Making 93 Grain Spawn Bags
Yeah, right now we're making some grain spawn, and we're just getting some of our grain loaded up into one of these bins that we just use for storage. This is a grain that I haven't used. It looks like rye grass seed. It looks really, no, they made a mistake. We're using white pro so millet as our main grain of choice. We might have a little rye grass seed. We'll experiment with that next time.
Sometimes mistakes like that, though, end up being like huge successes, because you'll, what happened to me once with the millet, or at one time, I went to go pick up some Milo and ended up with some of this millet and ended up using it, and I really liked it better. It has a really small grain, so you get really a lot more inoculation points when you use it to an octet your substrate. There's on a white pro so millet. You can use a multitude of grains to cultivate your spawn, Ranger from millet, which is my most desirable. We've also used soft red winter wheat or other various wheats, rye grain, basically whole rye berries. Also another favorite of mine is Milo or surgham. That makes a great grain. You get these nice spherical grains, but millets, I found, is the optimum one. I mean, you can really stretch your spawn further with it. Oh yeah, stay away from the uncle bands.
Yeah, so now we'll just take a scoop of this grain, and we'll weigh it out to our desired weight. A lot of people will will prepare their grain spawn differently than I do, but I found that I like to just measure out the desired amount of dry grains, and then I add in the percentage of water to basically shoot for a target ratio of 38% moisture with our grain spawn. As you get higher in the volume or bigger containers, you want to kind of decrease in the moisture content of your grain spawn. Like a smaller quart jar, I'll shoot for maybe a 50 percent moisture content, as opposed to these 38 percent content ratios with these bigger bags. It'll be a six pound bag. So yeah, basically some simple math, 38 percent of the six pounds, and we have our moisture content.
The reason why I like this method of producing grain spawn as well as because it's really little to no waste. All the water that we're using and all the grain gets added and sterilized, and we're not wasting any water. There's other methods where grain is required to be soaked for 24 hours, and then after that, it's rinsed repeatedly until the water runs clear, and then after that, grain is laid to dry out on the table till you get the desired moisture content, after which it's placed in your sterilizers and sterilized. I found that method works well, especially with smaller batches, but you use a lot of resources. A lot of water will get used for the rinsing of the grain.
So now we're going to start adding water into our bags, and we'll just pour it into this kind of like a poor pitcher bowl, and that will make it easier to get the water into the bag. We'll just sit that aside, and as we keep working, we'll let those grains start absorbing that moisture. Yep, so yeah, liquid culture will get poured into here, or wedges from our Petri dish will be transferred into here, and yeah, after that, full colonization usually takes about two weeks. So this all these seeds will be covered in a white mass organism called mycelium, and then from there, we can break it up and pour little bits of this grain spawn into blocks of sterilized wood base substrate. Each little seed becomes a vehicle to carry the mycelium into our substrate and basically acts as an inoculation point, from which mycelium can start to grow and reach for new food sources, such as our oak sawdust. This spot in particular will be doing a lot of lion's mane spawn and some shiitake and some a few
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Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
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Other varieties as well, you know. One of these six pound bags will create twenty to thirty production blocks for me, so you can also take it another step further, and with each of these bags, you can turn them into ten new spawn bags. So I can inoculate this bag with a culture. Once it's grown out fully colonize, I can then take the fully colonized bag and turn it into ten more bags that will be used to either inoculate more blocks. So yeah, one bag can become two to three hundred production blocks, or you can even keep expanding it further. Turn this one bag into ten, those ten into 100, those hundred bags inoculate twenty to thirty production blocks. Now you're at 3,000 blocks from just one single wedge of tissue.
So this is required to grow out the mycelium, basically in a nutrient grain-based substrate, and also each little seed acts as a carrier for the mycelium onto our sawdust. Everything has to be sterilized pre inoculation, so we kill basically endospores, mold spores, or bacterial contaminants that can also compete with our mushroom mycelium is precious food source. So yeah, without grain spawn, it'd be really hard to grow these mushrooms.
If you were to take just a liquid culture and pour it directly into sawdust instead of using grain spawn, then the the sawdust really doesn't have enough nutrients to allow the mycelium to really take off onto the sawdust. So that's why the grain spawn comes in handy. You'll notice when the knife and the grain spawn, usually within 24 to 48 hours, you've already noticed the mycelium has started to grow onto the sawdust. When they using liquid spawn, that's not the case. Usually it's it takes a long time, if any, to show any growth, and since there's such a lack of nutrients to really start the mycelium off on the right foot, then it you can have a higher chance of contamination, and the yield will be very low. The mushrooms utilize this grain spawn for its nutrients, so enables us to get a really good flush off of these production blocks. The target, you know, three to five pounds of mushrooms on our first flush, and that's due to the recipe that we use or the formula. Without that, you know, our yields would be very low and almost not worth it for the costs and everything it's produce. So that's why using the correct spawn for the correct substrate or farm, you know, liquid media or whatever, is really important.
All I knock you late some shiitake box with a bag of grain spawn, and that will basically be like a first generation production block for me, and then I can take a step further, and I'll label these blocks like a g2. It's a generation 2 shiitake block. That means I've taken a production block that has been an arcade with grain spawn, broke it up, and use it to inoculate ten more blocks. So each of those is labeled g2. That tells me when I'm going through my incubation area that, oh, this block has been inoculated with sawdust. I can't really uh knock you late. I can't use this to expand into more blocks. This has to go into fruiting, so I don't want to take it past pass the second generation of Spawn. I could very well take it past this and keep on going for another ten blocks. The only thing is, my yields would dramatically start to decrease. I mean, right now, I'm gonna be averaging two and a half pounds per block right here. If I take it in this another step further, I'm probably gonna be looking at one point seven five pounds per block. So it's up to you if you really want to keep it going, and you have the space and room to really just keep keep on expanding this mycelium. You can very well, you know, weigh out your weigh out your options and what's gonna be the most rewarding for you. So yeah, I usually just take it to generation two and then these
Will become our fruiting blocks to go into our girl rooms, and we can get a good amount of mushrooms from these shiitakes. Is a nursery. Talking mushrooms take about eight to twelve weeks before we put them in our girl room. It takes longer than most of our mushrooms. Most of our mushroom species usually are about two to three weeks, and we can start fruiting them. Specifically, like oyster mushrooms, two weeks, and they're basically ready to go anytime after two weeks, and then I kind of start becoming a little concerned if everything's okay.
Kind of like with plants and how you plant a seed to get get a crop to grow, this is very well the case for our grain spawn for our mushrooms. It's kind of acts as the seed for our mushrooms, as well as a jump start of really good nutrients to boost up mycelial growth and yield. This starts out as a food source for our mycelium, but once the mushroom mycelium has completely colonized your grain spawn, it becomes the seeds for the mushrooms to grow. So you utilize this as an inoculum, pouring little bits of it into different production blocks, or each production block. In the end, this will end up being 30 production blocks for us, each harvesting around two to three pounds. So one bag of grain spawn, 30 production blocks, about 90 pounds, 60 to 90 pounds of mushrooms, or we can just keep expanding and turn this into 10 bags of grain spawn and 300 blocks, and yeah, just keep going really. There's no stopping them. See Liam, it's always hungry.
So everything that gets inoculated straight from the petri dish is a G one, generation one. That means it's the first chance for away from the plate, and then if I use this to grain to grain, which is a common term, means transferring grains to new grains, that would be a generation two. And I really like to stay at around generation two. I don't like to go past it. Going past it, you can further the risk of basically just like a weaker strain, less vigor, and maybe even more of a chance of contamination.
Just until recently, I just did some experiments, and I found that just depending on what size of the vessel I'm using, I can kind of add in the moisture and the dry ingredients all at once. And depending on like if I'm going from a quart jar to a gallon sized jar, for instance, the race where the ratio of moisture to grain is going to have to decline as you get into a bigger vessel. So for the bigger ones, I stick to 38%. From the smaller ones, 50%. It works really well. You might want to, if you're using jars or whatnot, you might want to add a little gypsum because it does become harder to break up the grains, and they kind of mix them. As far as commercial commercial cultivation goes, I really enjoy this method of making grains bond.
That's one of the things with the mushroom cultivation is it's not something you can really speed up. You gotta be patient and let nature do its thing. So our grain spawn has been basically all the appropriate ingredients are added. We have our grain, we have our water, we've added a little bit of gypsum to prevent our grains from sticking after sterilization, making it more easier to shake. So we're gonna let these bags soak for the next next day until tomorrow morning. I'll let them soak overnight. We'll fold them up like they are now, and we'll come back in the morning before we load these into our pressure steam sterilizers, and we'll actually unwrap them. We'll shake them again to redistribute any moisture in these bags, and then at that we can load them in our sterilizer and sterilize them for four hours between 15 to 15 psi, 15 to 20 psi. After that four hours, we will allow them to cool overnight in our laboratory and commence the inoculation process the day after. So Friday these will.
Be inoculated with a fresh tissue culture, or Petri dishes, or liquid culture.