How We Incubate Mycelium Blocks for Mushroom Growth | Cultivation Tour

I like the top fruit my lines made for the first flush. Depends on how I'm feeling. I may not fruit it on the top flush or not top fruit it and just make some slices on the bag to to get a nice cluster out, but the top fruiting works really good for me. I'm able to get three to four pounds on my first flush. Rest of these bags put away.

All right, so this oyster mushroom that I'm pulling off is the, it's like a blue green or alternative blue oyster mushroom. It's a really heavy producer, one of my favorite, if not my favorite blue oysters to grow, usually yielding a little over three pounds on the on the first flush. I'll let my bags kind of start in the lab for the first 24 hours, depending on my schedule, because usually the next day after I inoculate, I come in and I go straight to my production, so that way I'm kind of not cross-contaminating my lab. I get my blocks loaded in my sterile sterilizer, sterilize my substrate, and then I come in on a day like today and I unload the lab. I also clean it and get ready for the next.

Inoculation procedure to take place. I also keep an air conditioner in my lab, so it's temperature controlled. It also remains at 72 degrees in here. That way, the mycelium is able to grow in optimum conditions, and we get a little time before we have to take them out. So now that the much, the basically production block, has been inoculated in our laboratory in clean, sterile conditions, and also sealed in this, uh, basically filter patch growing bag, so it's equipped with a nice filter patch, not to allow any contaminants in through, but also to let air and CO2 pass out.

So since it's sealed, I can let it colonize in a not so sterile space, but it's pretty clean over here, but it's not sterile like a laboratory. And these bags are just fine. You don't have to worry about contamination getting in unless there's a hole or puncture in your bag. And keep oysters, blue oysters, pink oysters kind of together on the same shelf. That way, when it's time to load into your grow room, you have, you're pretty organized.

You can just pull pull shelves as necessary to begin the, once the, once the blocks are ready to go. So now we're just ramping back up with our production, so this incubation space will be quite full. We can house about a thousand blocks just in this incubation space alone. Um, total with both both of our ancient space incubation spaces with both warehouses, we can hold about two 000 blocks at a time. We can also fruit about 900 blocks at a time, given the three girl rooms that we have.

Grab some more blocks out of here. We still have, uh, we still have some lion's mane, some green oyster or blue oyster, and some trumpet. So any given inoculation day, I try to inoculate with variety. So I did four different strains on this. At this point in time, you could look at your bags for contaminants if you're not really confident with your technique.

I personally don't look for. Contaminants at this point, because we've done thousands of these bags and it's always the same result that was ended up working just fine with our current method. So, no, we don't, we don't check check for contamination. Everything looks healthy. I'll do a visual inspection of the bag kind of quickly as I'm moving them onto the shelves, but for the most part, we don't really experience contamination with, especially with these oysters.

They're so aggressive that they're usually taking uh taking over your substrate within 10 to 12 days. There's no time for any contaminants to really take hold. Each of these little white spots that you see growing throughout our sawdust bag is basically a piece of myciliated grain spawn. So it's grain that's been grown out with our mushroom mycelium. You'll see this in our spawn production, where we basically hydrate grain and sterilize it, and then once it's sterilized, we inoculate in our laboratory with a pure mushroom culture.

Once fully colonized like this, the spawn is basically broken up to get each individual kernel broken up. This is our white pro so millet. I like this grain because the each grain is very small, so you get many inoculation points throughout your substrate. But we also, like, we vary from using this to whatever is available, soft red winter wheat, surgum. So now that that's broken up, we usually do this in our laboratory.

We can sterilize a scalpel, and after we've wiped down the bag with alcohol and whatnot, we can make a little slice to create a spout, and then bits of spawn can be poured into each, and then they're sealed and then shaken, agitated, so you can mix the spawn with the substrate, making sure it's homogenized. And after that, this is about 24 hours. We can see mushroom mycelium starting to leap off of each grain kernel and onto the sawdust, basically starting to utilize it as a new food source. So that's the, it's a little bit of uh the magic of mushrooms right there. These bags are pretty pretty heavy duty.

It's quite hard to puncture them, but if you do try hard enough, it is easy to burst. For the most part, they work very well, and they they have a nice durable, they're very durable, so they can withstand agitation, shaking, and whatnot. And these are the unicorn bags. So we use uh they, you know, they produce a wide variety of bag sizes with different filter sizes as well. And depending on the species, you know, we can use the 0.5 micron for like oysters or fast fruiting, and like a 0.2 micron for a shiitake, which is going to take longer to colonize.

Here's our reishi mushrooms before going in the grow room. I like to let the reishi mushrooms form these antlers inside the bags due to the high co2 levels within the growing environment. The basically ratio mushrooms create these antler-like formations in which they're kind of reaching for o2. In nature, that's how you'd find this mushroom growing. It produces uh it looks for o2 in its environment, meaning oxygen, and once it finds it, it basically forms a disc shaped conch, and that helps in which spread its spores and produce tons of spores.

So we like to let them grow out like this, cut cut them down, and roll the bag down, and then after that, put it in your grow room and watch these mushrooms form these beautiful disc-like formations. And uh it's really nice, very artistic mushroom, and as well as very medicinal mushroom to grow. So with the reishi mushrooms, they do, they colonize fairly quickly. It's one of the most aggressive colonizers colonizing mushrooms out there. We find that the mycelium takes over the sawdust within about a week, sometimes, you know, five days.

After that though, it does take a long time for the mushrooms to actually begin to form. Once they do form, it's usually about two to three months before we can actually put them in the grow room. These were inoculated three three months ago, three and a half months. Ago, so we're just gonna put them in the grow room today, which it's, this isn't also a great, a great mushroom to grow because you don't even need a grow room to grow it if you want to just to harvest them at this point and utilize them for their medicinal benefits. That's very possible, and that's actually what I used to do for a while before I had room to even treat these in my grow room.

They take a long time to grow, so if you do put them in your grow room, you want to make sure you have adequate space to house them because they're going to be in there for three to four weeks before you're able to to harvest them. So growing them within this filter patch bag is a great way for a cultivator to grow reishi mushrooms without having a growing environment. You don't need to maintain any humidity or any kind of control levels at that point, so just put them on a rack and just watch them grow. So this is our lion's mane right here. You kind of, this one's a little bit harder for for new cultures to kind of kind of grow, basically telling from the mycelium, because the mycelium is very faint and very wispy.

This is after 24 hours. It looks great, but you can barely see the mycelium on this mushroom, and it isn't for about a week into to where the mycelium really starts to thicken up. So this is about the thickest the mycelium gets. You can still see a bit of the sawdust through it, but it's very aggressive, and as we can see, it's producing fruit bodies already, and that's basically, this was about 13 days ago. So within 13 days, we have a nice solid block of lines made mushroom mushroom mycelium.

With our incubation space, we keep a bunch of different strains housed in the same incubation center. They all really grow, most of them grow at the same temperature as far as the mycelium grows, and then a lot of them can have different fruiting parameters. So you just have to be careful with that. At any given time, there could be 10 to 20 different strains or species of mushrooms growing just in this incubation center alone. Take a walk through your incubation and check out the progress of your of your substrate and the mycelium and the development colonization, just to make sure that everything's on schedule, and you can plan accordingly to when it's time to start loading into your growing rooms.

All right, incubation is loaded up. That's basically it. I'll come in and clean the lab tomorrow and unload my sterilizers and get ready for the next procedure to take place. So really exciting.