How We Load Shiitake Mushroom Blocks Into the Fruiting Room
So I'm just taking, uh, some shiitakes that are ready to ready to go into our fruiting, uh, growing rooms and, uh, yeah, getting them ready to go. So these were inoculated, uh, three months ago. So we let them go for about eight to twelve weeks. Then also with the I grow 3782 and shiitake 3790. With the 3782, I found giving the bat the block a light smack on each side helps stimuli stimulate fruit body production.
So do that before I put them in the grow room, and they say that it kind of acts as a simulates nature, as when the tree falls and hits the ground, it shocks the mycelium into producing the mushrooms so they can kind of spread their spores and repeat the repeat the life cycle. Just gonna throw some of these on since, uh, I just mopped in here. So I'll just take my bags and I just rip them open. I'll just tear them up, tear them out, and the shiitakes produce a lot of metabolites, so we can see this brown brown juice or a liquid, and that's totally natural. So that's just the mushroom mushrooms producing a waste by-product.
As the mycelium breaks down the sawdust, it exudes these metabolites. It said too that the metabolites also contain a lot of, uh, anti my, you know, novel antibacterial and anti-microbial compounds. Shiitake does a really good job of decomposing and breaking down. I put the block in. I also place it in upside down.
That way that most of the mushrooms do form on the bottom of the block. Really don't get many on the on the top. So I'll just go through and keep it going. We'll fill this whole room up with it. Sometimes you might see like a shiitake that grew on its own.
So we'll just remove that, and I'm just doing four blocks per shelf. Sometimes I can put six on there if I move them all like this, but there's no need to currently. So I'll just do four percent. So yeah, each block has been thoroughly colonized with our mushroom mycelium. Uh, we've inoculated this oak hardwood sawdust that's just been supplemented with a percentage of wheat bran for additional nutrition about three months ago.
So from that time, the mycelium, it, you know, started from Petri dish to spawn, and then it was inoculated to sawdust blocks. Those sawdust blocks were also broken down and inoculated into more production blocks, so it's been quite a journey. Now we're at time for fruiting. So once we open this bag, we're going to expose this mushroom mycelium to the rich O2 levels and high humidity levels in our growing room, which is going to signal for the mushrooms to just really explode through these blocks and just cover them with beautiful shiitake mushrooms. It's a very quick producer.
We can expect to be harvesting these mushrooms seven days from the day that we put them in. So within two days, we're going to see little primordia starting to pop up all over our mushroom blocks, and then every day they'll start to double in size until we reach full maturity. So it's quite an amazing process, and shiitakes are quite an amazing mushroom. Definitely a hard working mycelium. You can just really see that it's able to really break down this oak hardwood sawdust really well, and shiitake is a little bit more work than most mushrooms, where, you know, you do have to remove the bag.
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But it's pretty nice when it's time to dispose of them or if you're composting them, where you don't even have to take the, you know, bags out of the plastic, or if it's an oyster mushroom or a lion's mane, you do have to eventually remove it to compost it. So it makes for an easy composter or in addition to a garden bed. So if you're growing, uh, some shiitake blocks from like a grow kid or any mushroom from a grow kit that for that matter, you could just mix it into your garden for added benefits if you do see mushrooms. Growing in your garden, you'll probably be able to tell if it's like a gold or pink oyster from if you mix, you know, some of your own spawn in your garden. If you just see some random ones popping in there, it could be a good sign that there's a nice, rich mycorrhizal relationship going on with the soil and the mushroom mycelium, and that actually really helps benefit plants and aids in growth.
So the mushroom mycelium is able to help transport certain nutrients to the root system of the plant, as well as breaking down essential nutrients in the soil and aiding and distribution to the root system. So mushroom mycelium is very crucial to all environments. Without the mycelium, you don't have an ecosystem. So if you do see mushrooms in your garden, it's definitely a good thing, whether intentionally planted or not. It's great.
These tables make it really nice for just wheeling blocks around. Very durable and really useful. If you don't if you have a problem tearing the bags, you can always use a knife or a box cutter, but for me, this is a quicker saves me a little bit of time. I just rip it open. I currently have the humidity set to about 88 percent.
Since I'm just putting these blocks in here right now, we want that really high humidity to encourage these mushrooms to to really come out. So as they continue to grow, we'll gradually lower the humidity up until harvest to around the low 80s. That way, we can kind of preserve the self life as we move the mushrooms into refrigeration. But during the beginning stages, we want that 90 percent, as close to 90 to 95 percent humidity as possible to encourage the really good pin set across your block. So that nice humid climate around the surface of of our shiitake blocks will encourage really nice growth and just lots of pins where we see a good amount of mushrooms.
And one way you could do it too is some people prune it to kind of, sometimes you can get a lot of mushrooms on here, and to encourage some of the mushrooms to grow bigger, you can always prune and cut some mushrooms away in the early stages. Then that way, you have fewer mushrooms, but you get bigger mushrooms. So that can save you some time and labor when it's come come to harvest. Sometimes I do, but I actually like I let the mushroom blocks do their thing, and I I let them all of them grow. I don't go in and do any kind of pruning.
If we do get mushrooms that grow on the bottom of our blocks, we will go through and prune those off early on. So that way, we can redirect any energy that was going to go into growing out those mushrooms on the bottom into just growing out the rest of the crop that we can visibly see. So we also don't want mushrooms that have grown into the bottom because they kind of get damaged, and they just don't look as good when they've grown into the racks. So here's some shiitake blocks that were actually inoculated one month ago, and here next to it is some very ripe shiitake blocks that were inoculated about 12 weeks ago and ready to go in the grow room today. As we can see, there's a huge difference.
The mushroom mycelium of the shiitake usually finishes around two weeks after, which it begins to popcorn. It's a term used with this phase where you get this really bumpy kind of surface across your block, and then after which we let it ripen from this phase to to browning. So after several more weeks, the block begins to brown, and we get a nice thick layer of like a brown mycelium on the outer skirts of the block, and that that really, uh, lets us know that it's time to go into fruiting. This is our 3782 and 3790. 3790 just forms a block that's it's really nice.
It's very bumpy. It produces really nice dense. Meaty caps that are really nice. We like growing a couple different varieties at a time, just to have a mushroom diversity. Just pre-smacking all my bags before I get to the grow area.
All right, so I continue loading up the the grow room with the shiitake. Shiitake is really cool because it's super medicinal, as well as super delicious when applied in a culinary access aspect. It's known to, you know, really help with, uh, boosting the overall immune function. It's really good at that, and it's also been shown to help with, like, cancer and chemotherapy treatment, stuff like that. It reduces fatigue.
It's also really good for the skin. That's really cool about it. It's also a wide range strain, so it grows throughout. I can grow it all year, 55 to 80 degrees, even though our grow room really doesn't get above 70 to 75 throughout the summertime. A lot of new cultivators will get kind of intimidated by shiitake, but it's quite easy to grow and really just takes a little bit of patience.
About this size, about 10 pounds, is a good size shiitake block. You could do like a 15 pound block if you wanted to in this bag, so you can get like the substrate up to here, but it's, it's not as productive. We found that you get, uh, you basically can get more, uh, more mushrooms if you just keep it at around 10 pounds per block. I just peel off these mushrooms because if they're left to sit in the grow room, they can be the sites for contaminants or bacteria to grow on, since they're basically old mushrooms. The 3790 is really interesting.
It's, I would say, it takes a little bit longer to brown than the 3782, so if you're just starting out, 237a2 might possibly be a better shittake to start growing. Colonize is a bit quicker, and colonizes about the same speed, but it browns a bit quicker, and I mean, you can even go into fruiting about eight weeks with better results, as opposed to 37.90 taking more towards 12 weeks before you get the brown block. I'm probably not going to fill this whole grow room up with shiitake for this week because we don't need that much. Just off of this side alone, we'll probably get about 110 pounds, so I think we're going, we'll be good for. As you can see how I label my blocks, it says LE3790 G2, so LE just means shiitake, and 37 or LE means the species Lintanuli dotas, so that's shiitake, and 3790 is just a strain, and G2 means that I've taken a bag of grain spawn, inoculated some shiitake blocks, then I used those shiitake blocks and turned each of those into 10 new blocks.
So this was one of those blocks that was inoculated with sawdust spawn. So that's basically it. You'll come to learn all the mushroom species and stuff like that by their their latin latin names. So definitely, shiitake could be a messy mushroom to grow if you're growing it at your own home or inside your house. It makes more of a mess than any mushroom.
You get a lot of brown metabolite, like juice and liquid. Now, on top of that, it's a messy harvest as well. With all the trimming and cutting, there's lots of debris that's created from growing shiitake compared to other mushrooms. I mean, you could have a couple different kits at the same time. You could potentially have a shiitake, a lion's mane, and an oyster mushroom kit all growing in the same room, so you could just have fun.
Really don't see, uh, any reason why to limit limit you're growing. So I used to, I used to have hundreds of blocks growing in my house, so, and they do just fine. One thing you could do so you don't overwhelm yourself is I just loaded one side of my grow room today, then I can come back in like another couple days or whatnot, and just get the other side loaded when I come into harvest this day. It's going to be over 100 pounds of mushrooms, so just a little bit over 100 pounds, so I just don't want to overwhelm myself for one work day, because most likely I'll be bouncing through each grow room and harvesting more mushrooms. So I'll load that side in the next two days, and then that way I'll have another harvest of mushrooms that I can harvest a couple days later. So plan accordingly and just set yourself up for successful harvest.