Making 95 Blocks of Our Hardwood Sawdust Substrate for Mushroom Cultivation

And I'm going to be looking for a consistency where I can grab a handful of my substrate and squeeze it as hard as I can, and really not even a drop should fall out, where I wanted that filled capacity. We don't want our substrate too wet. We want our substrate about 50 to 60 percent hydrated, so that way we can let our mycelium just grow through it without any issues. So a field capacity is a term that's really important wood substrate. This field capacity is we what we want all of our substrates to be at with with with our mycelium growing through it.

So now, field capacity is meaning you can grab a handful of substrate, squeeze it as hard as you can, and maybe a drop might come out. That's good to go. And we're just about halfway there with our water content, and the sawdust just looks beautiful, and that's what we want. It's a nice, broken-up, even consistency there at a hundred and two hundred and three liters. I'm gonna keep this going to about 130 litres.

Then I'll stop it, and I'll add in the rest of the substrate, which is going to be a soybean whole at this point. Those are also Impella. It's so we'll stop the mixer. We'll fill those on top, will hydrate them a little bit so they can start breaking up as well, and then we'll start mixing them in with additional water. That way we don't have a bunch of just pellets.

You want an even consistency. So if I break up the soy pellets before the hardwood, we have a bunch of hard wood pellets that don't get broken up. So this is a production a half-day. We do two of these two of these batches a day, three days a week when we're running in full swing. So now we're summertime.

It's a little slower. Just do a half batch two days a week, which will be equivalent for us about 210 pound blocks. So that stuff's all in Chinese, and it basically, I use the Google translator to read it, and some of the stuff talks about danger. I think on the other side it tells you how many rotations it does per minute for sawdust. So the thing is built for mushroom production.

It came from a mushroom equipment supply company in China. They also produce an autoclave for us, which is behind me. It's a double door autoclave, and another mushroom grower in the area basically decided to close their business, so we ended up getting this and the autoclave for for a steel, really. What a blessing that this thing has been for us, because we started mixing by hand, or I was mixing by hand in my backyard. I got this warehouse, and then we were using a cement mixer, and then now from the cement mixer, we're using this, and then who knows where we'll go in the next year, so what we'll do next.

But for now, this works really well. All right, so we're at a hundred and thirty liters, so I'm gonna stop my mixer, and then I'm gonna add in some soybean oil. At this point when you can use on all kinds of supplements to add in addition to your oak hardwood sawdust. So the oak hardwood sawdust is kind of like the base of the substrate. In nature, this is what we'd find these mushrooms growing on, so they prefer oak or wood based substrates.

Doesn't necessarily have to be oak. The nutrition, we add that in for the yield we end up with a. For commercial indoor production, supplements are really necessary. To maintain an really high yielding crop, a lot of you can find a lot of farms that just grow off of straight logs outdoors in nature, and it's, it can work. But for indoor cultivation, the nutritious, nutritious supplements are needed to maintain those above 1 pound harvest averages per 5 pounds of substrate.

So, or, we usually get about 2 to 3 pounds first flush just off of our 10 pound blocks, so that's with our supplementation. Without that, we would probably be getting about half a pound per 5 pounds of substrate, so it triples our yields to utilize these supplements. When I first started out, I would just use wheat bran as my supplement for everything. Now I use this soybean whole mix for all my fast fruiting strains. They really love the 50% soybean mix.

It provides a really nice mushroom crop. This stuff kind of comes as a pellet, it's kind of like a powder as well. So this will be in addition. It's really easier to break up than the wood pellets, so that's why we break those up first, then we add these in necks. So start adding in our substrate.

I'll just top it off with some moisture. The fact that we grow in such a small space with these in this warehouse like we do, I think that's what fine, what makes us unique. We grow a lot of mushrooms in intense, and it's really easy. Look, for the most part, I think low-tech, you know, you don't have to get too crazy with with a bunch of stuff to do it. I think it's simplified.

I'll just start adding water, and so I'm just gonna, I'm halfway to my mom watermark. I'm gonna add in another hundred and twenty liters of water. After that, I'm gonna do a field test to see how the substrate feels, and then from that we can proceed with bagging in the substrate and getting it ready for our sterilization process, and then from there we can go ahead and inoculate and go. Into incubation for colonization so we're using soy whole pellets as a nutritional supplement for the fast fruity mix so the soy whole pellet isn't actually made from soybeans or anything it's actually from the crop waste and the roughage that comes from the production of the soybean so it's basically an agricultural waste that we are utilizing and recycling into mushrooms all of our substrate right now either comes from our local local supplier of the red alder sawdust or the mushroom media so Seth helps us out and gets top-quality pellets busy from like a group of Amish Amish people that make pellets and and bang it up and ship it out so stuffs great we've been using those same suppliers for since the start of the business we're actually at the start of the business I would go to like an Ace Hardware or Home Depot or just a hardware store and you can find the pellets for grilling and

I would use those and they work just fine just make sure You get the right kind and make sure they're hardwood. They can be quite a bit pricey. Usually, it's about a dollar per pound, so if you do want to get into this for for a living, or if you want to do it all the time, then there's other options you can take. So just do some research and figure out what works for your situation. You can also grow like oyster mushrooms on straw and other things, so maybe sawdust isn't right for you.

So yeah, there's a lot of options to take to grow mushrooms, different routes you can take to to get to the mushrooms. Yeah, it's crazy that all this substrate was just in these bags. Breaks down so much. It's about almost a thousand pounds of fresh substrate right here. It's about with the water added, it totals about nine hundred pounds, so we're almost 200 liters.

So the substrate is just about ready, but you can experiment with like beet pulp pellets and all kinds of stuff, but Yeah, we like the soil pellets are the best substrate I've found with the oak hardwood sawdust. You can also do like a cotton cotton seed hole pellet, but you can be more prone to a bacterial or contamination when using them. So yeah, we like the sawdust for our mushroom substrate just because we can grow a wider variety on sawdust. But if you wanted to, we started out with using straw and sawdust at the same time, mainly straw for oyster mushrooms. And with the straw, the yields were pretty low, but the cool thing is you didn't have to sterilize your substrate or inoculate in the laboratory.

So we would boil up 55-gallon drums to 180 degrees, and then we drop straw in there and let it past rest for about an hour. And then I would take it out and just inoculate in open air outside and stuff the strong spawn into big big tubes and grow them like that. Worked well, but the blocks, you get more efficiency and better yield. All right, so I'm gonna add in a couple cups of our gypsum, which is like a calcium attitude. So this helps with mushroom mycelium is growth and development, promotes like a strong mushroom mycelium, and it also helps aerate the substrate, letting that mushroom mycelium just rip right through it.

If I don't have gypsum available, I just don't add it really. It I only add it if it's a here. It's not like a big deal if you don't have gypsum, but it I it benefits it helps. So if you have it, why not? Oh yeah, I've done experiments side by side, and for the most part, you really can't tell the difference if you don't add any gypsum.

I'll just take it and see about build capacity, and I could squeeze it very hard and not any water comes out, but it still takes its shape. It's thoroughly hydrated, so it's perfect. That's filled capacity, and that's perfect for mushroom cultivation. A lot of people will get the mistake of thinking substrate just needs more water than it really does, and better be be on the dry side than on the two wet side. This is perfect.

So I just put my bin right under there, and when I'm ready for my substrate to come out, just lift up this lever. So I just bag right here on the ground, or I'll lift it up on the table if this makes it easy. Pretty pretty simple process. I do three scoops per bag and just place it right here on the table. Then I just use the bucket.

We also have like some nice, we're not nice, but you can make a bag filler just like with a pipe and our PVC pipes and like a register vent or something like that. Today, we just produced up nine hundred pounds of substrate roughly, which will equate for us to be about ninety ten pound bags, give or take. Usually on our when we're running full swing, we do eighteen hundred pounds of substrate per day. So we'll do two of these batches three times a week, so about five thousand four hundred pounds of substrate a week. And then from that, we're getting about up to 3 pounds of bag, two and a half to three pounds of bag.

So about five hundred and forty bags. On a good week, we're averaging about fourteen hundred pounds of mushrooms a week. So for our dry substrate being used, then that's about a hundred percent biological efficiency rate, where the mushrooms are able to turn the dry substrate into fresh pounds of mushrooms. So let's say we had about fourteen hundred pounds of dry substrate that week, we converted it into 1400 pounds of fresh mushrooms. So we're doing really good with our biological efficiency here.

We usually get about two to three flushes a block. So just off the first flush, we're getting a you know about that fourteen hundred pounds, and then the next flush will be about seven hundred pounds or so, so by large biological efficiency of about. A hundred percent. It's really necessary to be successful. As a smaller mushroom farm, we need those yields because we grow in such small spaces that every pound, every ounce counts, so that's why we use the best, you know, the best proven fruiting substrate to produce the best yield, and we just also take a lot of care and in our process.

So they also make, like, machines that do this for you, bag fillers, all that stuff, but for the meantime, this works for me. It's a, it's affordable. It was only like a few hundred dollars for me to get this set up, but they have really a really nice set ups that you can buy already, like, manufactured for you, just a little bit more in the higher price bracket. So my suggestion is, when you're just starting like this, is just work with, be resourceful, work with what you can, and make the most out of it. When you can't afford nicer things, you'll know.

Are you just go, go get it. Just keep refilling our bed. Next time, we'll get a shiitake mix going, but if I do that in about two weeks, and I just try my best, keep any dirt or sawdust substrate away from getting in the opening of the bag or just dirtying it up. So I just try to be as quick as possible. This will shake it to clean it up.

This is probably like one of the most labor-intensive parts of the job, but honestly, there's all, there's labor involved in every step. We've got the harvesting and just got to have fun with it. All right. I enjoy every aspect of the cultivation process. I find making the substrates very fun.

Look in the bags is fun. Making the spawn is fun. Everything about it is a very fun process. So yeah, 94 bags here, all filled up, ready for sterilization. So I'm just gonna roll each bag or fold it and roll the bag underneath, the flap underneath the block, so we can get a nice little nice block like that and after that well load it into our sterilizer and start the sterilization process and that'll be the step before we can uh knock you late them which will and be inoculating by placing the grain spawn that's been growing out with mushroom mycelium pour a little amounts of Green spawn into each bag and then that mycelium can start to grow throughout this sawdust utilizing it as a food source eventually producing mushrooms we just take each bag and you want to do a nice neat fold so go along with the creases along the bag be sure to not wrinkle it and push into your remaining air out and we'll just fold that flap right underneath good to go so yeah we just fill them about half way and then that way we can fold the bag properly and close

it essentially so it can sterilize and then once it's cool we can open the bags in the laboratory kind of our laminar flow hoods and just Fold them up. The bag is a heat tolerance filter patch mycological grow bag or mushroom growing back, so you can use these bags mainly for these are the five tea filter patch bags. So I use these for my substrate production blocks. Respond and make sure it has a 0.2 micron. So yeah, these are the 0.5 micron.

This filter patch is a 0.5 micron filter patch, meaning you can filter out air and everything down to 0.5 microns, so really not many contaminants can get through this. So it's great for like fast colonizing fruiting substrate, such a recruiting mushrooms such as oyster mushrooms and lion's mane and all kinds of stuff. So for spawn and whatnot, we'll use a point 2 micron because it can filter down to a lower size, making it harder for contaminants to enter into our bag and contaminate our precious spawn or substrate. With shiitake, it's recommended to use the point 2 micron filter patch with the bigger blocks as well, since shiitake colonizes for so long. I haven't always grown mushrooms this way.

There's definitely other techniques that you can use to grow mushrooms. As for the utilizing oak hardwood sawdust with supplements, then the filter patch bag is necessarily because, because you need to sterilize all the contents in the bag and then opening it, opening it up in a laboratory setting or in front of a flow hood, just because this is, this is a highly nutritious substrate, so it's very easy that it can contaminate if sterile, sterile technique and precaution isn't sitter. So you don't have to have these. You can use like reusable containers, like buckets and stuff like that with holes drilled in them, and you can inoculate those with pasteurized substrates that you can actually, or you can grow on pasteurized substrates in those containers that you can actually inoculate in open-air settings without a laboratory. So the filter patch bags are necessary for cultivation of mushrooms like shiitake and stuff like that, maitake, lion's mane, stuff that really does well on supplemented sawdust.

But yeah, the bags come in handy for the cultivation of, yeah, with loving species. I used to do. Oysters mushrooms on shredded straw, you could just pasteurize that by soaking the shredded straw and 170 degree Fahrenheit water for about one to two hours. After that, you can drain off the water, let the straw cool, and then mix in ten percent to 20 percent spawn, which if you're using like 10 pounds of straw and that'd be 1 pound of grain spawn mixed in. Then you can load that into a bucket with holes drilled in it or even on a long poly tube and kind of make like an artificial log and grow.

Mushrooms, right, that way usually straw takes about 10 to 14 days for colonization with oyster mushrooms. These are some hefty blocks, so a lot of these are the 10 pound blocks. You can also get like a smaller filter patch bag size, like a 3 T or 3-3 TL or 3 LT, and those will provide a bag that you can get like a 5 pound 2 7 pound fruiting blocks. You don't have to use these big bags. These are more for like a bulk setting or if you have a bigger sterilizer that is you.