How to Grow & Harvest Shiitake Mushrooms Indoors | Cultivation Tips

You can really utilize it. I mean, it, I would say this one has a distinct flavor. It's definitely unique. It can. It's not as a meat.

I think the lion's mane and like the trumpet are really good. Like, you could shred them up and create like a pulled pork, really get like a meatiness out of those. These ones have their own flavor. It's like robust, meaty pear as well, and I mean pastas, stuff like that. Instead of eating a steak, you can just do shiitakes.

Kind of has a meeting this to it, a nice smokey meeting this to it that really really pairs well with a lot of things, and I've considered a great meat meat replacement. A lot of these gourmet mushrooms contain up to 30 grams of protein per per quarter pound servings, so, or 6 ounce serving, so you can get a lot of protein from them, as well as central vitamins and other goodies that they offer. The lion's mane is super, really. It has like kind of like a crab like texture, some people say. One of my restaurants uses it in that taco recipe, and I think it makes an excellent taco.

We've done shiitake tacos as well. They also make really good mushroom tacos. Just depends on what flavor you're after. So shiitake has a nice distinct flavor. I think it prepares what best with pan Asian style cuisine or Asian style cuisine.

Stir fries with fried Rice's, soups like miso, zan draman's. I really like to use shiitake and that that kind of perspective. It's a common mushroom. A lot of people are familiar with shiitake, so it's been a staple and and diets for quite a while. I believe shiitake was first cultivated or brought here in a commercial sense in the 80s, so it's still about, you know, 35 years since the shiitakes were really brought out in a commercial, a commercial way, but they've been grown in like Japan and China for Oh quite a long time.

On the USDA Agriculture's sheets, the price sheet, shiitakes are a little bit more expensive than oysters, that they averaged about like 450 a pound on like a commercial wholesale price average, which is super cheap for the grower that's just growing them for this local local market, where they average and a local setting, I would say between 8 to 12 dollars a pound for like wholesale prices or grocery stores. So it's still quite cheap for for the mushroom, and since it takes so long to grow oysters, you're basically averaging about the same price, and you can grow them much faster, so a lot of people do just stick with like an oyster mushroom because you're you're really getting close to the same price, and you can produce four crops in the same amount of time. As you can produce one of these, we we just have a lot of space, and we do like growing the shiitake. So I have another warehouse set aside just for the shiitake incubation, so they have their own incubation warehouse.

And then we can do our oyster mushrooms and our lion's mane and our fast fruiting strains here and our in our warehouse or other warehouse. So we'll do like oyster mushrooms, lion's mane, pea opini, stuff like that in our fast fruiting section, even chestnut. And then shiitake, since it takes 2 to 3 months most of the time, we're letting our blocks go for three months before even getting them into the grow room. So that that does it. So if you don't have much space, and you're looking for a mushroom to grow, and you're thinking you want to go crazy Wichita he, definitely grow a few blocks and try it out, but definitely don't try to you know, it'll take up a lot of incubation space.

So take that into account, be aware of that, and you'll be good to go. I just started growing shiitake because I just like to grow, but I do notice people buy it often, and it's an easy sell. People are very familiar with shiitake. I think that the best thing you can do is a lot of people say don't do it is try to focus on growing one strain and perfect it. I just started growing up as many strains as I can, and I like growing variety.

I feel like it's better for me, and I'm able to offer more more more options for for people or clients. So I like the fact that we grow a lot of variety throughout the year. We can rotate through you know up to 20 different strains of mushrooms, and we do really well with them. I just started growing shiitake because I was really interested in it, and I wanted I just started experimenting with small batches at home. I was sterilizing all my blocks in a forty.

One and a half quart American pressure sterilizer, so I would do, you know, 30 shiitake blocks a week, and on top of that, I was sterilizing every day and doing production every day. I did about 36 to 40 blocks a day, so I have one of my production days, I would just set aside a shiitake day, and I wanted to get familiar with the growth of it because I was really interested in shiitake, just because I thought it was really fascinating mushroom and wanted to learn how it grows, and basically learned that's, that's it. Iced notice those shiitakes a great farmers market mushroom or like a grocery store mushroom. It doesn't do as well with like chefs. They'd rather get something more exotic, or maybe it's the fact that they can get some cheaper shiitake from Chinese grower.

We're from a just bigger distributor that grows them at a wider wider level than me, but most of the time they want something more exotic, like the lion's mane, the chestnuts, the pea apini, some colored oyster mushroom variety, whether it be pink or blue gold. But the shiitakes do excellent at a farmers market, and if you can get in with a grocery store, they do great there. It's a common mushroom, you know, for gourmet mushrooms, it's like our gourmet Portobello or button because everybody knows about shiitake. This is my second grow room, and this is must, this is my shiitake and my reishi mushroom grow room. It, I grow in this girl room for shiitake because it does have a lower speed fan setting for the exhaust.

All the other rooms are more high-powered. The grow room 3 has its own exclusive air system, so that one I can really utilize to just power out some oyster mushrooms, and I do lion's mane very well in there. I can get the teeth to grow out very long, and it's just perfect. So each room is dialed in to their own specific species. So grow room ones, that one can does Pete peony And chestnut also does always stir mushrooms very well.

Grow room 3 does my lion's mane and oyster mushrooms, and then this grow room I use for shiitake, and I'll do reishi mushrooms in here as well. So these mushrooms do really well in there, and it's just because it has a lower, just room maintains like a little bit of a higher CO2 level, parts-per-million. It probably stays around 500 in this room, and then the about 400. So at this point, we let our reishi mushrooms just grow out completely in the bag, and then when we want to initiate the conch formation, we'll just load them into the grow room and see, and I'll just do ratio on a top shelf of my girl room. That way, the mushrooms have enough room and space to grow out properly.

So this is the Ganoderma lucidum. This is the sensi cincy stricto, I believe. This is a California origin. Very nice. It produces these beautiful, beautiful and very nice thick stems, good for teas.

So you'll just boil these up. You can boil them fresh 30 minutes. Like I said, this mushroom is very tough, has a very thick cell wall, and chitin is actually the same substance that the crab shells are made out of and hard materials like that. So you can notice the very hard structure of the shell of this mushroom, and all mushrooms have like a chitin cell wall. So that's what we're essentially trying to break down so we can access the medicinal qualities or the the nutritional benefits of our mushrooms.

It's recommended that you cut them with scissors. If you try harvesting them with your your hand, you're likely to rip out some substrate, and it won't be as clean of a harvest. So just use these scissors to get a clean, efficient harvest on our shiitake crop. Wax paper is good because it kind of locks in that moisture so your mushrooms don't dry out when they're in the fridge. So I'll just put a layer on top, keep some pretty fresh, and if you don't use like wax paper and you try to use like another paper that's not like wax coated, and I've seen like the mushrooms try to like eat through them, try to grow onto like a paper because they love wood base substrate.

So most papers made out of wood, right? So your mushrooms will try to grow on to that. These boxes are sent to wholesalers. They go to Shamrock Foods, Peddler Son or AJ's Fine Foods. So it's a outlet of grocery stores out here in Phoenix that you can get these mushrooms from, and then that's basically why we use these boxes.

We can sell them in lots of five pounds, or as with oysters, we do three and a half pounds per per case. Since the oyster so such a fragile mushroom, it grows out on these big clusters, so trying to put five pounds in our our in our boxes can get a little, you can damage your mushroom. So we just try to keep it nice, but every other mushroom really about five pounds goes into in a box. And then from there, we have a have a few wholesalers come pick them up, we'll deliver them out. We also deliver it to our own restaurant clients, so we'll just drop these boxes off with a restaurant after they put in an order, depending on what species they get, and everybody's happy.

And then we'll also use them to just to store our mushrooms in general. We'll bring them out and sell them in at the farmers market, right out of the box. So these ones are ready to produce spores now. Actually, these mushrooms, if you wanted to take a spore print, you could just take the cap off of this stem and lay it onto a piece of foil, and the mushroom is actually sending out spores as we speak. A lot of them are microscopic, but sometimes if you look at them in the right light and you look at it like a mushroom block, you Can see little little plumes of smoke drifting from under the mushrooms, and that's tons of spores just traveling off of our mushrooms.

I actually just saw some spores just drifting off right now, so you can get a lot of spores from these mushrooms. They're actively producing spores as we speak. Yeah, and that's what I do. I just dropped some on a piece of aluminum foil. I dropped a cap on a piece of aluminum foil, covered it with a quart sized jar.

The next day I came in, and there was a nice little white spore print. Depending on each species of mushroom, you get a different colored spore print. Depending on the the species or strain, so like our pink oyster mushroom produces a pink spore print, shiitakes produce a white one, the chestnut mushroom produces like a chestnut browns, for Peppino's also produce a chocolate brown colored Spore, the lion's mane produces a white Spore. So we get some different colorations with our spores. After taking a spore print, I am able to go into the laboratory, and with a syringe filled with some sterilized water, I can scrape the spores into a clean little unused petri dish that's sterile as well, and throw some water in there and suck it right back up into my syringe.

And from there, I actually planted it on some petri dishes the other day, and now I already have some fresh mushroom mycelium growing from the spores. So I just restarted my basically just restarted from a new culture that I'm gonna be isolating from, because usually I just take from already pre grown cultures, and they last for a few years. But every few years, I recommended that I start back from spores. So I mean, depending on how long your cultures last, about every five years or so, you can go back to a spore print and look for a new strain or you know, try to develop something new and isolate it, and then from there, store that in a slant or a petri dish, and then you can have access to that strain for years to come. That's what I'm gonna be doing.

So yeah, these mushrooms are already producing spores as soon as the cap begins to flatten out, so something like this right here isn't producing as many spores. Well, you might get some sports from it, but mushrooms like these are producing lots of spores at this point. So these new genetics that I'm taking from spore, they'll be very unique. They'll be different, so it'll I'll definitely have to do some selecting to look for the most aggressive strain and also the best quality producers. Might want to make sure that it does a good yield for me and produces some beautiful looking mushrooms.

And also what I might do is that grow out the spore. Well, I have the spores germinated on petri dishes, the mycelium will grow out. I will transfer that to transfer sectors of it to new plates. Once those are grown out, I will inoculate sterilized grain spawn, then actually grow it out onto production blocks like this. Then from there, I can look for the best-looking mushroom on my production block, and then take that mushroom into my lab and clone it by taking a piece of tissue from the center of the mushroom and planting that on a petri dish.

And from that point, I will successfully isolate a mushrooms strain-specific to where each and every mushroom that I grew out and in my facility will be a clone of that mushroom and have the desirable genetic traits and yields that I'm looking for. So pretty cool stuff. Yeah, my 37 82 is actually from a clone. It's from 2017, so just the other day, I took a spore print, and I felt like it's time to just add another add another strain to the library and just have the new. Most of time with shiitake, we actually flip our blocks upside down.

No mushrooms grow out of the top, so this is when our mushroom just sitting on the incubation. This is Actually, the top of our bag, so when we put it in a fruiting, we just flip it upside down. All the mushrooms grow out of the bottom. I think that could be possible to gravity. When the mushroom block is colonizing, maybe most most of the moisture might be collecting down at the bottom, just from like condensation and whatnot.

Mushrooms will pin and form mushrooms wherever is they sense the most humidity, so we just flip them upside down. That way, we're not getting mushrooms growing all on the bottoms of our blocks when we're in there trying to harvest, so get better better fruits. The fact that you see more garriga's mushrooms, which would be your button mushrooms, your Kamini, your portobello mushrooms. The reason why you see most of those on your dinner plates, and I feel like in grocery stores, is the fact that there's such a huge, there's such a huge force behind the industry that are that are cultivating them. It's a billion-dollar industry, so they're super mass-produced, and they're able to achieve really high yields and like small spaces.

They're also, it's interesting, they're not as nutritional as like a wood loving mushroom. So like your buttons and permease and all those agaricus species are mainly cultivated on compost and manure based substrates. Wood loving species are definitely more nutritional than what you'd get from a button, portobello, or kamini. They are known to contain like high levels of beta glucans and polysaccharides and also a lot of other compounds that are good for us. Like shiitakes produced lenten in.

It's also anti-cancer, anti tumour, which you'll find with a lot of the wood loving species. They are really utilized. They've been utilizing a lot of medicinal aspects, ranging from like cancer treatments and dealing with fatigue and chemotherapy to even our alliance man or lion's mane mushrooms in general, that can help with just the overall brain function, cognitive function, memory, focus. The fact that it contains like harissa nose and hearing a scenes that can repair, you know, nerve growth and neurons and the brain is really outstanding, and there's so much to the world that mushrooms that you can find with hard wood loving species compared to just just agaricus. So, but, you know, I'm not gonna hate on any of the mushrooms.

I mean, mushrooms are all good, but I'm called specialty mushrooms. I think it's not the norm with seeing like, you know, now we're starting to see more growers pop up, but I feel like agaricus mushrooms were widely commercialized a lot before or before hardwood loving and specialty mushrooms were. So there's a lot of big key players in the industry that are able to cultivate over a million pounds of agaricus mushrooms every month, and those make their ways to a lot of grocery stores. Their mass produce, so you see them on every shelf, and you don't see much much of the specialty mushrooms. A lot of growers have been known to ship in ready to fruit like shiitake blocks from China and grow those.

I know like 85% of the world's mushrooms are cultivated in shiitake for like specialty mushrooms, so we're starting to see more of this growth out here in the United States. So more growers are growing a lot of different species, and there's there's a lot more diversity coming out, so it's really cool. I wouldn't want to grow compost living mushrooms just because the storage of all the compost. Like I can grow these specialty mushrooms in in like small spaces. I can grow them and you know warehouses, and I can set up these these growing rooms that are really nice and clean, then I don't have to deal with manure all the time and getting truckloads of manure is sent to me.

I can utilize local hardwood waste, and also if that's not available, I can get hard wood pellets that can be rehydrated and turned into my substrate, so storage is easy. I can store things and on pallets with no smell. I don't have to walk into my facility and smell a bunch. Of compost, which would not be good for my lab, is in the warehouse next door, so that would be bring contamination into my grow. So you got to be really careful when you're growing compost, letting mushrooms, for the fact that it takes a lot more space.

The fact that the those mushrooms usually average at about a dollar per pound or less, you're not gonna get much money unless you're able to really mass-produce them. So the guys that are drawn like a million pounds a week, they're able to really dominate the market. There's no, there's no room for anybody else because you're gonna, you know, unless there's a really good local market for you that's one to pay top dollar for, you know, locally grown button and cremini, then I would say to get your foot in the door the right way, start with like an oyster mushroom and really maximize your space and the use of materials that are around you. And then from there, one day, if you get the space and you want to really enter in the Agaricus market, and you can look at look into it, but I think there's plenty of Agaricus out there. Well, as I was reading a few years ago, up to 85% of the world's mushroom supply is coming from China.

China just has for a long time been just a leading producer worldwide for mushrooms, so a lot of people have learned a lot from Chinese cultivation practices. But the fact that a lot of mushrooms are coming from China definitely says something, that we need to start growing more food here and teaching people about this so we can access good food. I've read reports where mushrooms coming from China were shown to be sprayed with sodium phosphates and whatnot to make them appear or keep their whiteness and freshness longer. So that's like going against what we're posed to be eating mushrooms for, and to be eating them to remove toxins and pollutants from our body and not to put them in there. So it's one of the good reasons why I like doing this, so I can just give people healthy access to good good food.

I think it's mind blowing. A lot of a lot of shiitake, for one, was cultivated in China a long time ago and in Japan as well, but they found that like cutting down the trees that had shown fruiting some shiitake mushrooms and striking them as well as soaking them in water provided essential fruiting zs-- also China has like the landscape and environment where mushrooms can grow in these really unique basically farms, where they're able to fruit all the mushrooms on logs outside in like hoop hoop frame tents, where there's really no artificial supplementation at all. Everything is totally natural for the fact that the humidity is just out in the mountains, and you know, they have the tents really wide and open and air is able to travel through them really nicely. So yeah, China is just a place where they have been cultivating mushrooms for a long time, and they have huge farms as well that just pump out lots of mushrooms. I think the fact that they have such a really huge population, they've learned to cultivate a lot of food for a lot of people.