How We Grow and Harvest Reishi Mushrooms | Functional Fungi
This is a a RI species from Palmer Woods, uh, near Michigan. Uh, it's a beautiful species of Raii. It produces these nice antlers and conks that are really desirable, and this mushroom is mainly used for the medicinal benefits. We can take it and brew it into a tea or make tinctures out of it and utilize it for the health properties or health enhancing benefits at this mushroom offers. Uh, it's been used by Eastern medicine for about 4,000 years, so it's definitely good for for a lot of things, and it's known as the mushroom of immortality.
So we'll just cut these mushrooms off. They're really Woody compared to most mushrooms. Uh, most mushrooms are 90% water and 10% tissue. This mushroom here is 70% water and 30% tissue, so it makes a real woody woody mushroom that needs to be, uh, can't be sauteed or cooked. It really needs to be boil down into a tea to get all those goodies out of it.
So I'm just trimming near the base right now, getting all these. We had a lot of demand for reishi. I wasn't growing that much of it at first, and then I kind of was just doing it for personal, and then I kind of brought some out to the farmers market and just kind of started sharing with it with people. And from there, I got a huge demand, everybody asking for it. And recently, with a lot of things that are going on, everybody really wants RI mushrooms just because of the immune modulating benefits and the health enhancing properties that this mushroom offers.
Written protocol
Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
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So yeah, depending on demand, or if a mushroom's not selling too good, if we don't see it doing too good, we'll just trim back on demand and just grow what we need. I'm starting to see more specialty mushrooms available as they're gaining popularity. A lot of people are catching on to a lot of the knowledge that comes with the specialty mushrooms and health benefits. So we're supplying a couple grocery stores, uh, out here in Phoenix. Um, AJ's Fine Foods is one of them, and two other grocery stores in the East Valley called The Supersti Ranch Farm Market, and people love them.
Um, people are excited to be able to try something new and, uh, not your typical average run of the, you know, run-of-the-mill button or portabella mushroom, something that has more flavor, and you can kind of get creative with some of these mushrooms and really do something unique. This RI was inoculated in, uh, on December 14th, so it's 4 months old. It's took about 4 months to get here from the day of inoculation to now. It t it takes quite a while. This one does take longer than any of the mushrooms that we grow.
And there we go. We have a beautiful set of reishi mushrooms that is just amazing. Yeah, RI typically goes for for about 4 months, 100 day, 120 or so is when we harvest. shiitake about 2 months, 8 weeks. Oyster, I can do those in 3 weeks, sometimes less if it's the pink oyster.
Usually, you'll see fruits in as little as 10 days from the day of inoculation, so you can kind of play with what strain works best for your time and, uh, your schedule. The price is kind of developed by us due to the cost of production, the the, like, the labor involved for harvesting. Does it take longer? Is it easy? Is there much cleaning needed, um, for each mushroom?
And, uh, you know, really, how long does it take to grow for us? How long do we have to wait before we can harvest and and get the mushroom, the product? So yeah, oysters are going to kind of be the most affordable, um, from us, just because we can grow them so quick. And RI is going to be the most expensive because it takes so long. Also, another thing that comes into play is the demand, and, uh, is the demand high or low for this mushroom?
So like, lion's mane has quite. A bit of demand, um, medicinally and and culinary, so we have a little bit of a higher price point on that one. And typically you'll see mushrooms averaging anywhere from 8 bucks a pound to 18 bucks a pound, depending on if it's wholesale or retail. And then reishi, I mean, it could be up to $15 an ounce dry, uh, or or even lower than that, depending on who grew it. If it came from China, you can get Chinese grown RI for probably like 40 bucks a pound, 30 bucks a pound dry.