you just really want to grow these mushrooms like this if you're just going to eat them for personal use or if you just know some way that really likes them like this, but they don't last as long in the fridge.
So this is kind of what I liked. This is why I like to harvest them when the caps are still kind of rolled in like this, so that's peak peak harvest time, or right as the veal has just started to break. So you can see this right here. This is called the veal of the mushroom, and that's usually attached all the way up until maturity, so that's another way to determine the age of the mushroom. We could see these PFP no mushrooms where the veal has just started to break off, and we can go ahead and harvest these now, and they'll maintain a really nice flavor for quite a long time, and the store a lot longer in the fridge compared to, you know, some of our over harvested via penes, but these still tastes excellent, so we'll just take these home and cook them in our own dinner tonight.
They go great in like pasta sauces and soups and really whatever. It's great mushroom that's like a nice blue oyster. This was like a third flush for us, so we're still getting good yields. I mean, I would say this is almost half a pound, so for a third flush, that's pretty good, you.