Growing Pioppino Mushrooms and Reishi Harvest
This is a fast-burning strain, so this, we got to these too late. We're gonna have to rip off the top and get a second flush out of these. The PIA Pinot is a fast fruiting strain for us. It's usually by day 21 after inoculation, it's ready to go in the grow room. It's like, I don't know, it seems like it's every time, it's a, it's always fruiting, so if you don't catch it, we just kind of harvest whatever is grown on to it and just put it in the grow room.
It'll keep producing mushrooms until, until it's exhausted of nutrients. I got two more of these things that are on the way, but they haven't showed up yet. Kind of have like a cleaning bucket with you whenever you're doing any kind of harvesting to just dispose of any waste material. Yeah, this is the new such sawdust right here. At least it shows us that the Pia Pinot grows well.
Yeah, we recently got some local, a local furniture company that was basically throwing away all their sawdust that they were using to make this custom furniture, and they reached out to us, seeing if we could use it. So we started experimenting with it, and so far all of our mushrooms are doing really well on it. It's an alder sawdust, one artist alder, and if you ever get like local sawdust from like a furniture company or something like that, make sure that you make sure that it's untreated wood that's free of any kind of glues or any chemicals. So our, the one that we're working with actually have a waiver that they're able to give, so that would be a good thing to check out. And now we're just kind of peeling off this, these grown mushrooms, these overgrown mushrooms in here.
These aborted mushrooms is really what I call them, is when they basically abort because the conditions aren't met to provide optimum fruit body production. I like to fruit the P of P nose just right out the top. We have a few strains that will just do a top fruit, where we just grow the mush right off the top of the bag, and then other strains that we just do a slice on the bag, where the mushrooms can just grow straight out the side, or shiitake, whether if we just take the whole bag off and mushrooms grow from all sides of the block. So this is what aborted mushrooms look like. If you get these mushrooms right in the grow room as soon as you see them, then you get these beautiful crops of Pino, but it's not a big deal.
Just remove this mass. If you really wanted to go an extra step, you could take this stuff that we're removing and powder it and make like a mushroom powder or something like that, but I'd rather just take some better quality fruit bodies to make our powder. We like to cut the bag like at least three to four inches from the substrate to give a nice little human microclimate. These ones don't. The reason we rough up the top of the king trumpet is because it, the mycelium tends to overlay, their reforms like a thick mass on the top.
So that's what we just scratch it up. Since we're pulling this first flush from these blocks right now, we're kind of doing that already, so it'll be nice. Take some of these bags and start loading them up into our girl room. So these conditions in here are actually about 88, between 82 to 86 percent humidity. We just finished fruiting cycle in here.
I'm actually gonna up it now that we're loading fresh blocks in to probably get the humidity closer to around 92 percent. But then again, like it, it requires attention to detail because you got to notice. I mean, I like high humidity at the beginning of stages to promote the mushrooms to form, and then once they do begin forming, kind of lower down the humidity a little bit gradually as they mature, so they Don't become overly wet. The humidity in the room is basically just to serve a purpose of allowing the mushrooms to grow without them drying out. The mushrooms get all their water from the substrate.
They are extracting their water from the substrate as they grow. They don't actually get their moisture from the humidity in the air. Maybe in the air just prevents the mushrooms from acti drying out as they grow. They're just gonna continue cleaning off the tops of these blocks, being sure not to leave any kind of mushrooms behind. Those could be the sites for contaminants to grow and other molds, just rotting mushrooms, basically.
So we'll just remove all those. Usually, I we always catch it before this, but sometimes we don't. And if we if that happens and we just do this, we'll just harvest off anything that has grown already and just throw it in there. And usually within about a week to ten days, we can get another crop of mushrooms off of this this bag. A beautiful crop of mushrooms.
Written protocol
Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
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The strain grows out very nicely. It grows these really nice canopies of these delicious velvet golden tops little mushrooms. It's definitely one of our favorite strains to to grow and to eat. It's a very flavorful strain and also makes a nice powder, which can really give a nice flavor to like soups and other dishes. You will get the same nutritional benefits.
It'll just be powdered mushroom, so all those nutritional values and all those nutritional goodies will still be stored within the powder and then added into your broths or soups or recipes. You can actually get the mushroom vitamins and minerals into your diet all the time. So they can experiment with just different ways to integrate medicinal and gourmet mushrooms into their diets, whether it be powders or teas or, you know, with the powders or which is cool, you can just add them into recipes. We do the lion's mane powder, and at home, we'll add it into our smoothies. We'll even use it to like add it into like our baking mixes and stuff like lion's mane pancakes or certain breads, and you know, it's even great for the don't even know that they're eating lion's mane pancakes.
Ten days, and we'll do a harvest, and after that, we can even probably get another harvests after that within another ten days, and then after that, we'll get rid of these blocks. They will make their way into either a farmer's compost. A couple local people will pick them up to turn it into soil, but yeah, just basically not have any old substrate sitting in our facility. Can just be like a breeding town breeding ground for more contamination. Oh, we actually have a few more blocks now.
These were us. We have a couple grow kits that we didn't sell, so we're just gonna go ahead and fruit them inside of our room at this point, just because this was an oyster mushroom, and now we got this extreme overgrowth in the top of our bag, so it's not really a viable grow kit. But we won't let it go to waste. We'll still put it in our grow room, and we'll get a few mushrooms out of it. Sometimes we try to or, you know, I try to grow a little bit more just in case.
You never know if something unexpected will happen, so I always like to have a little bit too much an incubation and a little bit too little. I remember when I first started, you know, there was it was hard. You know, I mean, I'd go to a farmers market and leave for 30 bucks sales for the day just because I wasn't in the good markets yet. There were you know, this is a smaller market, and just being a new company, nobody really knew that we existed and that one mushrooms can even be grown in Phoenix Arizona. We still get a lot of people that are very surprised that our mushroom operation is right four miles west of downtown Phoenix, and you Know, it's just gotten to the point where we've built a reputation, and we've really perfected our products as much as we can to to turn heads and to get the right people noticing.
So I'm already about two and a half years to three years into the business, about two and a half years now, and it's become my it's definitely it's been nice. I mean, it's had its challenges, and it is a lot of work. You know, you're going to be spending most of your days just working, making, doing production, lab, balancing all your tasks. This is it the typical nine-to-five. You can come in here and see the mushrooms fruiting out of the bags in the in the tents, and they aren't ready to harvest at 9:00 a.m., but by the time that you get the boy your house cleaned up and your time to go home, yeah, it's time to harvest.
And so you really are on their time. The mushrooms don't take Christmas off. They don't know Thanksgiving off. My side fruited these pinks because, well, dude, that was actually growing already out of it. I had a hole had came into the bag in the lab, and I taped it over with a piece of micropore tape, and then when I was in incubation yesterday, that was popped off.
The ink the micropore tape had popped off of the bag, and the mushroom was coming out. This is the Japanese pink oyster that we were just transferring in the laboratory. This is about a day and a half in the fruiting. So a day and a half ago, this thing was the size of the tip of my pinky. Now it's right here.
In the next two days, it'll be ready to harvest, so it'll be a full-grown mushroom that will pick off of this block, and it's really cool to see. That's beautiful looking cluster. These blocks have flushed three times, so they're done. Time to clear out some space. You can get up to five flushes, but by then your mushrooms are you're only going to be getting like one or two mushrooms a block.
Like here, we see this is like a fourth flush right here, and we're only getting really getting this much mushrooms, so it's really not worth it to keep it around. At this point, we can just put in some fresh blocks. After like three or four flushes, the mushroom mycelium is the immune system becomes really weak and can be easily compromised by like a contaminant. But your first flush, you won't be seeing any contamination unless you have Tama native vlog. Yeah, for the most part, these are looking they did their job.
In nature, you'd find oyster mushrooms growing off of the sides of trees, so here we kind of try to simulate that way of growth with this block. Inside is a oak hardwood sawdust, and the back kind of acts as an artificial bark, tree bark. So when we give it an incision, it kind of just acts as in nature, when the mycelium starts poking out at the right points and receiving the right Oh to levels, that sends mushrooms out. So yeah, we have a few different kinds of reishi here. This is a Ganoderma multi phylum.
It's like an orange for us. It grows out in this orange yellow color, different than our other strains that we have. And here's our Ganoderma cecile. I love this strain. It grows out these beautiful conch like formations and is a really nice nice red coloration to it.
Sometimes when you put your blocks close together, you'll find that two Ganoderma x' will fuse together, so that's pretty interesting. And see if we can cut that off. And we supplemented the Ganoderma Malta file on this time, and I think it'll do better with an unsub tonight had substrate. Yeah, and we find that it doesn't like a humid environment with the Ganoderma multi file on. If it's two wets basically, it has the possibility to growing a little bit of green mold on it, so set those aside substrate.
Cart, and the reishi is definitely a an intensive harvest, so we'll just cut each antler off at the base of the block. It's kind of like a forest of reishi down there. That's a nice little reishi harvest right there, Ganoderma cecile Palmer woods. I just flush reishi out one time. We get pretty good yields on our first flush, and it does take a long time to grow, so we don't really like putting them in there for a second flush.
The majority of the reishi has grown in the bag, and we open up the bags just to put them in the grow room so they can develop these congklak features. It's due to the higher Oh two levels inside of the girl room, gives that reishi the signal to kind of begin producing these conks, and it helps really with the distribution of the spores of this mushroom, and it produces a lot of spores. Reishi is one of the most aggressive colonizers and fairly easy mushroom to grow. We usually see blocks of this strain colonized within about a week, so the the actual growth process of the fruiting body is what takes the longest, but I'd find about two months, two to three months after inoculation, I can be ready for harvest. When Tracy, you're gonna want to use some pretty good shears just because it's such a tough mushroom.
It's an intensive harvest, but well worth, well worth the reward. These mushrooms are great brewed up into tea. That's the best way to find to prepare them because they're so tough, really. If you try to eat them or powder them or add them into like any of your recipes, they're gonna be pretty tough to break down, so treating them with heat and when water as the extraction is the best way. For me personally, I do it, it shows that it really breaks down the substrate into almost a pulp like matter, ready ready to begin a composting into soil.
Yeah, this this is the most aggressive reishi that we have, being able to break down the substrate like that to where it's just easily rips off, it's insane. Yeah, this is the best reishi. This is a Ganoderma lucidum. You get these really nice lacquered stems or these just beautiful camps or conks is what we call them, but they're 75% water compared to most mushrooms being 90%, so the other more tissue-based, and they basically dry up to heavier weight than like a half a pound of our fresh shiitake would dry up to about an ounce, and then a half a pound of these guys are about would dry up to like two two ounces or so almost. This multi phylum is the hardest harvest, hardest harvest, but patience and time.
It's used for teas, tinctures, really just strict strictly medicinal use. It's been my shown to help improve the immune function and boost like the production of necessary T helper cells, and it contains some really like unique beta glucans and polysaccharides that have also been shown to like terminate tumor and cancer growth. So really a good mushroom that has a lot of promising research, and it's been used by Eastern medicine for over 4,000 years. Honestly, it's a great mushroom to grow and use. So just work on it on this supplemented substrate.
Just really get stuff down towards the base. Very hard to harvest. Zack, did you try pulling this one off like you did the lucidum? So yeah, if you do decide to grow a bunch of Malta phylum, taking the consideration that it's the most effort to get the harvests per se growing on a supplement its substrate. I think the next time I grow it, I'm going to experiment with some plain sawdust, no supplements.
There we have the cut right there, and we have a little bit of sawdust attached, so I'll just trim this off the best I can. There we have it. It's beautiful Cana Graham on multi phylum.