Sawdust Production Blocks for Mushroom Cultivation
And there we go. Uh, we got the mixer running at this point, and we're good to go. This will mix for approximately 15 to 20 minutes. Uh, during that time, uh, I'll go ahead and get set up for production. We'll bring our tables out.
We'll get the, we'll get the bags. We'll just get ourselves staged for, for production, and then also start adding in some soybean holes. So we have five bags, uh, 200 pounds of soybean hole. Let the substrate hydrate a little bit more before adding in the remaining soybean hole, especially with this batch of wood pellet. We recently got a shipment of like six thousand pounds of wood pellets that were compressed under a higher pressure than normal, so the pellet was almost like just harder to break down with our water and just takes more time.
So just be patient with it. At this point, we have a meteor attached to the, to the side of the mixer that monitors the amount of water that goes in, so that way we can just walk away, and you can kind of do other things while this is getting hydrated, getting properly mixed. The only thing is, you just got to make sure you keep an eye on it because you don't want to over, over saturate your substrate. Right now, we're at 115 liters of water for this mix. We'll add 230 liters of water, so that's totaling a little bit over almost 480 pounds of water to 400 pounds of substrate, creating almost 900 pounds of fresh fresh substrate.
After that, we'll bag it, load it into our sterilizers, and sterilize it. After after that, we can bring it into the lab and begin inoculation and get these things ready to produce some mushrooms for us. Currently mixing, we have our mushroom substrate. So our mushroom substrate is just composed of oak based hardwood you can find readily available in pellet form, or if you know, you know a local woodworking shop that uses a lot of oak, that's beneficial, but really basically mainly oak and then we also utilize for this mix 50 percent 50 soybean hole so that'll give a nice boost in nutrition and increase our mushrooms ability to produce a nice yield especially on the first flush since we really only focus on like the first two flushes here so we're at 207 liters we're gonna go ahead and add in the rest of our soybean hole pellet so this is just like uh soybean hole pellets are not made up of soybeans themselves but they're basically comprised of the soy the plant the waste product from the plant that's not used in the soy soybean so this is great uh use in mushroom production as it provides a lot of great nitrogen content for the
mushrooms to feast on and produce full bodied mushrooms that everybody will love so we're at 223 liters and again yeah this is just like a little water meter really relatively easy to find it's just called save a drop and it comes in handy for this kind of stuff but before this would just attach to the end of a hose and you could just sit there with your hose and monitor how much water you have going into anything so it's really convenient you can use it in any application whether you just want to measure out amount of certain amount of water into like a bucket before you pour it into whatever you're hydrating your substrate in then you can get the perfect moisture once the substrate's ready to uh come from come to our next stage of the process we'll just use that lever open up this door right here the substrate just comes right out and we'll close that move it to the table and we'll just start filling bags manually i prefer the mixing of the substrate as opposed to i see sometimes people will just add the dry pellets to the bag and then measure out the amount of water into the bag let the pellets hydrate in the bag and then sterilize it i Just feel like the mix, for me, is just preference.
Written protocol
Commercial Cultivation SOP Playbook
The written protocols behind this process, as run on the farm.
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I like getting that nice, even mixture before loading into the bag, and also I like the fact that the expansion of the substrate isn't as much as when you fill with pellets, roll your bag up, and then you sterilize it. It comes out pretty tight and then harder to break up and mix in front of the flow hood at that point. Just what I found. So this is my preference. I like the mix, and it works really well for for this kind of setup.
You guys ready? Show time. All right, let's do it. That's a good one. All right, so I'm just using one of these buckets to put my bag into.
Go ahead and fill it up, and I just do three of these, uh, these scoops right here, which will bring you to about a 10 pound bag. And then from there, just shake it to evenly settle the, and also just shake off any debris that might be here at the top of the bag. Then I kind of just, the bag kind of comes with these creases. You get like three of them on each side right here, so I'll just kind of just poke the bag in and follow the creases on down. Make sure the air is kind of evacuated from the bag, which will make it easier to get into the sterilizers.
Then I'll just bring the flap and just fold it right underneath the bag, creating a nice little block. And then we'll just keep doing that throughout the day until we're all done. Once it sterilizes too, the pellets, if there is any in here, will absorb any moisture that's not, or that's, uh, available, and you get a good moisture content. And really, the moisture content is just like by weight in a ways. I mean, when you're looking for the best moisture content, uh, you just want like 50 to 60 percent.
So let's say your total substrate's gonna be 500 pounds. Then you just do 250 pounds of substrate, 250 pounds of water. So believe it or not, that's usually the toughest challenge for when people come in here to work, is, uh, folding bags. Exactly. So I can get nine blocks per row on the on these sterilizers that I'm using, so I'll just get nine of these made, and then I'll load them up.
And a really important term and mushroom growing is field capacity. So you want your substrate to be at field capacity, where it's hydrated, but it's not overly saturated, meaning you can just grab like a handful of it, squeeze it pretty hard, and not even a drop falls out, but it's super moist and hydrated because when you let go, the substrate still holds its form, and then it just breaks up like that. Another way I just look for it too is when you take a small pinch of your substrate and squeeze as hard as you can, you can see that moisture just fall right out. Just a little bit though. But yeah, when you take a handful and squeeze as hard as you can, we don't really see a draw.
It doesn't leave a stream of water, which is, you don't want that. Your mycelium is not going to be able to tear through your substrate properly, and it's going to slow down colonization or even halt it to a complete stop in some part of your process. If you want to hand me some blocks. Yes, please. Put the brakes on it so the sterilizer doesn't move around, and this thing's pretty pretty deep.
I mean, at one point, we were, uh, having like a scale present to really check the weight of each block, making sure there are 10 pounds. But honestly, I like just doing the three scoops. They are gonna be in the range of 10 to 20 pounds. Sometimes that'll happen, and I've done that myself plenty of times, just smacking the block to get the sub nice and settled, and then it breaks. Try to make like.
A pattern as I'm building up the blocks. All right, yeah, this is actually a good way to do it because you don't have blocks, uh, sitting around all day all over the place. Yeah, when you're doing hundreds of blocks that you need all that space to house them, so it's nice having a sterilizer nearby or having having a nice system. But before all the mixers and stuff like that, I just took one of these same black bins that you see on the table. These were actually used for production, and I said from in my backyard, I would just pour 40 pounds of substrate in there, 26 liters of water, mix it with my hands, and then just bag it on a table and just sterilize it in some pressure cookers outside.
That works fine for, you know, depending on what skill you're at. When I got into the place, I had, uh, everybody coming in and mixing by hand like I was, and Bubba was the one that said, hey man, is there anything we can get that can mix the substrate for us? And I said, sure, I'll look into it, and I got a cement mixer, and that's still over there, and we used that for several months, you know, and it worked well. Yeah, it was affordable. So like a nice little cement mixer, really affordable, and yeah, we just mix your batch in there, let it do its thing, and it makes better.
It makes fine. Yeah, it makes it mix really good. Do you think it mixed better than our industrial mixer? No. No, nothing beats that.