Mushroom Cultivation Q&A with Michael Crowe | Tips from Years in the Grow Room
My name is Michael Crow and I own Southwest Mushrooms. Here we cultivate a wide variety of gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. Uh I started when I was about 15. I just got interested in mushrooms. Uh picked up a couple books and was just really fascinated by the whole process, how something can just start from spores, something that we really can't see with the naked eye into just being able to devour things at such a fast rate and produce these mushrooms.
So I got hooked on it at that age and by the time I was 16, I was growing mushrooms as a hobby and just became really hooked on the process. I mean it was in my thoughts almost 24 hours a day just how do I uh you know what kind of mushrooms can grow and what kind of substrates would be best and and you know I just took that and kept going with it. Two years ago, I uh decided that I wanted to really share this with the community and and uh my family for one. So, I started this business after uh selling some stocks and and cashing out my 401k. So, I I wanted to continue working with mushrooms as a for for life, I guess, and and kind of make it a career path.
I've been doing it for 13 years now, and I'm still learning every day. So, it's something that you'll always uh you'll always be learning something new. Micology is the study of fungi and and basically the growth of different fungi as well as mushrooms. I'm amateur micologist. Uh I am self-taught and self-trained and I do work with micology with what I do.
Anybody can teach themselves and uh you can learn by just doing it and there's a lot of information out there. There's books that you can read. It's something that you can go to school for, too, and get a degree in, but fortunately, you can always teach yourself what you want to know. There's plenty of information out there if you're willing to learn it. People know so little about mushrooms cuz I believe that just up until now, a lot of information about mushrooms is just becoming more widespread knowledge.
And I think there was always a somewhat of a and especially in the western civilization kind of like a a stigma against mushrooms and you know them being you know some of them being poisonous and stuff like that. But now that we're finding out that mushrooms really help our immune systems and are full of nutrition and health enhancing benefits. A lot of people are starting to gear more focus on mushrooms and looking at looking at them in more more ways on how they can help save our environment and clean up a lot of pollution. And there's so much mushrooms can do. People think that all mushrooms are grown in the dark on manure.
Um people don't realize that there is such a wide array of different mushrooms out there and all of them have like a just like a unique purpose on what they what they're able to break down in nature, what they grow on. We have woodloving mushrooms, mushrooms that can grow on insects and microisal species of mushrooms that can connect with like different plants and and trees in the forest and communicate and bridge the gap between communication. There is thousands of different kinds of mushrooms and a lot of uh species have still are still uh to be discovered. There's like over a million different kinds of fungi and uh thousands of different kinds of mushrooms specifically. The difference between molds and mushrooms uh basically mycelium or the fungi which produce mushrooms gives rise to fruit bodies in which those spread the spores and continue the life cycle for the mcelium.
A lot of different molds will self- sporolate basically and they don't produce fruit bodies. So, and the molds grow a lot faster than mushrooms and uh but they are classified as a different kind of fungi. What qualifies that is the the fact that the mcelium is able to give a rise to to mushrooms um producing a fruit body that again produces spores and the spores produce mcelium which produces mushrooms. So, it's just part of the mushroom life cycle. An apple comes from a tree or a plant which has a root system which feeds on soil.
Some say like mushrooms pave the pave the way for all plants and life on earth or not even mushrooms but fungi in general due to the fact that the fungi is able to like break down certain nutrients within the soil and feed it to the plant or the tree um enabling it to have access to higher levels of nutrition. Also giving it CO2. The fungi will breathe in oxygen and exhale CO2 which the plants love. That's a big difference. Um and the the fact that molds and fungi starts from spores rather than seed and they they feed on a a you know different uh different arrays of uh wood of waste and and agricultural waste and byproducts that are produced by the environment.
And a lot of old like plants and leaf litter can eventually be turned into fungi as well. Mushrooms are good for the environment. They're kind of like the immune system for the planet. They're able to just like clean up old things in the environment such as um there's been stories of toxic waste clean up by mushrooms. Mushrooms being able to break down oils, also plastics in the environment.
Without mushrooms, we would be overrun with waste and basically there would not be any life on Earth. Uh, mushrooms are very crucial to the to the environment and ecosystem in many ways. Mushrooms have a wide array of different tastes, textures, and flavors. Some of them being more woodsy and meaty and somewhat smoky to others having like a very seafood-like flavor and texture. Such as lion's mane.
It can be prepared and used to like imitate a crab or lobster dish. And then like an oyster mushroom has a real savory flavor and a lot of people will compare it to like somewhat of a mild poultry like flavor. You can kind of get a lot from mushrooms if you're looking to experiment with different taste and textures. Porttoellas are going to kind of have more of an earthy flavor. Those mushrooms being grown in compost.
They're just kind of basic um for flavor, but a lot of people like them. So, it's to each their own. A lot of mushrooms are really good at boosting the immune function. Um so, they help basically keep you healthy, keep you from getting sick. They're antiviral, antibacterial.
They also have some significant levels of proteins like ratio specifically is used in like chemotherapy and cancer treatments. It's been shown to shrink and terminate tumor growth. A lot of people that have compromised immune systems are able to utilize certain mushrooms like shiitake for instance has been shown to dramatically increase like production of necessary tea helper cells and stuff like that to help fight off infection and and keep your body safe. There's a lot to mushrooms that we're still trying to figure out and it's really cool. Two of the things that are really important about mushrooms is the they contain polysaccharides and betaglucans.
So that in return protects our cells and keeps us healthy. Um there's a lot of research being done on it and it's definitely interesting stuff. The lion's mane powder is very effective. A lot of companies right now are either getting their mushroom powders from like China or we have like bigger companies that are doing like freeze-dried mcelium on grain that's powdered. So they're basically just growing out the mushroom mycelium on like a brown rice substrate and then powdering that and then capsuling it and uh distributing it.
There's a lot of claims out there where people are trying to figure out if the mcelium is more potent than the fruit bodies. And you know, there's a lot of arguments going back and forth. Here we utilize a little bit of the mcelium. Um, we have like an oak based mcelium that grows off of our our block that we'll harvest as well as mostly fruit bodies. Our mix is like 90% fruit bodies.
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And we've just found that the fruit bodies are really potent when we take those. Um, we'll powder them and we can capsule them. Recommended dose is like a half a gram to a gram a day for just like good benefit. You know, the main people that really feel the effects are like like young children and and older people. I had one client that has a 7-year-old daughter that's autistic and she started taking her lion's mane powder and uh she said it was life-changing for them.
The the kid was actually participating in uh activities that they normally didn't participate in. Their communication was better with their parents and uh yeah, basically they said that it was like saving their life. We got some regulars out there that that love our our lion's mane powder and and all of our products really. I found that it's definitely better to just grow your own or or work with somebody that grows it um than buying it from like a big box store cuz a lot of those uh supplements and stuff like that are kind of diluted down and you really don't get much benefit from them except just like starch or rice. A lot of mushrooms have their own unique like health benefits that you can only get from that mushroom.
Like shiitake for instance produces a polysaccharide called lentin and uh that's something that you can only get from shiitake. Oyster mushrooms produce a compound called lovocatin which naturally reduces blood pressure and lowers cholesterol and that's something that can be found in an oyster mushroom. So each mushroom does have their own unique compound. Lion's mane produces horicenos and irony which is able to stimulate nerve growth factor in the brain. Um basically enabling people to recover from traumatic brain injuries, helping people deal with Alzheimer's, dementia, stuff like that in order to keep our brain sharp.
Each mushroom is very unique in what they offer us. And even uh the fact that each mushroom has been assigned like a a material to break down in nature. Certain mushrooms grow off certain kinds of trees. It's kind of kind of crazy how the how nature has assigned each mushroom a like a job in decomposing and stuff like that. With like lion's mane, it's able to it's been reported with a lot of research that it's shows that it can balance mood, help deal with stress levels.
Same with reishi the cognitive function. It's able to like repair like the neural network in the brain and help with that. So you can have a clearer, more focused uh more focused like brain function. Well, when growing fungi, you have to really take a lot of care into making sure that you're only growing the fungi that you desire. When growing plants, you can really get free and work, you know, in the dirt and get your hands dirty.
Same with fungi, too, except that you need a sterile space to be able to perform like necessary work to really get the beginning stages uh going. A clean room or or lab work is necessary when you really want to really want to expand uh the mushroom culture to the maximum potential. Yeah, with with fungi it's totally different. You're growing out spores, you're germinating spores on petri dishes, you're growing out the mcelium, you're doing transfers into like sterilized grain substrates as opposed to soils. Totally different process.
A lot of people that will get into try to get into growing mushrooms because they've grown like a lot of plants before think that, you know, it'll be basically like kind of similar, but it's definitely totally different. Plants will breathe in CO2 and exhale oxygen as to where mushrooms will inhale oxygen and breathe out CO2. It's definitely a different environment, different controls, the humidity needs to be high, uh the substrate's different. Um it's just a totally different process. So the mushroom consists or depending on what kind of mushroom you're looking at.
Um basically it's a it's made up of a like a kitan like material and it has a cell wall that's very thick. Um and it basically consists of like a fruing body. Um usually they'll have like a stem and a cap. Um underneath the cap will be the gills and the gills are responsible for like producing all the spores that the mushroom will utilize to continue the life cycle. Um certain species of mushroom there's like gild species there's tooth fungi like the lion's mane it produces these teeth that would in return will produce the spores for that mushroom rai that's a polyore mushroom so there's going to be little holes that produce spores and those will shoot out spores as well fungi is just special in my eyes um just because it's it's I mean it could be special to everybody but for me it really remains special just because of the whole process that I'm really fascinated and taken back by the the whole mushroom life cycle.
And we could all learn from from fungi. Um how they're able to take what they need from the environment and then also give back more than what they've taken. Um, and then as far as nutrition goes, I mean, they're amazing in addition to our diets and and you know, there's a lot of uh cool new things that are being discovered about fungi that, you know, could be new new medicines being discovered and just new ways to clean up the environment that a lot of, you know, a lot of EPAs and stuff like that are taking notice that mushrooms could be, you know, the answer to a lot of problems for for our environment, too. I think they're they're really special organisms that have been here for quite a long time. I mean, we share a lot of the same DNA as fungi or mushrooms.
They're more closely related to to animals than plants. The difference between us and mushrooms is we develop these cellular sacks in which we can break down our food and absorb them. Mushrooms, the mcelial network will basically excrete certain enzymes onto the the waste product and which allows the mcelium to break it down and reabsorb the nutrients back through the the cell walls. Depending on the species, you can play with the humidity. Um, depending on what stage of the of the life cycle you're at with your mushroom, but usually towards the the beginning of the fruing cycle, we try to keep the humidity um upwards to the 90 percentile range.
Towards like the end of the crop, towards harvest time, I try to drop it a little bit towards like 80%. That way, we get a longer shelf life and a mushroom that's not too overly wet when it goes in the fridge. Anywhere between 80 to 90% is a good range for mushroom growth. Um, but yeah, it just takes a little bit of understanding the mushrooms that you're growing and being able to tell when they need the, you know, when they need more humidity and when they need less. We grow mushrooms that in nature you'd find them growing right in the forest right off the sides of different trees.
So we try to give these mushrooms a little bit of light stimulation kind of just similar to what you'd get in like a shaded part of the forest. So just a little bit of blue spectrum lighting, nothing crazy. And that basically gives our mushrooms the pigment the color they need and it helps them grow in the right direction. It kind of goes in a circle. I mean they start out as spores.
Two compatible spores will mate and form myelium. From there, mcelium will spread and devour whatever food source that it's working with. Once it completely devours all of its food source, the mushrooms are signal or the mcelium signals to produce mushrooms in order to continue the life cycle. So mushrooms job is to make spores to basically keep the life cycle going. I'm using oak hardwood sawdust or alder hardwood sawdust.
And in addition for like extra nutrition, we uh supplement with like some organic wheat brand or various organic seed holes to get the most out of our mushrooms depending on which ones we're growing. Um you could grow mushrooms just on straight sawdust with probably just boiling water and really didn't need you don't need it like sterilize. The sterilization comes into play because we are supplementing with higher nutrition that in turn involves lab work and stuff like that. But we're getting really good yields uh from that. Oyster mushrooms are known to produce very heavy levels of spores.
So, you'd want like a mask that can basically filter out all the spores and protect your lungs from inhaling too many. When working with mushrooms for a prolonged period of time in the grow rooms, the spores can collect in your lungs and basically make it harder to breathe. You can even develop an allergy from the spores, giving you a really stuffy nose. Um sometimes like a scratchy throat. Um it's definitely not, you know, you want to wear your mask when you're working with mushrooms all day.
If I'm going in the grow room for just a second to do like a presentation or something, I I might not wear it. But for the most part, we always wear our masks when we're in our grow rooms, especially during a big harvest day cuz the spores are just ridiculous. And uh you definitely want to, you know, I want to keep working with mushrooms and I don't want to develop an allergy to them. So masks are important. So, if you plan on doing it, I' I'd recommend a mask.
Will mushrooms grow in your lungs? Yeah. No, they won't. Um, yeah. So, the spores won't be able to germinate in the lungs and and colonize your lungs, but they just uh they're just hard for your licky.
So, once they do get in your lungs, it's really hard for them to get, you know, get on get unstuck. Um, you'll you'll experience some cough and stuffy nose and just not pleasant. It's almost like a mild flu. It's very important to get mushrooms that are as close to you as possible as far as being grown locally. A lot of mushrooms that you'll find, you know, they might have traveled a good distance to get to you.
And, you know, 2 week old mushrooms compared to fresh fresh mushrooms are lower in nutritional value. Uh they aren't going to have as long of a shelf life. A lot of mushrooms are coming from China. Uh 80% of the world's mushrooms are grown there. And there's been studies shown that mushrooms that come from overseas have been sprayed with sodium phosphates to make them appear fresher upon arriving.
So, I'd recommend like trying to find a local grower in your area um and getting mushrooms from them, making sure that you know their growing practices and that they're growing good quality mushrooms. Growing your own mushrooms is a very fun process and I think everybody should at least give it a try if they're interested. It's something that we don't really learn about in school. I think it's going to be a cool thing for a lot of kids. It's a great project for classrooms.
If you're looking to try your own mushrooms, there's grow kits out there. You can literally do it on just a countertop or just a desk in your bedroom. Growing a grow kit or a little bit of mushrooms doesn't take much at all. It's when you're trying to grow a ton of mushrooms consistently where it does take a little bit more tentive care and and planning. My favorite is the lion's mane mushroom.
I I love that mushroom because it's culinary. It's a it's a delight. And then medicinal, it's it's something that I can use uh every day and and feel sharp and and keep focused as I get older. I want to stay sharp and, you know, keep keep everything going. Also, I like the ratio mushroom for, you know, just utilizing it to keep my immune system healthy and uh just basically keep from getting sick while while running the mushroom farm.
And for eating, I I do I do also like the oyster mushrooms as well. They're so versatile and it feels like you could just add them into any kind of dish to get an enhanced enhanced flavor out of your dish. A lot of people do are blown away at the fact that mushrooms do grow fast once they once they arise from your substrate. It's usually about once the once the first mushroom appears. It's usually about within 5 to 6 days that we're harvesting them.
A lot of people don't realize that uh mushrooms grow like they double in size every day. And a lot of people are just like just kind of I don't know. It's kind of crazy. Feels like we're teaching a lot of people about mushrooms that we deal with at like local farmers markets and stuff like that. A lot of people don't know about the different kinds of mushrooms that there's polyore mushrooms that there's teethed mushrooms other than just like your normal mushroom that just has a cap and stem.
There's mushrooms that look like all colors, all shapes, and all sizes. So, that's pretty interesting. A lot of people don't don't know that about mushrooms. Turning your hobby into a p or like it's definitely I'm I'm I've learned a lot since doing that. Um it can be a hard step because you are going to take something that you're very passionate about and that's a hobby and you're going to turn it into a business.
You're going to have to have a businessman or businesswoman approach to that. Now, you know, at the beginning I I'm so passionate about every step of the process that I wanted to do everything. It's like I got to make every bag. I gotta not, you know, I gotta do everything. Harvest every block.
And then once you just start growing and you got to look at it in a business aspect and it's like this is a business now. It just happens to be my passion and my hobby, but I got to, you know, kind of let go of some things. And, you know, I brought on a team and started training people to do stuff that I used to do. And that was a little hard at first, but that was like the best thing I could have done because, you know, uh, and it allowed me to do more things with the business. And it's a privilege to be able to wake up every day and and go to work for do do something that I'm very passionate about.
And you know, it doesn't ever feel like a a real like it doesn't feel like I'm really working. I mean, it I'm working for I'm caretaker for the mushrooms, but other than that, you know, it's it's great. If you have a passion and you want to turn it into a business, then, you know, don't let anything stop you. You can only try, you know. I mean, it's growing pretty fast.
A lot of people. It just started with like the farmers markets and everybody just being really amazed by our quality of mushrooms and from there like chefs started asking us about mushrooms. So we started dealing with chefs and then from there the distribution companies started looking at us. So it's just been like one step at a time from farmers markets to chefs to now distribution and then now our mushrooms are making it to grocery stores and restaurants all over the state. We're growing at a fast rate and we're just noticing that we, you know, there's so much demand that, you know, it's hard to keep up.
We're also the biggest mushroom cultivator in in the state. And, uh, there's not much mushroom cultivation out here or any. I mean, that's what I noticed when starting the business is where's a mushroom farm that I can go work for, you know, where can I work with mushrooms out here? And couldn't find anything. So I ended up doing this to to create jobs, I guess, for for me and anybody that really wants to work with mushrooms.
Cultivating fungi and mushrooms is like a balance between science and art. One, you got to understand the science of it. And two, the art of it is basically being able to execute your your crop the right way. The setup, the just the design of of how how you're going to grow out the mushrooms from the fruing room to placement of your of your blocks to all that. You can really get creative with uh growing mushrooms. And I think it's just like a marriage between science and art.