Gourmet Mushroom Harvest Lion's Mane, Turkey Tail, Chestnut, & Reishi
Getting ready to go into the grow room and harvest a little bit of some mushrooms, like the reishi, and we have some turkey tail that we're going to be loading. We're harvesting some mushrooms. We have, uh, we have some lion's mane that were top fruited and kind of left in here to do a second flush. Uh, we harvested a bunch of chestnuts over the weekend, but there's a little bit left in here that we can utilize, so we'll just do a nice little harvest. Chestnut's really a nice mushroom.
It just pops right off the block, and yeah, we get these beautiful clusters as usual. So there we go. We got our 2.8 pound cluster. Just pull off a nice head of lion's mane right there. This one could have gone a little bit longer, but it's at a prime condition right now to be utilized.
We have a little bit of cleaning to do on the bottom of it. Just use a little pair of scissors. Blindsman is an easy mushroom to clean and harvest, and yeah, for the most part, it's a pretty well-rounded mushroom. It can be used in a lot of culinary applications, as well as the medicinal. Then we have some oyster that we could load in.
I'll just put a little bit of wax paper right over it to kind of just keep the mushrooms as fresh as possible. You too, take care. All right, so yeah, I'll get this cleaned up, and that's basically the little little fresh harvest for now. I'll show you guys some of the lion's mane. Um, so these were harvested over the weekend, or actually over the week, um, and we took them all to the farmer's market.
I usually will top fruit them, and for the second flush, I'll fold the bag over and make a nice incision to let the lion's mane grow out of the side for the second flush. But I didn't get to these in time. I noticed that the lions made mushrooms were starting to form little. Fruit bodies. So I went ahead and just left them there to grow, and I'll go ahead and harvest these and use them as a just a nice little miniature Lion's Mane mushroom fruiting body that can just be a nice little little mushroom.
These are grown off of, uh, an oak sawdust and wheat brand. I had a bunch of, uh, this is a recipe intended for the Shiitake mushroom, and I just had a bunch of these blocks left over from an inoculation day and a little bit of extra Lion's Mane spawn, so I just went ahead and inoculated them all with Lion's Mane. And here's just an example of after they're harvested. These ones were folded and then sliced, and then we just get these nice, beautiful little heads of Lines Man, just great little size. And these are just five pound blocks, so this one will grow out for for another day or two, and I've noticed I'm getting almost a pound of Lion's Mane mushrooms off of these little five pounders.
So the Lion's Mane does like growing off the oak and wheat bran recipe as well, and it does just fine off of it. If you can't access the soybean whole pellets or any of the other supplements, you can kind of just experiment and find supplements that work with the mushroom. So there's a lot of stuff out there that works really well. You can get, like, rice brands, oat brands. Wheat bran is what's used in this particular recipe.
Um, then we also are doing some Turkey Tail. So I have a couple blocks in here growing out, for example. So yeah, this one was just sliced about a week ago, and we got the nice little formation of Turkey Tail mushrooms starting to grow out. So this is one that I'm actually excited to grow a lot more of. It's a really cool mushroom.
It seems to colonize. It takes over the substrate lightning fast. It's a very aggressive colonizer. These blocks were inoculated, let's see, on the 6th of June, so yeah, we're, yeah, second week of August, we're into fruiting, so it's a nice polypore mushroom. What I've noticed with a lot of the poly pore mushrooms, like the turkey tail and the reishi's, the even the mai takis, is they seem to prefer more of a wood-based substrate compared to what we're seeing with like the all the other gourmets, where we're doing like a 50 percent supplement or even a 20 supplement.
So these perform much better with the more wood in their diet. So we'll load up a bunch of these today, and I'll kind of show how, uh, how some of these cuts were made. But yeah, we're just getting some nice formations for the turkey tail, um, also known as Trimidi's versicolor, because it's known to grow out and get a bunch of different colorations throughout the, it's a super medicinal mushroom, highly regarded for the compound PSK, which has been shown to reduce like tumors and cancers, and a lot of research being done on it. It's the most researched medicinal mushroom. So this is not like an edible mushroom.
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Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
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It's one that we would use in teas, tinctures, you could brew it into different different recipes and stuff like that to get the medicinal compounds from it. But yeah, that's really cool mushroom, really excited to grow a lot more of it in the future and just be able to help people with it because I know it's a good mushroom. Yeah, I think the turkey health is really cool. I haven't really grown, I've grown it, but I I've got a new recipe for it. I think it's working a little bit better.
Then we have a Ganoderma multiply liam, and this was just loaded within the last five days or so, five to seven days, and the mushrooms are starting to kind of, it's been growing out in a high CO2 environment prior. So once it's loaded into the grow room, since it's the heightened O2 levels, so you'll start to get these nice little disc-like formations at the end of every antler, and they're responsible basically for really spreading out the spores. And the way that the conchs will develop is what they're referred to as, is they'll form a really nice disc like shapes, and they'll be billy thousands and thousands of, uh, pores on them, and that's where the spores are basically created. Uh, and reishi is really cool. You can like, this is the multi-panelium, and it has like an orangish, uh, yellow issue, but some of the other ratios we grow, you can get lacquered reds or, you know, black reishi, a lot of different colorations.
So in the next week or so, we'll leave this in the grow room, and then it'll probably get the to the maturity that we're ready for to start harvesting it, and we'll load up all these today and kind of get the room ready for that, and then load up some turkey tail as well. I'm gonna zip this up for now. All right, man. We're using for grain is just like a wheat. You could use a winter wheat or a millet, white protein millet.
But we inoculated, yep, we mixed it. This is just like a combination of white prosome millet and wheat, but it could just be plain wheat or it could just or the other way around. But this is just a nice combo. Once this is fully white, um, we can, uh, basically it will be fully colonized. We can still see some uncolonized portions of it.
This is inoculated four days ago. You have any one that is fully white, the way you should be. So different different strains. So this is like a Black Pearl King Oyster, and we can notice the, this one's a fully mature bag of spawn that was not created. This is what you're looking for.
Your bag should look like this. Yeah, and I have another strain in here too. So, um, so yeah, you can check it out. Yeah, this is this is the final part, final product. So depending on the strain, I'll.
Show you guys this too. I like the pink oyster, so you'll get like a pink hue. Um, so depending on what mushroom you're growing, this is just ready to go. We'll, we'll probably use this to inoculate some substrate today. Okay, and uh, yeah.
So, okay, yeah, so this one bag of grain spawn will become uh, 30 of our our blocks of these bags. Yep, you pour little amounts into each bag in front of the flow hoods in the lab, seal them up, shake them, and then we bring them out here to colonize. And then within 10 to 14 days, this should be ready to go into our grow room, and then five to seven days after that, you have mushrooms to harvest. All right, so the difference between evacuation and grow room is the temperature, basically? Yeah, yeah, because the incubation, you're going to want more of a steady temperature, so, you know, 68 to 72, no more than 78 degrees.
Grow room can be a little bit cooler than incubation, because when the mushrooms finish colonizing incubation, you move them to the grow room. The drop in temperature actually can be something that signals for mushroom production. Okay, so it's like time to go. Yeah, it tells them it's time to go. The season's coming to an end, and it's time to produce mushrooms.
That took two weeks for the grain to fully colonize. So this one was inoculated at the end of June, July set the 27th. This is actually a little bit over colonized, so if it goes any further, it's going to be hard as a brick, but this is still good. We'll break this up today. Any any time over 30 days, then the spawn can become kind of unfavorable, hard to work with.
It's tough. Yeah, and then like, for instance, we can just go and break it up. Okay, and then we have our nice colonized grains. This is the wheat grain right here, and then we'll get it all broken up. Each of these clumps is broken up, and then yeah, little amounts of this is poured into each of the sterilized bags in the lab, and those are left to colonize for two weeks, three weeks, and then they go into the grower.
We'll make these bags, and then tomorrow we'll inoculate them. Okay, do you have moisture in this room or no moisture? No moisture. The moisture just of whatever's in the room. The uh, the grain spawn is colonizing inside of a basically a sealed sterile environment.
It has a filter patch equipped just to allow gas exchange. The CO2 levels for incubation can be quite high, even as high as 20,000 or even up to 30,000 parts per million. Um, but when we go to fruiting, we're trying to get into as close to the outdoor, okay, you know, simulate the outdoor environment to, you know, get these mushrooms to grow. I don't know if I showed you guys these ones earlier. I got some little conch formations starting to come with some of these.
So this one was just put in a few days ago. Okay. Oh yeah, they kind of start to fan out at the top. Uh-huh. And get this, cut the bag, put it in there, and it starts growing like that.
And it'll grow like this for a couple weeks, and then we can go ahead and harvest it and use it for medicinal purposes, and you know, dry it out, and you can process it into a tincture, just as dried mushrooms for people to use and teas, and use them yourself and teas. This is for good for what, like cleansing and? Yeah, this was a, it's uh, good for cardiovascular health, um, good for the or, you know, body organs, uh, body tissue. So you're actually like 100 years old, but you're using this stuff. I wish.
Now this stuff is uh, ancient though, as far as the medicinal use goes. It's been used in Eastern medicine for over 4,000 years. It's a ancient like Chinese and remedy and a lot of. Uh, it's a good health tonic to utilize. Okay, yeah.
Then we got some cartoon. Yeah, man, I know, right? It's an artistic mushroom, amazing, fancy art. I know, right? One of my favorites to grow.
And then you guys saw the lions made in there? Yeah, we'll we'll harvest all that today. Oh yeah, yep, at the end of The day we'll get it harvested, uh, we'll try to, and then we'll get the grow rooms going, and if not, whatever we don't do today, we'll do tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, fine. Yeah, thanks, man.
And then when taking a look at it when it's open, it's even better. It does look even better, but yeah, as the desired height, yeah. When it gets to, like, the top of the back, okay, yeah, you want to go ahead and get them into the fruiting mode. But yeah, I did a couple different recipes of it. Uh, this is, these are all the same recipe up here.
Okay, this is a different recipe. Oh no, same recipe too. What was the name of this? Ganoderma multipalium. Yeah, it's a reishi mushroom.
This is a Asian origin one, comes from Asia. Um, but I like growing the multipolium a lot. They have a, we have a ganoderma cecile and lucidum. Lucidum is the most researched ratio that you see. It's like the red lacquered one.
Okay. Um, but yeah, man, that's it for this.