Sterile Mushroom Substrate
Foreign.
So we're in the lab. We're about to unlock a bunch of sterilized substrate. It's finished the sterilization process, so now it's time to get it in the lab and get it ready for the next step, which is going to be inoculation. [Applause]
The substrate we're unloading is the blend of Oak hardwood and soil, so this is a good substrate. I'm just growing a wide variety of strains, and so this is an atmospheric steam sterilizer. Basically, it has a heating element in the bottom, and also there's a float valve down there. It hooks up to a water hookup, and as the sterilization process basically ensues, the water level continuously stays the same, and heat is generated, creating steam which travels up through the chamber and basically sterilizes the substrate for a prolonged period of time. It's hooked up to a PID controller, so it just monitors the temperature and the time, and when the sterilization cycle is complete, it just shuts off. So, [Music] we can notice, as the bags have finished sterilizing, they've sealed shut, so it makes it really easy to work with them until we can open them up in front of our HEPA filters and proceed with inoculating them.
So I'm just getting the sterilizers a nice little saturation with some of this isopropyl alcohol. Just simply grabbing the blocks out of the sterilizer and just passing right into the lab. The general cycle, depending on elevation, is usually 14 to 20 hours. So, and depending on the amount of supplementation in the substrate, usually I'm doing my processes anywhere from 14 to 18 hours. So these are all 10 pound bags. We usually make 160, but since the other Bubba we just unloaded was only maybe two or three rows, that's like 40 to 50 bags we didn't do, so maybe we did 110 to 120 right now. Blocks of substrate, these are all completely cooled down, so it's safe to unload them.
Yeah, so this room connects to the lab, so it's just the labs pushing out positive pressure HEPA filled air into this room, so this is kind of like a secondary clean room in that sort. No outside dust or contaminants can get in, so positive pressure air is blowing through each crack and crevice within this room and underneath the door. So I hope so, and I never have any issues. So, yeah, at one point they would cool in the lab, and I still do that. I have two sets of sterilizers now, so these ones kind of just remain right here for the time being. I'll eventually put some wheels on them, um, but I'll unload these out here, let them cool, and then I have a second set on wheels that I can wheel into the lab, and I can unload those sterilizers when the blocks are at a hotter temperature because they're just gonna be cooling down in a really clean environment. So if I wanted to, and I've done it before, I could unload hot blocks in this room, just put them in the lab, and I wouldn't have any issues as well, and I've had to do that before.
Written protocol
Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
Read the guide
I like these for the use of sterilizing bulk substrates and stuff like that. I really don't have a preference. I like to use anything that's available to me to grow mushrooms, so these can be cost effective, really easy to use. The cool thing about these is I I feel like they're very easy to fix. I mean, I've had to replace the heating elements, float valve, and really that's all that'll break in these things. So, I mean, I can do that myself, which I find I'm really, uh, it's convenient. You don't have to call on anybody to fix it, so just depends on what you where you're at, but for me, I don't have a preference.
Yeah, these atmospheric sterilizers came from Bubba's Barrels, so they're really, uh, heavy in like the brewing equipment type stuff, and that's kind of like their their main thing, but they, uh, were approached by Eric Myers with the design and.
Basically, they made these really nice sterilizers. One thing about these I right now is, uh, there's a long lead time. If you do get one, it takes like three months to have one of these built for you, so that's something to take into consideration.
You can get, uh, for like a hobbyist, or if it's just starting out, you can always get some pressure cookers, which are great. I like the All-Americans, and they have them all the way up into 41, 41.5 quarts. They also have the electric ones you can plug in. I have those in my other lab. I even have one in this lab, and with those, you can sterilize six to eight blocks at a time. It only takes like two hours since it's under pressure, so it could be your grain in there. You can really do everything there, uh, with just an All-American or two. Now, if you want to grow for a lot more people, then just got to look at getting the necessary equipment. So yeah, currently I have six of these atmospheric sterilizers, so that enables me to be able to do more days of production, um, and just produce more mushrooms since we got a lot more demand coming up, especially since falls right around the corner. So we just want to make things easier.
The blocks end up all over the place for the stuff that we produce here. We go for the farmer's markets, then we have a few distributors that we grow for, and then we have our grow kits, which are pretty popular. So we, uh, walks have a lot of different, uh, purposes around here for what's in this soilizer.
All right, so we're gonna inoculate all the blocks that we just unloaded from the sterilizers. We just have a variety of different strains that we'll be inoculating with today. I'll be doing, uh, inoculation with this bag of spawn that actually inoculated with the liquid culture on the last video, and this is the blue green oyster, so I'm just showing Uh, how simple it is to grow a mushroom spawn. So, yeah, not long ago, just a couple of weeks ago, this was just a bag of sterilized grain. This is a a bag that has a filter patch and an injection port attached to the bag, so I was able to utilize a liquid culture syringe and basically just inoculate right through the injection port and utilize a nice little bit of inoculum. And within uh, like 10 days or so, this was fully colonized.
So this can just be you used to inoculate now up to 20 of the 10 to 12 pound production blocks, or I could break this up and I use it to inoculate more bags of green spawn by doing grain to grain transfers. So, a lot of different ways to utilize the liquid cultures and spawn and expand it and grow a lot of mushrooms.
Print out some labels, and while that's going, just break up my spawn. It's just been aggressively colonized by the oyster. It looks very healthy. So what you want to see, just making sure each all these clumps and each little cluster of grain is broken up so we can get as many inoculation points as possible.
All right, come down here now. Just go ahead and proceed to label the bags. My scalp already, and I'll go ahead and place it in the back tie zapper, so that just sterilizes all my transfer tools and stuff like that.
All right, go ahead and stage all my bags and get them ready to receive a nice bit of green swamp. At the end of the flow bench, you can see to start sealing everything. You can smell the freshness of the spawn as the inoculation takes place, so it seems like it's very healthy. So this way, I can do a secondary check of any clumps, break them up, but I also have a team here today, so I'll just slide slide the bags out. Mike is um, inoculating these bags with this um, inoculated grain and as
All we're doing is breaking up the grain. You get big clumps in there, so we're just breaking up that grain on the top here, and then we'll go ahead and break up all the substrate, and we're basically just trying to evenly distribute all this grain into this block. And then, about two weeks, you'll have a fully colonized substrate block ready to go into the grow room and grow some mushrooms.
So you just want to break up all these clusters that are in here. You could, uh, see it looks like a cosmic brownie. You can see grain spread out everywhere in here, so just try to get that easy but evenly distributed. And then, in about two weeks, it should be good to go. Flatten the top out. Make it all solid. Get a nice solid block ready to grow. Kind of get that grain mixed in there, and that's it. These blue oysters, these are, this is blue oyster, takes about two weeks to fully colonize. It'll turn into these blocks here, and then they'll be ready to go into the grow rooms.