Grow Tent Mushroom Farming
So we're at the facility in front of one of the growing rooms, and this is grow room one. Not really too much is going on in here. There's a few oyster blocks that we have kind of finishing off there their time here, and this is like a second flush block of the Nevada oyster. So yeah, we'll harvest this, and let's see what else we'll have in here. Yeah, just some more of the Nevada oysters, of course, and this mushroom, during the warmer times of the year, kind of has a little bit of a lighter color.
During the colder months, it takes on a really dark dark bluish greenish color, but now, it kind of, as it matures, you can see it uh takes on a nice lighter steel blue appearance to, with nice uh kind of like a greenish greenish tones to it. We have some golden oysters that are producing a second crop, and we were just here like a couple, actually a week ago, and we had some golden oysters growing off of this block that were overgrown. So those were harvested, and at this point, we've had a second crop appear, and it's looking really good. This will be ready to harvest within the next 24 to 36 hours, so I'll just keep my eye on it. But yeah, the golden race is a great summer variety.
Of course, we're still on the hotter temperatures. We just got into August, and out here in Arizona, it can get up to 110 to 120 degrees on average, so kind of switching the strains that I do grow this time of the year, it's kind of important. Otherwise, I'll lose out on production, and it'll just hurt hurt the overall business in a way. But yeah, just making sure uh you know warmer varieties are grown during the warmer months, like the golden oysters and the pink oysters do well and temperatures from 70 to 85 degrees, even more. I've seen them growing at 90 degrees at times.
We have another block of gold, and as it keeps producing, we notice that the block is getting smaller, and it really doesn't have much weight to it. So after this crop is harvested, the block will be recycled, and we've had a couple of bigger entities reach out about just picking up substrate. There's like a garden space out here called Spaces of Opportunity, so we're talking with them about just doing bigger pickups so we can get rid of more substrate through other farmers and composters rather than throwing some of it away. We also have a few lion's mane in here putting out a and we can see them right here, and I've top fruited it, and like after our top fruit, we fold it up, fold it up, and make a nice slice on the side, and you can keep getting several flushes of Lion's Mane. This is the HE3.
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Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
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This is a nice dense meaty strain of lion's mane that is actually my favorite. I really like the texture of it. I also have a couple strains that do produce the longer teeth. Those ones are really good for like farmers markets and stuff like that. I found that the denser ones do better for like wholesale and distribution.
Chefs really like it. It just holds up really well, and the shelf life is amazing, so it's just a great great mushroom. It's basically it for this grow room. We're going to finish it out and get it restocked with a bunch of Lions Maine here in the next couple days. So we're at grow room number three, and this girl room's kind of been getting refilled with substrate ready to fruit.
So we have some pink oysters in here. These were just loaded a couple days ago, and we can already see them starting to form these beautiful clusters of mushrooms. So this is a really fast fruiting strain, and it's a tropical species. Most of the times, we're finding that it's uh already ready to go into the grow room within 10 to 14 days after inoculation, so it's Really good strain for this time of year. This is one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest growing oyster that I found.
It's a Plurotus pulmonaries, so it's more of a brown oyster mushroom, and it just grows very fast. Usually about 10 days after inoculation, you'll start to see mushrooms starting to form in the substrate, so it's kind of like a race to get it into the grow room, because if too many mushrooms grow before you can get it into the grow room, I found that it does deduct from the total yield that you'll get off of the first flush. So, and we have a bunch of the oysters coming in right now. We can kind of just see them at different stages growth. These will be ready to harvest within the next 24 hours.
By tomorrow morning honestly 12 to 24. They grow very very fast so it's definitely the fastest growing strain and also it's an all year round strain as well it seems to love the warm and cold temperatures yeah and we also have lion's mane that was just i just put in here this is the he zero so this is the strain that produces more of the teeth it's actually fruited right off the side for the first flush so we can just have a nice diversity of the way the fruit bodies develop so we we can just kind of have a lot of different options for anybody that wants the mushroom and right here we just loaded up some chestnut mushrooms some of them have like started top fruiting before we could get them in the grow room So at that point, I just cut the top of the bag off and put it in the grow room. The mushrooms will get pretty big. Chestnuts, I don't know, when you don't see that many mushrooms, I find that usually the mushrooms get really meaty, and a lot of the mushrooms, or a lot of the blocks, are just side fruited or top fruited.
So we just load the blocks in just like we do any of these ones and just make a nice diagonal cut on the on the front of the block so we can get a nice crop. Then we just have some lion's mane, really old. This is like a fourth flush. Some of them we've just been letting hang around, especially this time of year, where it's a little bit slower for us in the dead of the summer. We have a lot more space to grow more mushrooms, so just let them do their thing.
But this actually started out as one of the, you know, 10 to 12 pound blocks, so you can see how much mass the mushroom has utilized, is basically just broken down the substrate and exalted it into these fresh mushroom. Yeah, it's pretty amazing, and the block weighs next to nothing. I would say it's like a, uh, it's about a five pound block right now, so it's seven pounds of, uh, seven pounds gone into mushrooms. So it's pretty cool. And, uh, that's actually basically it for this grow room.
I mean, besides that, it's fully stocked, and, uh, we'll be harvesting out of this growing for for quite a while. Should get quite a yield. That's