Lion's Mane Mushroom Harvest
I'll build a couple boxes before I start harvesting and kind of get myself prepped. Also pack the rest of these mushrooms up. So yeah, we have a somebody here to pick up some lion's mane, so we'll harvest that right now. So, harvesting the lion's mane is pretty easy. This is our first flush.
Pull this bag down just a bit. Kind of just trim it. Kind of like giving it a little haircut. And it just pops off really clean and really nice, 100% edible. So, we'll get this into a 5-lb boxes.
And the lion's mane's a super dense mushroom, so it easily fills these boxes uh with, you know, 5 lbs and still have space left over. Really nice dense denser lion's mane that we grow. Uh and I I actually prefer it. I like its meatiness and I also like that it's uh really good yeilder. Depending on how long you let it grow and what stage of harvest you do, it's usually 2 and 1/2 to 3 lbs on the on the first flush of like a 8 to 10-lb block.
Written protocol
Lion's Mane Commercial Cultivation SOP
175 pages on this species specifically, from culture to harvest.
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So, we're at 5 lbs already with almost two blocks utilized. All right. And we'll hand this off to our our guy. We'll just put these aside too cuz we can also trim any of this growth and and just utilize it uh just like a dried lion's mane uh in addition to like the fruiting body uh powders or just use it into a mushroom powder that you're going to yeah, use for a recipe or whatever, but definitely has those beneficial compounds that you'd want along with the fruiting body. So yeah, some of it just peels off.
Got a little bit of sawdust. It's wonderful mushroom. Lion's mane's a great mushroom to to eat when I don't honestly at any time as you as you age or just to keep sharp. It promotes uh a world of benefits. That's basically how I grow lion's mane for the first flush and harvest it.
I'll also save like when I'm growing 100 or 200 lion's mane blocks in the grow room at a time. I'll put put this box one of these boxes aside or however many I need and I'll save it for like trimmings or little fruiting bodies that just don't make it into our 5-lb boxes. Give the block a nice fresh start. Oops. And what you could do too is you could even like mist a little bit of water inside of here to kind of rehydrate it, but lion's mane's really good at uh utilizing the water throughout the life cycle of the fruiting substrate really well because it goes off into multiple flushes and I even have some blocks in here in the grow room that I can show that shows that it still produces really nice fleshy fruit bodies that are really good.
Really good quality up until like I've seen them go four or five flushes still producing up to half a pound to 3/4 of a pound. So, it's a good mushroom to grow for multiple reasons. And this kind of layer just kind of peels right off. Really easily. And I just fold this in there.
You want to do that really good because the lion's mane will actually find its way and make its way out of the bag from the bottom if you don't enclose it properly. So, I'll just do that and once it sits on the shelf, it gets a nice slice. So, this this point right here is going to be basically presenting the most oxygen and proper conditions to send the lion's mane shooting out that that area that I that I want it to. So, I I like growing lion's mane this way. I've experimented with multiple ways of growing it.
Um I mean, there's another way where I wait, you know, until the day that the block reaches full colonization, it goes straight into the grow room. So, that's usually by day 10 to 12. And it's placed in here and uh sliced just as we did these ones. But I found that just doing the top fruiting for the first flush really helps me with my time schedule. I can get mushrooms uh quicker.
Usually by day 14 to 15, it has like a one to like about a one to one and a half inch layer. And from there, I can kind of put it in the grow room. If I Usually if I don't wait for it to get a nice layer or like a nice growth on the top, you'll put it in there and you won't really get a good fruit body development. And also the harvesting will be really messy. You'll end up with lion's mane that are grown into the sawdust block.
So, that this is important. I actually learned this by a mistake. Just let some lion's mane colonize for too long. And I decided just to top fruit it. And I found that it worked worked for me. So, it worked really good as opposed to doing it the other way.