Mushroom Final Flushes and Sterile Substrate
So, yeah, we're in the one of the grow tents here, and this one is, uh, actually about to be restocked. It's acts, uh, most of the blocks in here have produced several flushes, so at this point, we can harvest them this week and kind of get everything out of here. We have a little bit of turkey tail growing. Uh, this has actually been, uh, fruiting for a couple months now. We could see we made some incisions right here.
Actually, I made some incisions right here, and we have a nice little turkey tail like formation starting to come out. So, turkey tells a nice medicinal polypore mushroom, similar to reishi as being a polypore. Instead of having gills underneath, there's a bunch of little pores, and that's where actually the spores are produced and distributed from. That helps continue the life cycle of the mushroom. This is a super medicinal mushroom renowned for its anti-cancer properties.
It produces a unique compound that is aids in cancer treatment. A lot of people like utilizing it in conjunction with, like, chemotherapy and stuff like that. It's been used for quite a while, and it grows all over the place. It's a very prolific mushroom and very aggressive as far as the mycelium goes. I've seen it colonized substrates usually within five to seven days.
It's one of the more aggressive ones. We've also cut the top off, and we have a little bit of turkey tail mushrooms growing right here at the top. Not much that it's producing at this point, but still something worth worth looking at. It also produces unique colors. The Latin name is Trimedes versicolor because it'll usually produce a bunch of unique colorations as it grows.
So, yeah, we could just see, like, different colors of browns and stuff like that, and in here we have some turkey tail growing that has a unique darker color. So, I'm kind of just experimenting with it. It's not a mushroom that I grow too often or much at all. So then, we also have some older reishi mushrooms. This is, like, a Ganoderma cecile, and this is a definitely ready to harvest.
And this was actually a bigger block at one point. The ganodermas are just super aggressive digesters, so they're able to really make the most of the substrate. As we can see with some of the other strains here, we have some lucidum. So, this is fully mature and ready to harvest. The mycelium has totally digested the substrate, which was once a tight fitting block, and now the bag loosely hangs around it, and we can see the mushrooms have really gotten the most use out of the substrate.
This has been growing for about five months, five to six months. So, at this stage, we're ready to harvest. Also, we have some second and third flush lines man. After I top freedom, we fold the bag back down and just make a nice incision, and we can still get copious amounts of lion's mane all the way up to the third or fourth flush. It really gets the most out of the substrate and produces for for quite a while, and it's definitely a popular mushroom, producing these nice teeth-like elongations.
Instead of having a traditional cap and stem, it brings out a wonderful texture when used in dishes. Some people like to saute it in a garlic butter and kind of use it as, like, a crab or lobster substitute, but it's also renowned for the medicinal benefits. It helps in aids in cognitive function and stuff like that. So, there's a lot of research out on this mushroom, but I just think it's fun to grow and just a beauty to look at and a beauty to work with. One of my favorites.
There's some side fruited lines man. Another thing you can do is, after harvesting, you can kind of just lay the block back down, and it'll just keep producing mushrooms right out the side. Another cool way to grow it, whatever the preference is, it'll it'll work. Here, we just have some lions made just different. Stages, and these are probably just a couple days old.
Over the next couple days, we'll really start to see these develop, and the icicle teeth like formations will begin to elongate, and uh, they'll be ready to harvest within four to five days. So, just another mushroom that we love growing. See all the battle scars from the failed attempts of getting it perfectly in the door. Right now, we're just taking the bags, the sterile sealed bags from the lab into the other warehouse so we can stack them on the pallet, wrap them up, prepare them for shipping in a big truck. So, we got like 200 more of these to stack on the pallet, but working here since day one has taught me to appreciate this process, and like, the process has gotten, I mean, a thousand times easier since day one.
Like, when I got here, when we're hand mixing this stuff, like I said, Mike is just like a different specimen of human. Like, his strength, like what strength you need to perform a task doesn't matter to Mike, I swear to God. Like, it's insane. So, when I got here helping Mike do his stuff, I'm like, dude, this is way too hard for a normal person, like the way he's doing things, you know? And even when we were mixing at first, I asked him, I said, is there an easier way to do this, dude?
Like, is there like a industrial egg beater we could use for this? I think the legit asked question I asked him, and he laughed, you know. He's like, no, but they make like, like concrete mixers, like pretty big concrete mixtures that you can just roll around. And I'm like, can we please get that? And so we got it, and through my inability to keep up with Mike, that like catapulted us pretty pretty far forward to like producing way more in a day.
And then the idea of the concrete mixer just eventually turns the idea of an industrial mixer like we have now, and now we have that, along with the bagger for different substrate, and the process is still as complex as ever, but the steps require less strain, I guess. Way more output, same amount of like time as far as effort goes, but like physical output, way less. And that's what I'm about, honestly. Minimal effort, maximum output, that's how I live my life. And okay, so far, I'll come back and get this table, and let's do it again.
Yeah, we're just uh, getting all the compiled onto pallets so it can be hauled off in a truck. So yeah, it's our all-star wrapper. The blocks are pretty big, so I figured it's easier just to put them on pallets and wrap them instead of trying to put them in boxes. So this, this way for now. This is actually our first time doing a big order of sterile substrate.
We've done uh, big orders of sterile grain spawn, and those are like the six or seven pound bags, so those usually fit pretty nicely in boxes, and we can just stack them on pallets and have them shipped out. But yeah, it's really nice to be able to help people out like this.