Massive Mushrooms in the Grow Tent
Really not much going on in here today. There's a couple couple blocks that can be harvested at some point. We have some king trumpet mushrooms, and we also have some of these blue oysters going in here. And this is a new strain of blue oyster. It's actually a strain from Nevada that does does really well in supposedly high CO2 environments, but it also produces just a really nice meaty caps, and then you get these nice alternative blue colors with the mushroom as well.
So I think it just adds a nice nice bit of variety to the mushroom lineup, and it's just a really aggressive producer as well. We also have some chestnut mushrooms kind of spitting out like a third flush, so these are certain decrease in the amount of mushrooms that they are producing. So after this flush, we'll go ahead and get rid of these guys. I'm just doing a basic walkthrough in here to just see what needs to be harvested, and anything that is going to get harvested, I'm just going to put it right out here. So I'll just get my scale set up, make sure I have my wax paper placed in there, and then these trumpet mushrooms, just really easy harvest.
You just grab it right by the base. It just twists right off, and from there I could take like a scissors or just a blade and just kind of trim trim off any of the base. And the same thing with this, just got a cluster of a few of them. With that, you can kind of just kind of peel them down one by one, make them easier to weigh out and sell, especially if you're taking them to like a farmer's market. Usually people don't buy a bunch a big cluster of them at once, so and that will just kind of trim them down.
And then, yeah, we see the sawdust kind of attached. That just gets cut right off. A couple more trumpets. So we have some nice nice bigger king trumpets. These are really popular with like chefs.
I found they like them bigger than normal. And then the smaller ones that we grow, we kind of like these ones go good for like people at the farmers markets. Even this is a little big, um, but people at the farmers markets enjoy the smaller king trumpets because that way they the bigger ones usually weigh about a pound or more. So most people like to, for us especially, like to get a bit of variety from our booth. So we'll give them like a pound of three or four different strains together.
So that's why we like the smaller trumpet mushrooms for those mushroom medleys and those pounds that people pick up. It's a super dense mushroom. It's nice and heavy, so it's not a problem getting a five pound case weight out without damaging any mushrooms or trying to shove them in there. And we'll just clean up, put this aside, and move on to these oyster mushrooms right here. So these ones are are easier harvests.
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You just grab the cluster and just kind of wiggle it off. It just pops right up. Not much cleaning is necessary for this mushroom, so we could just load it straight into the the boxes. And with these mushrooms, the oyster species, we typically do like a three and a half pound box since the mushrooms are kind of more loose and airy and can be more fragile than some of the other species, such as shiitake, king trumpet, all those denser ones, even lion's mane. So just have like a nice three and a half pound box just like that.
Yeah, this is a super aggressive strain that really pins quickly. Usually within 10 days of inoculation, this one starts to pin, and this is kind of like some new a new fruiting for us. Actually, it's our first time testing it out. Man, I really like it. It seems like it has a nice little a little bit of stem, but in a really nice cap ratio, stem to.
Cap ratio. So, yeah, we had what, two, four, five blocks there, each of them producing about two and a half to three pounds, so it's a really productive strain, which is good for especially smaller farms where space is everything. Then with the oyster blocks, you can kind of get rid of any of these aborts and smaller little pieces of mushroom tissue and debris. That way, you can kind of reduce any risk of contamination as the mushroom fruiting block kind of prepares for its next flush or crop of mushrooms. So we'll get about two to typically these blocks will produce about five flushes of mushrooms.
So after every harvest, within seven to ten days, another crop of mushrooms will be produced from these blocks. But since, uh, we like to get the most out of our substrate, we'll just get rid of them after the second flush. That way, we can kind of maximize the output of the grow rooms. I'm just trying to harvest these things at the peak harvest. I could let these mushrooms go for another day.
In doing so, I would get a lot more weight, but also I wouldn't get as a durable mushroom fruit body. The caps, we could still see the very edges are slightly enrolled, so curled in. As they mature, these will kind of fan upwards and the caps can kind of start curling out, and also the color will start to fade, and you'll start getting like a light grayish mushroom, even a silver, and you get a lot more of a fragile mushroom. I would say the flavor is not even as good, and also the shelf life just goes straight down the drain, and, you know, the mushrooms just don't look as good after a few days. So harvesting your mushrooms at the optimum time is definitely crucial for maintaining like a super high quality crop and super high quality product that people are going to enjoy time and time again.
We have a second flush chestnut block, uh, so let's just put out A first flush in a second, and with this strain, I found that the second flushes are really good, um, almost as good as the first. We're usually able to get almost two pounds off these things. Definitely a mushroom that you want to leave in the grow room for multiple flushes because you're going to keep getting a good harvest off of it. Harvest these like that. The chestnut produces these nice clusters of multiple mushrooms.
I mean, usually anywhere between 50 to 100 mushrooms in a single cluster. It's a super super cool exotic mushroom. It's in the fully odo family, so it's related to like the nameko mushrooms, and it's a, it's one that we like to grow for our exotic mixed case, which is just like a mix of different strains that we sell to chefs and restaurants. It has a good shelf life as well. I've noticed that the mushroom usually lasts like 10 days or more in the fridge, so you can kind of pass that on to your.
Customers and they enjoy it because it lasts quite a while really not much going on in here we have some black pearl king trumpets uh growing and some lion's mane lion's mane won't be ready to harvest until they towards the end of the week but we are doing like a side fruiting with a new lion's mane strain this one's from washington state and it grows these nice icicle-like elongations and it gives you more of that tooth or teeth look with the lion's mane some of them kind of give off more of a pom-pom like look when you when i first put it in the grow room it has a sort of a pinkish hue to it as it kind of starts to mature that pinkish color starts to go away and it starts to produce these nice teeth and then over the next couple days these teeth will start to elongate and the mushroom will actually start to whiten up a lot more too and we'll start to harvest it At that point, we just have one one of these Black Pearl King Oysters that are ready to harvest for today.
It's a nice little oyster strain that produces these beautiful clusters of king trumpet but oyster looking mushrooms. Kind of show them at different stages. Here's some I just started pinning within the last couple days, and it really starts off nice. You see tons of healthy little mushrooms shooting right out the sawdust block, and within the next three days, these will reach full maturity, and the caps will kind of start to open up, and we want to catch them right here at this point, just like the oyster. If we let this go for another day or two, we'll get a lot bigger of a mushroom, but also these caps will turn very, uh, kind of turn up and flatten, and then they'll also lose this beautiful rich color that we see here, that nice pigment, and the shelf life will just go away, so they just won't be that beautiful mushroom that you see in front of you.
I hear that same mushroom is after another day or so, and probably by tomorrow, this will look like that. For harvesting this mushroom, just like any oyster, it just pops right off of the substrate, and you're just left with this beautiful cluster of beautiful mushrooms. We're growing the mushrooms right out the sides of the blocks, so we just put the block up, slice it, and mushrooms come scented right out the side of the block, and it's a really beautiful way of fruiting these mushrooms because you get really nice formations, and kind of like you would in nature when they grow right off the sides of trees, mushrooms are able to grow in like shelf-like clusters that really present themselves well, and they really just look great. And another way that we can grow them is just like a simple top fruit. You just put the mushroom block down and fruit right out the bottom, and this makes it, it's just another way you can grow them just to get different formations and different, uh, looks from your from the same mushroom realistically, and that can, uh, just add some diversity to your boxes or to your mushrooms in general.
Um, but during the winter months, we can kind of focus on more cold weather production on this strain and a few others like the king trumpet. Humidity likes to be anywhere between 85 to like 90 percent for this strain, especially at the beginning when you first cut your blocks and load them into your grow room, try to get that humidity as high as possible for the first few days, kind of like simulate the rainfall that you would get in the forest or in nature right before mushrooms start to appear a few days after. So yeah, usually in nature, it'll rain really good, then within like a few days to a week later, usually like a few days, you go out and you start looking and the mushrooms are just popping up, so that's kind of what we do here, nice rainfall-like environment for a few days, and then at that point, the humidity's kind of dialed back a little bit as the mushrooms start to gradually mature, and then right up until harvest, we kind of kick the humidity down to the low 80s, high 70s, and that'll allow the mushroom to get ready for cold storage.
So when you harvest them, when they've kind of dried out a little bit, it makes the mushroom last a little bit longer in the fridge, and you don't have like a wet mushroom going into your fridge, your cold storage. Luckily for this mushroom, the stem is actually sought after. So usually with oyster mushrooms, you try to keep the O2 levels high because we want to get as big of a cap as possible and less stem, since the stem for the oyster mushroom isn't really as usable as like a stem for like a trumpet-style mushroom, where the you get a really tender meaty flavor and a chef. Can kind of create some really cool things out of that. It's one of my favorite oyster mushrooms to grow, um, and also because, like, the shelf life's good and the mushroom holds up really well.
Also, the yields are really good. Usually on, like, a 10 pound bag, usually averaging about three pounds on the first flush. So that's a great producer and all around great strain, you.