Long Term Mycelium Incubation
All right, so we're just in the secondary incubation area over here in warehouse number two, and this is where all the longer colonizing species come, such as shiitake. We have reishi growing in this area. We'll put turkey tail in here, maitake, anything that's going to take quite a while, like, you know, six to eight weeks or more, kind of comes to this area. At this point too, we do have some enoki over here, plenty of shiitake at different stages of colonization, and then, yeah, more reishi.
Of course, some of the reishi we've left for quite a while. It's been here since March, so it's going on five months, and some of them are starting to grow conchs right out the filter patches, and I think it's pretty cool, so I've just been letting letting some of them do their thing. Usually, I'll cut the cut the bag down and put it into the growing environment to get really nice ratio formations, but we had an, uh, overabundance of reishi, uh, this like in the last couple months, so some of them have just been hanging out here, and then we noticed just like a beautiful conch starting to form. Really not much humidity in this warehouse too, so it just shows how resilient this strain is. It's growing perfectly, and yeah, it's pretty dry in here, so that's pretty cool. It's definitely probably able to uptake a lot more water from the fruiting bodies inside the inside the growing bag.
So yeah, then yeah, we just have some shiitakes. These were inoculated about a month ago, so they've already gone through the popcorning stage, and then they're going to begin browning, as we have some of them back there that are pretty ripe, and we have some freshly knocked inoculated enoki bags that are just about two or three days into colonization, and more reishi. So this is ratio that was inoculated a month ago, and we're just starting to get the beginning stages of the fruit body formation that we can see. So these will just be left to grow until the reishi mushrooms make their way towards the top of the bag. At that point, I can cut the bag down, put them in the grow room, and let them finish off in the grow room, and they really really take a nice form.
Written protocol
Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
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And then we have another cool reishi right here. This is called the tiger reishi. My first time growing it, but it looks beautiful. Let's see what it looks like towards the end of its development.
And here we have a bunch of golden enoki. These ones were left to just fruit inside the bag, giving them more of the heightened CO2 environment. They grow these really elongated stems and really small caps, and this is usually how you'll find them in market, so it's another cool way to grow them. It's a cold preference strain, so we're growing it in the middle of summer here, and it does find in the grow room when we cut the bag down, and it gets a bigger cap because it's exposed to a higher oxygen level. But yeah, when you grow them like this, you get more of the elongated stems. This is kind of an experiment as well, so yeah, we have a bunch of them kind of doing their thing. You could see really nice golden enoki coming along, and I actually, uh, always see the golden enoki starting to form, uh, mushrooms inside the bag, and getting them into the grow room is usually what I do when I start to see a good pin set, but I traded a culture with a friend, Fungi John or John Martin, and he he showed me that they they had actually harvested some just out of the bag like this. So it's a good way to get some nice enoki mushrooms with some nice elongated stems and, yeah, great for the perfect application in certain Asian dishes and stuff like that.
So and then, yeah, we have these blocks that were just inoculated within the last 48 hours or so.
And we can see each spot where the grain spawn has basically taken off and formed new mycelium, and is reaching out to start the colonization process with the sawdust blend that we have sterilized for it. So yeah, we can see that the spawn is evenly mixed, and you can each spot will basically grow, take over the substrate until everything meets up, forming this really nice infused network of mycelium that you can put into the proper conditions and get some wonderful mushrooms off of.
All right, just making my way through the incubation, and this is towards the end. We have the Foliotas over here, just the chestnut and the Mako. So chestnut would be the Foliota adiposa, and the Mako, of course, is Foliota and Mako, and these ones generally take about six weeks. Nemeco, usually about eight weeks before I want to get in the grow room. So here we are exactly eight weeks after inoculation. This was inoculated on the 16th of June, and today is the 16th of August, and the Nemecos have just started pinning. So we'd see these baby mushrooms, so the beginnings of fruit body formation, and they just start off as these red little spots or oranges little spots that you see. Some of them have a little little stem and a small cap, so it's known as like a pin. So these blocks have started pinning, and they have these like little pinhead like mushrooms starting to grow on the blocks. So you just see these beautiful little mushrooms. The Mako is one of my favorites. I just love the way it looks, and I love the way it tastes as well, a nice earthy flavor, but I like to grow this mushroom as it gets towards the fall time, cooler weather.
So it's basically that then, yeah, we have a bunch of shiitakes still going here. We like to keep a lot of them in incubation, and we have one of them, or we have a bunch of them actually, but I have one of them right here to show you kind of what it looks like when the block begins to ripen. This is two days before the two month anniversary of the inoculation of this block, and we can see the nice browning that we have going. We could let it go for another month, and it would be really brown, but at this point, it's safe to fruit the mushroom block. You'd get a great yield off of it and really good quality mushrooms. So shiitake is one that requires patience, whatnot, but it's well worth the wait. In my opinion, it's a great mushroom.
So we have some mushrooms dehydrating over here. This is a lion's mane. We harvested this fresh and basically loaded up into the dehydrator to make it available for all those that want to use the medicinal properties of lion's mane to their benefit. So we'll use this dehydrator to just dry mushrooms that we prefer drying, like some reishi mushrooms or lion's man, or even some of the mushrooms that go into our medleys or our dried mixes, just to preserve the mushrooms, and I know a lot of a lot of people sometimes prefer having dried mushrooms available over fresh just because of the usability of them. We can also use these for mushroom powders and stuff like that. So the mushrooms will be loaded up, and we can kind of set the temperature and the time depending on what mushroom we have. In dehydration, we can do the preferred temperature. So these are going at 140 currently, and we'll let these go basically for a whole day, usually about 20 hours, and at that point, they're nice and bone dry and perfectly ready to go for the next applications.