Mushroom Farming: Oak Pellet and Wheat Bran Substrate Blocks
We are putting the oak pellets into the mixer to start our, uh, production day for using the wheat bran substrate. Usually, when we use a wheat bran substrate, we're going to be doing shiitake from this. This pretty much the only mushroom we grow off of the wheat brand, and the wheat brands in these two blue containers. We'll put in probably like three quarters of the way of the mix. We put that in because if it gets wet, it turns really sandy and nasty, and it doesn't mix well.
And this giant bag was once filled with wheat brand, and now we're just trying to empty and get it out of here. So today we're just gonna make a wheat brand mix for the substrate. We have a meter in measures in liters how much water we put in here, and then, uh, the back side of the mixer, water comes out of the smaller holes. Some of them get clogged up, so we take a little pair of scissors. We usually try to put, uh, the majority, not the majority, but a good chunk of the substrate on the left side of this mixer, just because the water pressure is a lot stronger on the left side and kind of fizzles out once it gets towards the end.
And so we found that the substrate on the left side of the mixer usually gets hydrated way faster than the right side. Now we just let that run. Probably take about five to ten minutes to fill up to where it needs to be. We'll turn it on, start adding the wheat brand. Looks pretty cool too.
It's super like light, super light, yeah. And that'll be going in once once water starts coming out of this door. It's like the visual aid to let us know when it's time to start mixing. That means the water's built up on the bottom enough so where all that oak is going to be soaked in properly down there. We got to get the top to the bottom to make sure it's all evenly evenly soaked.
You don't want it turning into mud. You want it to turn into like a really nice soft like dirt texture. If you put too much water in too soon with the wrong kind of material in here, it actually becomes a problem, and you get less material out of your mix. It becomes way too saturated with water and wheat bran, and the soybeans specifically don't respond well to like direct contact with water unless that's how you want it. But you can see there's some residue from the last time we made the substrate.
Typically, if we were going to go from a wheat bran to soybean day, we would give it a nice power wash, make sure there's no traces of wheat bran left in here. But last time we made a mix, it was a wheat brand day, and so the residuals on the wall or even a little bit at the bottom, um, won't won't mess with the mix at all. And it's not like you couldn't grow mushrooms off of like an oak and wheat bran substrate with a little bit of like trace of, uh, soybean in there, but we don't like to. We like to keep it pure wheat bran oak wood. Sterility isn't like an absolute necessity at this point, only because it goes through a very thorough like sterilization process, not pasteurization.
Even so, pasteurization still leaves some room for bacterial growth, whereas like if something's absolutely sterilized like we do our blocks, I mean you could put something bacterial in this mix and it'll eventually get killed through the heat penetrating the blocks. So we wash our hands. We keep clean. You know, we can touch the mixer with our hand. That's not going to mess anything up.
You know, it's not a point of return. If it wears the lab, if you touch something without gloves on the lab, you kind of have to like shut down, readjust, clean everything properly, and get back to it. Can't even go into The lab with a dirty shirt, like if I was going to be doing this all day, we'll end up scooping all the substrate into bags. If I was going to be doing this all day, there's zero chance I'd be allowed to go into the lab to like finish any kind of work in there, just due to like the dust particles on my shirt. If there is anything bacterial on me or airborne that landed on me, it's potential to get into the bags that we're trying to inoculate.
And so there's a part, there's a part of the job that's like no room for exceptions with them being sterile, like keeping the workspace sterile. But this pro this point right here, it's not the utmost concern, but we do take, you know, the basic strides to make sure we're not putting anything in the mix on purpose. We wash our hands always with some clean clothes on and just get to it. So during this time, we would usually be doing something that needed to be done, but right now everything's handled, so we just look at this and stare at it and enjoy the small break we get before we start bagging and packing. But with wheat bran specifically, it's just like the mix can't be any more perfect than in the mixer.
I don't know what happens like when it's mixing together and getting like, I, I really don't know what happens to make it so perfect, but it's like really nice and broken down, and it ends up just like looking like sand, like really nice sand. Yeah. So these are oak condensed super, like they're hard pressed oak pellets. So this is essentially just oak, uh, dust pressed super hard into these pellets. They fall into like, uh, like I said, like a mud almost, you know, it starts here, rub it in your hand a little bit, and it starts to become like, like again, like a soft dirt, exactly how you want it.
You want it all to look like that. And so once it's hydrated and the friction of the mixture rubbing up against the mixing blades, rubbing against each other and the dry pellets, it'll just break down, and it'll all look exactly like that. Our provider Seth at Mushroom Media Online, I guess I was a unwarranted free plug. Congratulations. He started this business as a barbecue wood pellet business, and we were the first of, you know, his kind to provide oak or any kind of wood pellets for mushroom growth.
And he really liked the idea and then started a separate company for the mushroom pellets, or, you know, wood pellets before mushrooms specifically, but same ones as barbecue pellets. So you see that the water's starting to trickle out now. So now I'll turn the mixer on for like about two seconds or so. Okay, and we'll let that run for another minute or so. And now all that wet stuff from the bottom got pulled up to the top, and now you mean you can see it's all hydrated stuff up here.
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We'll give that stuff on the bottom, that dry stuff, an opportunity to make contact with the water that's pooling up down there. Another 30 seconds or so, I'll flip it on, and then it'll continuously run until we're done with the day. We'll put all the excess water that's spilled out during right back in there too, to make sure that we have an accurate amount of water in there once it's all done. And now the water will stop that's in the next minute or so. And you can see now it's already, so it already happened.
Most of the mixture has been pulled to the middle. The left side of our mixer waters so efficiently that if we did this from the beginning again, it'd be like a big pool of water on this left side, and you don't want the wheat bran specifically sitting in that water for any amount of time at all. So we try to keep the puddles on the sides non-existent. That's how I Know to put more wheat bran in at that time is when it starts puddling on the left side a little bit. A lot of trial and error to make this process work exactly like we want it, and we've had this locked down for a pretty long time, and now it's just a matter of making sure you don't let the water run too long.
I know there's no chance it's even close. Probably halfway. Yeah, literally, literally halfway to where we need to be. Let this run for another 40 liters, 50 liters of water, and we'll start adding in our wheat bran. And so, during this time, I'll put the water back in, and then we'll start weighing out the, and we do need to put a specific amount of pounds in here for this amount of mix that we have.
So this looks like we could probably get about 15 pounds in here. First bucket in there. All right, so now that the um substrate has had a chance to marry, I would say, and like mix really well, it's like the perfect um, I don't know what you call like uh texture. Yeah. Good job.
A perfect texture, and we're gonna start putting it into these bins, and when it goes into the bins, we load it to the table, and I'll scoop it into bags and make sure it's the proper weight, and we do that until it's done. Yeah. All right, ready? Push this down, and the door comes up. Close it.
Lock it up. And it's the point now where it's mixed well enough where now we're just preserving the life of the mixer. Like it doesn't need to mix anymore. Now lift using proper technique. Grab one of our substrate bags.
Use this bagger that Mike had put together. Mike built this out of just an idea, and it is the best thing by hand. I recommend you get some PVC piping, some ducting connectors, or whatever this is. Yeah, right? Isn't it like a wall mount?
Looks like it. It's perfect. Man's a wizard. Yeah, and then three like hefty scoops of these, or this uh substrate, is going to be about what we need every time. A little more, little less.
Yeah. Tiny more in there. Pat will come over here, fold it up, and stage it, and once we are done with all of the mix for the day, we'll take these folded bags and load them into the substrate or the sterilizers. In comparison to the um soybean substrate, this is so smooth and like, you know how I said earlier, it's going to look like it's like sand almost? It's perfect.
There's no like uh chunks of oak in there. There might be here and there, but typically not. It's broken down perfectly. 10 pounds, 10 pounds in this bag, looks like way more substrate than 10 pounds of the soybean mixture in this bag. It's because of how well it breaks down.
Every little piece of the oak mixes with the wheat bran, and there's like no piece, like chunky pieces, making this like all compressed and nasty. It's just like literal sand, and if you could just take sand in your hand, and if it's a little wet, pretty much form it into anything you want, that's exactly the consistency you want. The wheat bran substrate. Yeah, it's fluffy. It's fluffy for sure.
And again, I'm not really even sure what wheat bran is, but I know it's light and it mixes really, really well, and pretty much exclusively used for shiitake. We used straw, straw pellets for an experiment that we did, and the straw pellets were so fluffy that we couldn't even sterilize them all together. Made like 200 bags. Yeah, and so it really depends on what substrate you're working with. Usually, when we work with the wheat bran, a recipe like we are today, it will be on the higher end, probably closer to 180, but when we do um soybean and oak, it'll be more like 160, maybe even 150s, but yeah, somewhere in that area, 150 to.
180. And as we get down to the, like, the middle of the mix, it actually becomes a little more fluffy because it's not as hydrated as the top would be. And so the weight of the bag will adjust as well here, probably in the next, like, two or three bins. We'll probably start making the bags closer to, like, closer to 9.5 or below rather than 9.5 or above, just because you kind of have to adjust, and you don't want any of the bags, like, popping open in the sterilizer. And the wheat brand so fluffy that if a bag comes unfolded in the sterilizer, the pressure will make the wheat brand spill out onto the bottom of the sterilizer.
It's just a big mess that no one wants to deal with. Nope. Well, actually, I can't deal with. I'm literally too short to deal with that problem. It's pretty nice, actually.
I can't even load the sterilizers at all. I'll fall in. Um, and then we'll do this again. So a full day is two two batches of this, and, um, usually we'll have three people on on this job. Um, today is just one of those off days where we have less, which is me and Pat here.
Yeah, there's no Pat, and, uh, yeah, we're just gonna have to muscle it out and put our League of Legends gaming on hold for a little while, dude. And we're just gonna stay here and get all 160 of these bags made and loaded. It makes a big difference when one less person isn't here for this process, just because folding obviously isn't, like, the quickest thing ever, but, like, I can bag bags as fast as two people can fold. No, faster. But, um, when it's just me and Pat or me and anyone one other person here, uh, doing this, it's just like, uh, this takes longer, you know?
So I'll do, like, upwards. I'll probably do, like, 900 scoops today with my left arm in a full day, right? What is it, like, 160 times not that many three? It's another 500, whatever. I'm not here, man.
I'm not here to crunch numbers. You're not a math teacher. And most of the reason why two we don't do this process in the baggers, like I said earlier, if the wheat brand comes in contact with water directly, it kind of turns into a consistency that we're not looking for at all, and it doesn't mix in as well. And so, you know, small small adjustment when we do the wheat brand days. A little more manual labor, but same same amount of bags, same mushrooms came out of it.
I don't think any of this comes into mind if you ask a normal person, like, hey, when someone says, like, I work at a mushroom farm, what does that make you think of? I don't think they ever go to probably a good a well-lit warehouse, a couple of machines, and some, like, humidifiers. Like, well, maybe. I don't know, but I don't think, um, all the steps are considered, at least at least people don't know all the steps. And, uh, because I know nothing or knew nothing about mushrooms, um, before we're coming here to work with Mike, and, you know, I still have quite a big, like, knowledge gap of the mushroom lover, but it's effective.
Like, I don't know any more or less than most people who work with mushrooms, and we're growing some beautiful mushrooms. So it's just the right information, I guess, goes a long way, you know? So I won't mess up this mix ever, you know what I mean? Like, if you ask somebody to make a substrate mix for mushrooms for shiitake, the majority of society is not going to know what that what that is, but my little pocket of knowledge allows us to make good mushrooms without Mike having to worry about someone messing it up, you know? Yeah, and plus farming usually isn't indicative of, like, being indoors.
It's usually, like, a farm, right, when you say, like, I'm a something Farmer, you don't go indoors first ever if you don't think it's like this, but in Phoenix, it's the only option if you want to do it year round. Yeah, so you want to get it nice and compact, so usually you just slam it on the floor three or four times. Uh, it just helps to keep it packed and loading the Bubbas. When we say Bubbas, it's not me. I don't sterilize these things, so they're just standing over breathing after eating Hot Cheetos.
Yeah, no, the Bubbas are the sterilizers, because these take about 20 hours to sterilize, so before we could run the Bubbas and have another round of blocks in there within the three-day period between making it, sterilizing it, unloading it, and inoculating it. And then now that we've acquired a few more, we can come back tomorrow and do the same exact thing, and then when this batch of blocks are done sterilizing, we can just plug in the other three and start that process immediately rather than waiting for it to cool down. Yeah, and, uh, so yeah, we're pretty, we're set up to be super, um, efficient, efficient, yeah. You know, we're pretty, we're pretty ready for whatever now, yeah. A couple days of production and a couple days of shaking, shaking and staging, yeah.
Shaking them takes all the energy. I gotta get a Bang before I come to work. I gotta come prepared, dude, on the shake days. About four hours after these are done sterilizing is when they're, like, still, like, hot but not too hot to work with. That's the sweet spot for shaking up the bags and inoculating them with grain.
Yeah, everything breaks up because when you take them out and they cool off, they like harden, and it's sometimes it's really hard to like break the blocks up safely without like ripping the bag. And if you get them hot, and they're still like, you know, like a loose in the bag, it's way easier. I mean, night and day easier to break it up and inoculate it. I say four more. Four more loads, you