Inside Mushroom Farm Consulting | Real Solutions from Southwest Mushrooms
So those will just continue to grow a little bit more, yeah, and they'll probably be ready to harvest sometime late tomorrow, because I always tell people with the grow kits, you got to harvest everything at once. Oh, you do? Basically, if you're growing it at home, you can monitor the growth of the grow kit every day and harvest the mushrooms as they're ready. Okay, yeah. We would print the label out at the same time as the packing slip, but now we're just going to do the packing slip, pack the order, and then basically I got this for you know almost free.
I kind of saved it from going into a scrap yard. They're like, if you get this, because they offered the mixer to me for a thousand, they said, we'll go ahead and throw in the autoclave. So so I got those. Yep, that's it. Yeah, yeah, man, what's in these big, uh, this is the soy hole.
You get organic soy, or is it just regular soy? Just the regular non-GMO. Yeah, this is a second flush. It's a really good second flush, a little loose. We'll go ahead and harvest this one too.
Okay, thanks, man. I'll just harvest that real quick. Comes off pretty clean, so just making up some five pound boxes, and we harvested these chestnuts earlier, so we'll put those in there. Do you find people prefer them bigger or smaller for chestnuts? Um, this one in particular prefers smaller fruiting bodies.
He likes the whole mushroom to go into each dish to showcase the mushroom itself, and with the bigger ones, they basically have less to go around for people experience, so the bigger ones are sliced into segments. Right, so it's not something that is preferred. I did have some really big ones come out of here though. Yeah, I've been having that happen recently too, some really big ones. Do you notice any rhyme or reason why?
I know, when there's fewer mushrooms to, like with chestnuts specifically, when we put the block in there, if there's already some fruiting bodies developing inside the block close to where the incision is made, maybe that fruiting body will develop before even an initial pin set can start to form. We had that happen in like three or four mushrooms came out, and they were the size of my arm, so they might even be in this box. We might be able to find them. This is a huge cluster right here, beautiful mushrooms, and these will be going to the Sheraton down downtown, actually. A big chestnut.
Holy cow. Yeah, they can get pretty monstrous depending on how many form, and this might be good for somebody that's looking for something that they could substitute for, like a portobello, something similar, and just have, like, a better mushroom with an overall better flavor compared to that. So, if you can use that for some people. Love these. I think they're awesome myself, but I like to have just, like, a diversity of different different sizes and whatnot, just because certain people like different things for different uses.
Yeah, so can you fit five pounds of oysters in these boxes pretty, um? These ones are meant for three and a half pounds of oysters. Okay. And then they could do five pounds of, uh, basically everything else, shiitake, lion's mane. You can do like six pounds of shiitake in these pretty easily.
I can't wait to start growing these. Well, it does look really good. Oh, thank you. Are you growing these right now? No, I I have a culture for them.
Okay. But like I had mentioned, I didn't let them fruit long enough in the bag. Yeah, so when I went to heart, or put them into my grow room, they just got really short and squatty. Oh, okay. And I didn't get those long stems to them.
Now we have some pink oysters growing. This is the Purotus digimore. There's also the Plurotus salmonella astrominius, which is more of the salmon, salmon colored oyster. The Plotus Deja Moore, of course, produces the deepest colors. And I think it's the best one to showcase the color of the mushroom, a little mix case.
I'll hand this off to the delivery driver, and we'll get these mushrooms out of here. Foreign. That's okay. So let's say this is my 10 by 5. On the one side, just I have my tote outside.
Yeah. So my air is coming in this way. Okay. So you have your toe outside. Tote outside.
The fog is pumping in over there, and then picture this is like a rectangle though, because it's a ten by five. So fog is coming in over there, and then over in this corner is where I have my exhaust. Okay. So I used to have the humidifier on the outside of the tent, and I just didn't like it because the water would end up getting trapped in the exhaust or the intake tube and the exhaust tube. So I ended up going back inside the tent because also, yeah, just become a pool of water inside the duct.
So this is a mild version of what's been happening. Like the sides, the sides produce nice fruit. Could it be wedding? Could they be getting wet right there, do you think? That could be it, like too humid of an environment, and then water just sits.
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Yeah, because I know I see you growing them out sideways, and 90 of people do grow them out sideways. Some people do, and that's what I did notice when I was growing them. Like cutting the bag and growing them right on top of the bag, I noticed they just didn't develop the nice ice cool elong. Like they didn't have the definition that I usually get when I fruit them off the side, and I think, you know, part of it's because water doesn't get a chance to settle on the mushrooms as much, and also just like the gravity, right, of just hanging off the side and growing kind of like similar as they do in nature off the sides of trees. Get those nice spines on them.
Nice spines. Nice, nice mushroom fruit body development. Yeah, um, so that's what works out. And I'll show you how I set the 5x10 up. So I used to have the humidifier right here, and it had a hose hooked in through the side where it pumped the humidity in, but I just noticed it just didn't, I didn't like it.
So I put it back inside the tent, and it's on a dolly on wheels, so it could be moved around, and then the exhaust is all the way in that back corner right there, opposite of the humidifier, and that just creates the perfect grow environment. Do you have to grow my Taki specifically by themselves? An awesome room, you would like. Yeah, well, you don't have to. I've got no way of throwing them in the other rooms.
Typically they don't like the fluctuations of temperature that you'll get with a lot of other strength that I get with the other rooms. The intake is actually not connected directly to outside because the outside air kind of fluctuates in temperature. Yeah, and it gets really cold in the morning and average temperatures in the day. So it's just bringing in air from the facility, and then the intake for the outdoors is actually just piped up in the top of the warehouse just to kind of lower CO2 levels. It felt decently cool in here.
What's the temp? Temp in here is like around 67, 68. Okay. Yeah, a little cooler than actually in the warehouse. What do you keep your humidity at and all your tents?
I'm in the 90s. I try to see. That's, that's what's crazy to me, because I kept mine like high 80s, and that lion's mane was getting that, oh, that weird growth to it, and I thought it was too much humidity. But I like to do a lot of humidity at the beginning, and then you could try to bomb. Once you get good mushrooms to grow, you could bring it down to the low.
80s because you're in the Bay, so your environment's already more humid than mine is. So I basically am trying to condition my air all the time due to us having only like a 10 relative humidity. Yeah, so for you, you might need to just, you know, dial into the humidity due to your location. Yeah, I'm gonna take him back there real quick and show him it. It's something that probably won't be on camera, though.
Let's go check it out. So you have the two different labs? Yeah, that's what I'm trying to figure out right now with my setup, is do I have enough space to have two labs? I would much rather things are set up, uh, well, it's going to be like 1400 square foot. Okay, so yeah, you probably don't need two ABS.
I just have one lab per facility to help, um, take the load off for how big it is. Okay, because there would be times with the other lab where I used to do everything in the other lab, but the lab would be like overloaded with substrate for production, and then also I'd need to get in there and make spawn, do Petri dishes, and I'd be sitting there waiting for a substrate to cool down before I can even get it. Are they both positive pressured? Yeah. Your filters are always running for both of them?
Well, one of them is really only when it'll run for a week at a time sometimes, but I can turn it off and clean the lab, do maintenance on the filter. The pre-filter is on the outside of the labs. This lab has a different positive pressure system and actually has two two by two flow hood units installed into the wall. Then it has basically three flow hoods inside of the lab that are just like recirculating the air and, you know, providing sterile work space. Yeah, so I think that's where I was trying to figure out what to do, because I obviously want to have the lab positive pressured, but I wanted to have just like a culture and grain lab separate from like the inoculation lab.
Maybe building a small lab would be beneficial just for you to do Petri dishes, liquid cultures. That's what I'm doing with this one. It's really helped out, and that's just a bulk substrate level. Yeah. And then I can inoculate substrate in there.
Okay, okay. So we'll go in here. I have some more suit coverings right here going around the clear. I'm looking at some wise man in the fruiting stage, and we went ahead and sighed through these, or they've been here for almost a week, so they'll be ready for Harvest probably by tomorrow. They develop pretty quickly once put in the grow room and produce these wonderful pom-pom-like or brain-like formations.
This is the HE3. Some of this is HE1. What is the difference between the HE3 and the HE-1? The HE3 is more of like the pom-pom-like formations, and it produces really well. It's a really heavy commercial yielding strain, producing like three to four pounds on the first flush.
And the HE-1 is kind of similar in the way it yields. Its heavy yielding commercial strain, really reliable, three pounds plus per first flush, and then it has like a brain-like formation, uh, real dense media-like mushrooms that are really good, great for distribution, great for chefs. I see that chefs tend to like the HE3 and the HE1s due to the meatiness of the mushroom, the density, and then the fact that they can withstand distribution and shipping and stuff like that. It's good options. Well, this one's about to pop.
So yeah, we can see this one has like the smaller teeth and, uh, kind of like some Brandy-like development. Really cool mushroom itself. And then after this first flush, weave fruit again from the top. I'll basically fold the bag up and and fruit it from the side. Yeah, these ones are like second flush.
The bag's gotten a little bit smaller. We could see that the bags Shrunk a little bit. We ended up folding the top back up and just making a nice little diagonal cut, and then at that point the mushroom just keeps growing, and they do produce nice heads of mushrooms throughout the second, third flushes. I've even seen them go up to the fifth flush, still getting a nice little head of mushrooms. But if your production is uh allowing, you could just simply, you know, like we do, we replace them usually by the third flush.
Oh yeah, that's it in a nutshell for the grow room. Uh, fruiting Buddies gonna wash wash our hands real quick and get ready to go unload the atmospheric sterilization machines. And how much substrate you're running? Do you just run these right here? Oh yeah, they all get ran in this room.
Okay. They get hooked up right here. I have outlets for them. Yeah, they can hold around 640 pounds of substrate per cook. Yeah, I have the same one.
Oh, you do? Yeah. Nice. I just didn't know how many of these you ran like a day. Oh, three.
Three a day? Three at a time. Okay. And then, yeah, basically you can do a lot of processing that way of substrate. So I got kind of just, you you work with these things, so you know how it is.
I'm cheap and I use bleach though. Oh, you do? Yeah, I've used it before. 10 bleach. Yeah, it works.
Yeah, yeah. I haven't. I mean, it just leaves a residue. Maybe it builds up. I like the isopropyl alcohol for just wiping things down, spraying down sterilizers as well as racks.
I used to use bleach a long time ago on all my racks that I unload onto, but like I said, they eventually leave a heavy residue after time, so you you know, you do have to wipe them down. Alcohol is just easy for me. It is expensive though. It's like 20 bucks a gallon. Where do you, okay, so would you just order those through like Amazon or something?
I used to get them through Uline, but now I found a place right down the street from my farm that I could just go pick them up by the gallon. That's sweet. And I sell them for like 20 bucks each, 20 bucks a gallon. How often do you clean out the bottoms of these? Every time?
Every time. Or like really clean them? So I just drained the water after every cook and put fresh water in. Yeah, every let's say like every month or so, I put a gallon of vinegar into the sterilizers and let it sit for about six hours. Then after that, I could just rinse them out in any kind of build up just falls right off, and it becomes like a brand new drum.
That's good to know. So you never have to actually get down inside of there? No. I used to when I first got them. I got in there with a steel scrubber, scrubbing it up, and then I was like, man, that has to be a better way to do this.
And then I went to the store and got a gallon of vinegar. Well, the next morning I came back and rinsed them out, and they just were shiny and brand new. So I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of good info today, but that helps a lot because I get down inside there and I scrub it, and it's just so much work. Yeah, the vinegar just, you know, basically just takes care of it. Do you take the grates out when you pour the vinegar in?
Yes, I do. Okay. Yeah, take the grates out. I basically just pour the vinegar in, and then I can rinse out the the bottom, any kind of build up. I could tilt the the sterilizer and then just kind of pour it out this valve right here.
It is one thing that Bubba's Barrel rep did warn me when I bought one of these. Make sure you're tall enough to reach the bottom if you Buy the 150 gallon one. I'm about three centimeters tall enough to reach the bottom bag, and I'm 5 10. So if you're shorter than 510, find a friend that's over 510. Better yet, find a mic that's over six foot.
I just started growing mushrooms. It'll be a year in February, and I kind of just dove into it, learning all different sides of it from watching these YouTube videos of different guys, hearing so many different approaches, all of which might work, but everybody's situation's a little bit different. You're fruiting in different size spaces. You see these guys growing in these big grow rooms with perfect humidification, perfect airflow, and then you're at home growing in a five by five ten. You're trying to pack it full of as many bags as you think you can.
That was one thing I struggled with, as I tried to put way too many bags in there. Couldn't exchange the air fast enough for how much CO2 was producing. It's just trying to find your balance of your airflow to humidity level to managing the CO2 in there, all dependent on what size tent you have. I would say that was definitely the trickiest part. I think doing consultations, or just like trying to get onto other people's farms to just have another perspective of like, it's gonna open up different angles to your mind to see it in a different way, and like, oh wow, like, I don't do it that way, but that might help me, you know.