Fruiting Oyster Mushrooms on Production Blocks | Complete Indoor Grow Cycle | Southwest Mushroom
All right, so next up will be some of the oyster mushroom varieties we have. We have a golden oyster, pink oyster, blue oyster, and Italian oyster, so four different oyster species. So grab these. So this is like the Italian or Phoenix oyster, as it's called. This oyster mushroom, the Plurotus pulmonarius, it produces these lovely brown, brown caps.
So it's kind of like a brown oyster mushroom. If you're growing mushrooms and starting out, the oysters are probably the best route to take. They, they produce so quick. These were just inoculated 10 days ago, and we're already ready to get them into, into fruiting. So 10 days is really, it's really great.
It's the same thing with these as I did with the lion's mane. Just gonna make a little cut at the top of each bag. We'll kind of just make sure you deflate the air, so it's kind of like the same thing with the lion's mane. You can fruit these, uh, you know, basically just make a cut on your bag, and the mushrooms would go straight out. You want to leave the plastic on.
Some, I've seen some people will take the bag completely off with like these kind of mushrooms, and like oyster, lion's mane, the mycelium is really at high risk for drying out if you do that, and you're going to lose a lot of mushrooms. So make sure to keep the bag on. What I'm looking for is just basically complete colonization of the bag, so it's a full white block. It's also very dense. The mycelium has really pulled all the sawdust and all the materials in this block together very tightly.
So you just, uh, you can just feel it after, after a while of doing it. You'll look at a block, and you'll just feel that it's ready to go in, and these oysters are ready to go. So yeah, I just look for full colonization. I don't want to see just big spots of sawdust in my bags. Anything that's uncolonized by the mycelium will basically be at risk for, once you put it in the grow room, for being contaminated.
Let's say it was just like half colonized right here. I've seen some people will, will flip the bag upside down or just make a cut where the, where the my slam is grown, but you do have risk because you're going to basically allow air into the block. And let's say there's an area right here, half the block's not colonized, then you can get like a bacteria or some kind of mold can grow basically on your substrate, hindering the growth of your mycelium and also taking away from your yields in the long run and possibly even cross-contaminating something else in your, in your operation. So it's always wise, you know, with mushrooms just to be patient and to wait because, you know, you've already gotten this far, might as well wait a little bit longer. I'll show you guys when I go in there, but the mushrooms do get very big, and you, they do are, they tend to be at risk for falling off the shelves just because they're so big.
The blocks can just knock right off at this stage. This is our fully colonized block. It's colonized with mushroom mycelium. So the mushroom mycelium is actually the oldest part of the organism. It lives for the longest period of time.
The mushroom, it only appears for about a week, and then it dies. Its purpose is to generally continue the life cycle, produce the spores that are going to be used to keep the mycelium alive, keep the genetic lineage going for a long time. So yeah, basically you just want to know just a little bit of terminology, you know. Mycelium is, uh, you know, the part of the organism that basically, you know, is the oldest. The mushroom, uh, comes at the end to basically continue the life cycle.
The mycelium is very important. It is the, the network that produces these mushrooms, and it basically is the, it's what's responsible for breaking down this. Raw material and turning it into just organic, ready to go nutrients that can be utilized by soil or whatever. Composted, the mycelium is the true workhorse. So yeah, this one is a little bit uncolonized on the very bottom.
We can see some spots where the mycelium didn't grow out yet, but since it's already cut, I'll just make like a little, a little cut right here, and within the next few days, this will probably end up finishing up too. But if this were like halfway done or not colonized at all, we just had some spots, then it wouldn't be a good idea to put this in the grow room. We grow them out in these Unicorn bags. We're using these five micron filter patches, and I found that with, uh, with these fast fruiting species, a lot of people use the 0.5 micron for shiitake. I'm finding that for me, the 0.2 microns work really good, and for spawn, it allows in less, less particles, less contaminants.
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So for working with spawn and longer colonizing species, than 0.2 micron is a recommended filter patch as opposed to these 0.5. Mushroom cultivation definitely is a very sustainable source of producing food. The fact that, you know, you can grow it on products that are otherwise going to be, you know, sitting in a landfill somewhere, or, you know, basically, you know, otherwise agriculture waste, stuff that, you know, is basically trash, and you can produce really quality mushrooms off of this stuff. The fact that, you know, you can grow hundreds of pounds in just a small room per week, you know, as opposed, you know, to farming other, other crops or even livestock, which takes, you know, hundreds of gallons of water just to produce a few pounds of meat, whereas to produce a few pounds of mushrooms, you know, a couple liters of water is all you need throughout the whole life cycle, and, uh, it's just super sustainable in my opinion.
And I think it could be the future for, for a lot of people to, to basically eat healthier and get more nutrition in their diets. You know, they share 50 of the, over 50 percent of their DNA with animals or us. So, you know, the difference in us and mushrooms is, you know, animals develop these extracellular sacs in which to digest and break down their food. Mushrooms, uh, excrete these enzymes throughout the mycelial network that will basically break down whatever they're latching on to, such as sawdust or agriculture waves, straw, leaf litter in the forest. I mean, so they're very interesting.
They, uh, and also, you know, it's a great meat replacement for a lot of people. Mushrooms have a, a very, very meaty texture and can be used in, in place of, you know, meat in some dishes, mushroom tacos, mushroom burgers, all kinds of stuff. I just feel like it's not as much, uh, not as much resources are used as opposed to farming your traditional meats, where, you know, you're using all this land for, for livestock to graze on and all this water that is being consumed every day. So mushrooms are something to look at for the future. So with the oyster mushroom, I'm just going to do like a diagonal cut.
Then I do another cut that way and another cut this way. So it's kind of like a, like a crooked X. Just got one diagonal line, one right here, one right here, and that, for me, just allows the best, uh, the best fruitings of these mushrooms. Got to make sure you get the back back, and you don't always, you don't want to forget any mushrooms back here. If everything goes accordingly, we're doing about 600 of these bags a week, and each of these bags appearing on the stream, we're going to be pulling about two to three pounds of mushrooms off of, and, you know, on a good week at full, full capacity, that could be anywhere from 12 to 12 to 1500 pounds of mushrooms for us utilizing all three grow rooms at once, and it's Quite a bit of mushrooms.
I mean, it's, it's a lot of mushrooms, so it's crazy how fast that, uh, you know, within a couple months from start to finish, you can have, uh, you know, thousands of pounds of mushrooms just from a single petri dish. And, uh, compared to like getting a pound of like chicken or ground beef, I think a pound of mushrooms is a lot more as far as the visual. You get a pretty good size amount of mushrooms, so it's, it breaks down, and you can really, uh, really get the most out of them. Start getting our pink oysters ready to go in, and this mushroom mycelium is, uh, pretty interesting. If you let it go long enough, you'll, you'll get a lot of mushrooms that grow on the top of the bag.
It'll top fruit, so it's good to get this one in the grow room right on time. Otherwise, you can basically lose out on some of your yield. All these oyster mushrooms, you know, we have the pink, we have the gold, we have the brown, the blue, there's the pearl. All of them have their own unique characteristics, flavor, even aromas. Um, everybody has their own preference.
Some people do prefer the pinks. Um, some people like the blues, you know, just depends on preference. It could be their favorite color, you know, so that's the cool thing about oysters. You get all these different variations within the same, you know, basically the same species. You get these different strains.
They come from different parts of the globe, so like the pink and gold oysters are native to Asia, found like growing in tropical forests and climates. They also have a very distinct flavor. The pink is a, has a very strong, uh, for one, it goes bad very quickly, and within three days it develops a really unique odor. Some people can compare it to like a seafood kind of like odor, so with the pinks, you definitely got to be careful that you're getting them to where they need to go. They're getting used or sold in time.
And, uh, if not, then you gotta dry them at least, I would say, at least by day three or four, because if, uh, you get to day three or four and they have like a smell and they get like a little wet and soggy, then they become, uh, kind of unappealing to even dry at that point. You just don't even want them, so you gotta really, uh, really work with the strain. Oyster mushrooms are referred to as oyster mushrooms because they have caps that kind of look like oyster shells, so yeah, that's why they're called oyster mushrooms. It's a unique name, you know. I'm not very fond of oysters anyways, but I do like an oyster mushroom.
Oyster mushrooms also grow out and really nice clusters. Usually get a nice cluster of anywhere from 20 to 50 mushrooms that grow out kind of like a bouquet, and that's always an eye, an eye catcher, and, you know, great for the markets or any, any clients that look at it. They're definitely amazed by, by them. So yeah, this is the pink oyster. This one's, uh, referred to scientifically as Plurotus de Jamore.
There's also another pink strain, uh, called Pleurotus Salmonello Ostrominius. Uh, so it's two different pink oysters. The Dejamora grows, uh, more of a deep reddish pink, whereas the other, the Sam salmon oyster gets kind of like a lightest, more of a lighter pink color, but get a pretty good yield on it. So as far as the shelf life goes, they both are pretty short. I would say the pink oyster lasts five days.
After that, it's, uh, it's done. And then we have the golden oyster, which is kind of like the pink. It lasts longer, but the mushrooms are super delicate and brittle. That's called Pleurotus Citronaut Pleities, so that's a pretty good oyster. We only grow it kind of during the warmer months of the year.
As soon as it gets a little bit colder, we Just do like a blue, white, and brown oyster. As far as the humidity for the different rooms goes, um, basically everything's, uh, you know, you kind of got to just judge it by the room, depending on where you're kind of, where your crop is. So if I just loaded up a room like this, I'm going to turn up my humidity pretty high at the beginning, as close to, you know, in the 90s as possible. As the mushrooms start to grow out, then the humidity is kind of gradually decreased up until harvest time because if you harvest and the mushrooms are too wet, they're not going to last as long in the fridge. So you get, you're going to lose out on some shelf life.
So we have three grow rooms going on in our facility, and depending on what stage the grow room is at is kind of where, you know, the grow room manager will dictate what the humidity should be set at. So constantly fluctuating humidity depending on what grow room you're in, what kind of mushroom is growing in there, and what stage of the, of the grower are you at. Are you just putting your mushrooms in? Humidity's turned up really high to kind of, um, really is to stimulate the mushrooms to grow, to get a really nice pin set at the beginning, kind of like in nature when you get this fresh rainfall, and then within a couple days later you get nice fruitings and mushrooms in the wild. So it's kind of like what we do in our grow room.
Really, really wet environment for the first couple days. Once we start seeing mushrooms come out, gradually lower the humidity and kind of work our way down into the 80s up until harvest time. Having the humidity dialed in is super vital because, yeah, definitely affect your grow, your pin set, your overall yields, and, uh, just your, your time frame, you know. So if it's too dry, you know, you could walk in and you could see some, you can see the mushrooms suffering from it. They'll basically have, you know, dry spots on their caps, and the mushrooms will start to shrivel up and basically not grow.
You're going to lose a ton of yields by not keeping your humidity up. Yeah, if you're struggling with yields, there's a couple things that you can look at. There's, for one, I guess the first thing would be to look at your strain and see, you know, a lot of it depends on the strain as well. How's the genetics, and is this a strain that's likely just to produce a heavy yield? And if it's not the strain, then you need to look at your substrate recipe, and what are you feeding your mushrooms?
Because they do like a balanced diet like us. So you got to give them, uh, give them a good diet, and, uh, if it's not the, it's not your substrate formula, then I don't know what to tell you. There's a couple things. It's your strain or your recipe, so it's basically it as far as the yield goes. And it would be your grow environment too, like your, how's your, you know, your grow room needs to be dialed in to be able to maintain optimum conditions, you know, with humidity and not just humidity, but with the air flow as well.
Proper number of, uh, air exchanges and proper amount of air coming in for mushrooms to breathe because they are like us. They breathe in oxygen and exhale CO2. Due to our schedule of three production days a week, and then when we do like 600 backs a week every week, we usually have, um, about a good five or six hundred bags to put in our grow rooms. Each grow room can hold like 500 blocks. Basically, we just stay with our, our production schedule.
We just create a schedule for producing, and we produce that amount, and we know that we're going to be harvesting X amount of mushrooms per week. So it's just like a a System that's been developed for our production, so we kind of just know what our grow rooms can produce. We know what our our production schedule will look like for the week. So like, let's say we're loading all these blocks in today. In about a week, within like a three to four day period, if it's oyster mushrooms, we'll harvest all these mushrooms at the same time, or it's close together.
But like for the mines hockey, that's going to come at a different day, so everything will. Same with the lion's mane, that'll be a. Little bit of a different day, but for the most part the same week. Yeah, so with one of our accounts, we did get a a pre-order for restaurant week, which is going to be, it's going to be in about 10 days. But we put these blocks of king trumpet in here just about three or four days ago, just to get ready for that day.
We knew we had these pre-orders in. We let them colonize for for three to four weeks, so I like to let them ripen up, and then I'll put them in. The grow room, and then within that time, ten days, and we get a harvest. So once you get really accustomed to growing all these mushrooms and you can kind of figure out the time frames on what it's going to take for spawn, for colonization, and then to fruit, then you can really just dial in your time frames for accounts, like if you have chefs asking you for mushrooms, or if you have people from the farmer's markets wondering when you're going to have something in stock, it's nice being able to tell them what. Day you'll be harvesting and basically to come through on your promise to actually harvest on that day and deliver the goods and that really makes it makes your customers really happy if you can uh say hey i'm going to have these mushrooms in 10 days and in 10 days they're ready for them everything else is super easy you know grow mushrooms keep your stuff clean clean your facility get a schedule down for your team make sure everybody's on the same page and have a good time grow some mushrooms and feed your community you