How Mycelium Becomes Mushrooms | The Urban Farm Lifecycle
So, from start to finish with mushrooms, you're either going to start from a spore print, or you're going to have a already grown out culture, whether it comes in a test tube, a petri dish, or even like a liquid culture syringe. And with that mycelium, you're going to basically be responsible for growing it out and ensuring you get to the point of mushroom production. So here's a room where we kind of have a lot of the first stages going on in here, from basically petri dish. So we'll start something out on like a plate. Here we have the golden oyster.
This is a commercial culture, and little wedges of it will get either dropped in a sterilized grain spawn or liquid broth. And from there, we can, let's say we drop it in this liquid broth right here, we can see this nice little glob of mycelium floating in the in the broth. There's also a magnetic stir bar on the bottom, so this will be put on a on a magnetic stirrer every other day, and the mycelium would get broken up. Once we get a nice amount of growth going through here, we'll take syringes, and we'll suck the liquid culture up through this gasket, and we can basically make a bunch of syringes of liquid to store for our own production or to give to people that want to grow mushrooms. And that liquid culture can be used to inoculate all this grain.
So grain spawn is going to be something that's very important with growing, or any spawn in particular, but we use like cereal grains. So soft red winter wheat, rye berries, millet, surgum, oats, all kinds of grains that you can use to grow out the mycelium. And the key is just to make sure that the grain has the proper moisture content, and it's sterilized properly. Once that's done, you can inoculate it and get this nice, healthy bag of mycelium. So this will get broken up and used to inoculate up to 20 of our production blocks, basically is the life of the business right here.
So we have multiple different strains all growing throughout. Basically, grain spawn mycelium grows, you know, whatever strain it is, maitaki, oyster mushroom, shiitake, lion's mane. You can grow the mycelium out basically on the same stuff. So grain, or you know, any kind of cereal grain, will work. And with liquid culture, you can kind of just use like a light malt dextrose or like a little bit of honey to give your mycelium the proper amount of nutrients to just grow out.
Once it's grown out, once it's grown out properly, and you know you have enough mycelium, then you can start inoculating accordingly to what what that species requires, whether it be a species that requires oak hardwood to fruit, or just a species that grows on like a soft wood or or just any agriculture waste. That basically covers, you know, incubating our spawn and and some of the cultures that we grow. So now let's move over to the basically raw production and see what goes into making up the food for our mushrooms to grow on. For like grain, so everything kind of just starts with this. This is just some soft red winter wheat, and this is hydrated and sterilized and allowed to cool, and from that point we can inoculate with a mushroom culture, whether it be a liquid culture or just slices and wedges of a petri dish just dropped into a sterilized bag.
Once colonized, we can use that for inoculation of production blocks. So production blocks will get mixed up in this room, and we use just various ingredients, whether it be like an organic wheat bran, some soybean holes, or we just work with these hardwood fuel pellets, which is made up of 100 oak. So yeah, this will basically be like our food source right here. Once hydrated, these things expand like 10 times their size. So, and another source we have is some alder sawdust.
Written protocol
Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
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So that's just loose sawdust that we can use to to mix. Up and and basically grow our mushrooms with. So we'll just get this from a local local woodworking shop. It's all red alder. Everything gets mixed up into our mixture mixer, and then from there, we can bag everything up and move on to the next phase of the process, which is the treatment of our substrates, and we use heat treatment.
We steam sterilize everything to eliminate contamination from from our from our operation. We'll check that out. So yeah, this room will sterilize all of our substrates, our spawn, you know, anything that needs to be properly sterilized before inoculation. And then from there, we can kind of move into our laboratory, and this is our completely sterile room where we have HEPA filtration running constantly, and it's a room where I spend most of my time. You know, a lot of a lot of hours throughout the week are spinning here, culturing out new strains, inoculating substrate, making spawn, just doing everything that I can.
It's basically like, uh, you know, this is a very important room and, you know, keeps everything afloat here. And then from here, after everything comes out of our lab, after post inoculation, we move to incubation. So this is the area where our blocks will come out to just hang out until they're finished colonizing. So we have some blocks that were just inoculated yesterday, and they're just starting to show growth, and, uh, you can kind of see after the spawn is poured in, you can kind of see little spots of the mycelium starting to recover. So each spot you see is a basically a grain that's been colonized with a mushroom mycelium.
Once broken up and inoculated into a sawdust or another substrate the mushroom I sam can eat on, you'll see that each each point of inoculation will will start to spread, and you'll notice the mycelium just weave its way throughout the substrate, knitting everything together and pulling it into a really nice block. From there, it can be placed into our grow room after an incision is made to let the mushrooms grow out. So these are all wood loving species. So in nature, you'd find them just growing right out the sides of trees, and we kind of just imitate that here by growing on sawdust. And then with our fruiting, with the way we fruit, we just make these incisions where the mushrooms can kind of just grow out the out the bag, just like in nature.
So yeah, here's a block that is almost complete. I would say this is about 90 percent colonized, and you can see the mycelium kind of just closing in on this uncolonized portion of sawdust right there. And then once we kind of get closer to full colonization, or reach full colonization, we'll just see like a full white block that's very dense, and it's ready just to go into the growing environment at this point. So yeah, we'll make it to our fruiting rooms. Yeah, we'll just load up our grow rooms with all of the ready to fruit bags and kind of just get our shelves nice and stocked, get everything cut, and within seven to ten days, sometimes more depending on the species.
I mean, I've seen some take up to two weeks for like a maitake. Uh, we're ready to harvest, so it's very quick. You know, start to finish with like an oyster mushroom, you're looking at about three to four weeks just before you can get some mushrooms, so that's pretty good. And then we also have some mushrooms that have fruited quite a bit, and they've done their job. They're probably like on their third flush, and we have some growing in here.
We also have some first flush chestnuts. So here's a blue oyster on its third flush, and this is actually ready to harvest today, so that we can see these nice little mushrooms just coming right off the side of the block. Here's another block with some mushrooms that just started growing. By tomorrow, they'll be the size of the, they'll be fully developed, so they Grow very quick. This is the blue green oyster mushroom.
So you can kind of see it has like a bluish green hue. We have some chestnuts starting to fruit. This is a really interesting mushroom to grow. It's a full iota, kind of in the same classes as the mako mushroom, and it grows these nice speckled caps and these nice big clusters, and it's definitely, uh, it's an eye catcher, and it's a favorite at the farmer's market. Then we have some lions maine.
This stuff fruits forever. This is like a fourth, and we're just keeping them in the grow room, or we're going into our fall production at this point. So in the summer time, we uh, we don't grow as much, so we'll just let the mushrooms kind of fruit in here longer than we usually would. And then here we have the foliota nameko mushroom. So this is uh, related to that chestnut that I just showed.
So this one actually develops a gelatinous kind of gel on the cap, which uh, you know a Lot of people will find use for it as a thickening agent in, like, soup, stews, gravies. Then we have some black pearls. So this is like a black pearl king oyster or king trumpet. It's kind of like a cross between your classic oyster mushroom and classic king trumpet, and it produced these nice clusters of oyster-like but trumpet-like mushrooms. So it's a really, really good mushroom.
Here we have some third flush pioppino. So these were harvested already and allowed to grow for another run. This is one of my favorite mushrooms. It has a really nice mild pork like flavor, and I think it's a stunning mushroom. It looks beautiful.
It has a really nice cap and really nice edible stem. When I first moved in, we weren't producing this much, but this is one of the lowest weeks I've had as far as production goes. So from here, we just harvest the mushrooms, cook them up, you know, your preference, a little bit of oil, butter, some garlic, served as a cider entree, and just enjoy you.