Fruiting Maitake Mushroom Blocks | How We Grow Grifola frondosa Indoors

Then also every bag has like a label on it, which will have the species and data inoculated. So it's really easy just to walk down an aisle, glance at the labels, see what date they were inoculated, and decide whether it's ready to go in the grow room. I also keep like a little, um, like a little journal in my laboratory. So if I ever need to reference that, I can go in there, see what was inoculated, what day was inoculated on, and then I can just come out here to the incubation and and find it and get them all in the grow room. So it's basically how I can kind of keep on top of my inoculations and all these blocks, especially when we're producing about 600 a week when we get really busy for the fall.

So it's a good way. You got to keep organized. You got to know what's in your incubation, otherwise, you know, you'll just be all over the place. With the Mytaki, I found it's a really tricky one to fruit, and for me, the best way to do it has just been to simply just cut the top of the bag off, and basically, I'll just let the my talk heat grow up in the bag like that. I've tried just making cuts on the bag when you see the growth, like let's say I see it right here, I've tried making cuts and, you know, tucking the.

Bag down to where just the fruit body sticks out. That's another way that can work, but for me, this is the best way that I found, um, kind of like in nature with my when maitake grows. It gets like a high little CO2 environment. Usually, it's found growing near like the base of oaks and stuff like that, so when it's like in the lower levels underneath like, uh, leaf litter and stuff like that, it's higher CO2, and it'll kind of make its way up and form these beautiful leaflets and get really nice. And maitake originated, or basically one of the meanings of it is a dancing mushroom.

So when people would go on forages or forays and they'd find this mushroom, they'd basically dance with joy because it's a choice edible. I know, uh, a lot of people will say the, you know, try to get away from the plastic with mushroom production. This is probably one of the only downsides to mushroom cultivation, is the fact that you do need to utilize some plastics to cultivate the mushrooms, but when you do look at the bright side of things, the amount of plastics that are needed to cultivate thousands upon thousands of pounds of mushrooms compared to the amount of resources that are utilized to farm other other goods or other foods that we eat, mushrooms definitely leave a much smaller footprint and basically can feed a lot more people with less waste, less resources, less water consumption, less land used. So there's a big bright side to growing mushrooms, even though that some plastics are used.

Now, if you're working with like an oyster mushroom or something that can be grown on a pasteurized substrate, then you can get away with just using buckets and straw or just pasteurized sawdust, or, you know, I've seen people use aspen aspen chips and pet beddings and stuff like that. So you can get creative if you're really, you know, if you're small scale, you definitely don't want to have a big footprint. It'd be recommended just to kind of get some buckets, drill some holes in them, or even just find reusable containers. You can use really anything, um, from milk cartons to old little old coffee cans. I mean, I've seen all kinds of stuff.

So, but yeah, once you get to a huge scale, when you're making hundreds upon hundreds of bags a week, then you just don't have the time and, you know, resources at that point to clean hundreds of buckets every week and disinfect them, and yeah, it's just a lot. And then actually, for some of the species that we grow, um, you know, you need to have a sterilization of the substrate that needs to be done, and that's hard to do inside of a bucket and then move it into your laboratory where you can inoculate it in clean conditions with a, you know, fresh culture or colonized grain spawn. So that's a little bit of the breakdown of plastic use and mushroom cultivation, but it's really the one of the only negative things about it. So if you're struggling with contamination, some things to I bet the best thing to do would be retrace your steps. Look at everything that you've done up into this point.

Uh, how long did you sterilize? The inoculation, did that take place in a clean laboratory? Did you do it open air? Um, where you clean when you were inoculating? Really, you can take us take a look at a few things.

Maybe look at how long you were sterilizing, because that could be, uh, that could be it right there. I mean, really, it just all boils down to ensuring that your mushroom mycelium is clean, and it has a clean food source to basically colonize. There's no other competition that can live with our mycelium. You got to really, uh, emphasize developing a good sterile technique for your process to basically minimize contamination in your operation. So I'll close that up for now.

We had some maitakis. This one, it kind of grown so big on the side. That it just broke when I moved it, but you can kind of see the beginning stages of this mytaki. It forms like these little globular, like little structures, and each of these will kind of elongate and then branch out, and then they'll all form their individual leaflets or fronds. So really nice mushroom.

This is actually an edible piece right here. I could take this home and slice it up into little nice mai taki pieces, and and it's very delicious. It's been known to be referred to as maitake brains as well because it just looks pretty, pretty bumpy and crazy, but very, very meaty when you break that up. It's a super meaty mushroom, also referred to as hint of the woods, maybe for for that reason. So I'll put these aside.

The same thing happened with this one, so I'll just take that piece out. There's still a couple little mine takis actually growing, so put this in the grow room. All right.