Mushroom Overgrowth and Grain Spawn Incubation
We're in the spawn tent right now, and a lot of this spawn is, uh, fully colonized and ready to ship. Spawn is actually made in the newer spawn laboratory next door, so we can autoclave the spawn and inoculate it and move it over to this tent to kind of keep it in incubation and get it ready to be used in our own production processes, or send out some of our spawn to anybody that orders online. We have some chestnut spawn. A lot of this stuff will come from, like, a grain to grain transfer. We'll inoculate a bag of sterile grain with a Petri dish agar wedge, and then at that point, it'll fully colonize.
Once it reaches full colonization, each bag will actually inoculate 10 additional grain spawn bags, and those will get labeled as G2, and these G2s will be used in the inoculation of a sterile substrate, which is in this case oak hardwood based substrate blends that we use here. And some of the strains aggressively colonized, like the Reishi mushroom. You can see a nice thick white mycelium, and it's actually ready to be used for inoculation. If you let the ratios go too long, the mycelium toughens up really, uh, like kind of like leather, and it becomes very hard to break up. So this is a mushroom species that you want to inoculate as soon as it reaches full colonization.
Otherwise, it's going to be a little bit more difficult. Then, of course, we have just some oyster mushrooms. These colonize really quickly. This was inoculated six days ago. This is a G2 inoculation, so they colonize very quickly, and at this point, we can already begin using it to inoculate more substrate.
So it's a very fast way to expand the mycelium and to produce a lot of mushrooms with very little material, and that's the point, is to get the most mileage out of your mycelium. That's what it's meant to do. Yeah, that's basically it. We'll try to keep this stocked and full as much as possible because we do go through a lot of spawn. All right.
Written protocol
Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
Read the guide
All right, so we're in front of one of the growing rooms, and, uh, we'll check out what's going on in here. There's not too much action. We harvested a lot of mushrooms that we had in here throughout the weekend. It's Monday now, and also throughout the weekend we had some very heavy monsoon downpour. The streets around here were actually flooded very heavily.
They were actually like rivers, so we decided not to travel in yesterday, and some of the mushrooms are actually way overgrown. So we don't like them to get like this, and at this point, they'll just be used for personal use or, you know, dried or saved for later, just because the shelf life isn't going to be as good, and they're going to be more fragile when they're packed, and they just don't look as presentable. So, and we have some golden oyster mushrooms right here, and these were left to over mature. We could tell that the mushrooms are over mature because the caps have actually fanned upwards. I like to harvest the mushrooms when you still have the edges of the caps kind of curled inwards, right before they do flip up.
They can still be used today to make a nice delicious meal. They still have, like, a nice wonderful golden color to them. Some people would think that they look really cool. Just, uh, from what I'm used to and what I'm used to seeing this mushroom do, is it does better when you harvest it a little earlier, because one, it's going to be more fragile when you pack it, and two, it's not going to last quite as long. Here we have some golden oysters that are still good.
We can see that the caps are kind of curled downwards towards the bottom. Some of the top ones were left to over mature a little bit earlier than the bottom half, but still some good mushrooms right there, so we can kind of see a Little bit of a difference between the two. We have a lot of mushrooms in here that are producing like a second or third flush. We could see these, uh, blue oyster mushrooms starting to pop out in areas where they sense more moisture. The first crop was harvested directly from the center.
You can see that it's a little bit dried out. The mushroom still scents the areas with the most desirable conditions, which would be like in the pockets right here, up here, and they send these beautiful nice clusters. You see the baby mushrooms. In a few days, these will be fully grown and get a nice second or third crop of mushrooms, and you'll kind of know when the block is done producing, when the block is in as heavy as it used to be. When we first put these in here, they're about 10 to 12 pounds.
As the mushrooms produce and they lose weight, they become about half the size of the original weight that we put them in here, so they're very light, and that's when you know it's time to get rid of them. We also have a nice second crop. Of elm oyster mushrooms coming in. It's a very nice mushroom to grow during the warmer months. It's actually an all year round mushroom, but it does well all the way up into the 90s, I found.
It's a very fast grower. It's one of the most aggressive oyster mushrooms that I've actually worked with, and it's just a consistent producer, so you can always rely on this mushroom all year round, and it's also a nice addition to the oyster family. Here we have some well overgrown elm oyster mushrooms. This is also a mushroom that can get to pretty big sizes. I mean, this is a second crop.
If we would have got this last night or probably early yesterday morning, still would have been in its prime, but it's a very fast growing mushroom. These mushrooms grow around the clock. If you don't catch them when they're ready, which is pretty quickly, then you can kind of lose out. Luckily, we've only lost out on like two or three blocks in here, so it's not too bad. The goal is to, you know, maintain the best crop you can, but sometimes you do your best so you