The Mushroom Grower - Vol II: The Substrate
The yields were kind of as an experiment. So, we uh tried uh straw and soybean holes 50/50 instead of oak mix with our oysters. And we did like some 7lb blocks and some 8lb blocks. We did some bigger blocks, too. We experimented with dry bagging and doing a a straight up custom mix of the substrate.
And uh I just found that I really don't like the straw that much. I don't think it's a a good substrate compared to using oak. Um cuz off of our 7 lb box, I mean, we do get some good-looking mushrooms. These are like a second flush. And let's see what the yield was on this second flush.
So, almost a pound, but not quite. And uh on the first flush, we got like a pound and a half to 1.6 lb. And uh usually on like a block this size with like an oak recipe, we'd easily get 2 lb. So, um I don't know, worthwhile on it, which it would still work out, but being that the oak is available, then I'd rather just use that. So, and this stuff makes more of a mess in the lab.
You'll have like little bits of straw flying all over the place, and that's just not preferred for me. This is going to be our master's mix for all basically a lot of our fast fruiting sub or strains all of our fast fruiting species and strains can grow on this mixture ranging from lion's mane chestnut pipini oyster mushrooms even uh reishi maki uh beach mushrooms all kinds of So yeah, these are compressed um oak hardwood sawdust pellets. So basically there's a process where the sawdust is taken and it's pressed into these pellets. So this makes it really easy to store our substrate. It's very clean, no smell.
So this is what I mean by being able to grow a lot of mushrooms with the specialty mushrooms in small spaces. So the oak hardwood sawdust is kind of like the base of the substrate. In nature, this is what we'd find these mushrooms growing on. So they prefer oak or woodbased substrates. Doesn't necessarily have to be oak.
The nutrition uh we add that in for the yield. We end up uh with for commercial indoor production supplements are really necessary to maintain a really high yielding crop. Uh it's it can work but for indoor cultivation the nutritious nutritious supplements are needed to maintain those above one lb harvest averages per 5 lbs of substrate. So or we usually get about 2 to three lbs first flush just off of our 10 lb blocks. So that's with our supplementation.
Without that we would probably be getting about half a pound per 5 lbs of substrate. So it triples our yields to utilize these supplements pellet. So this is just like a soybean hole pellets are not made up of soybeans themselves, but they're basically comprised of the soy the plant uh the waste product from the plant that's not used in the soy soybean. Um so this is great uh use in mushroom production as it it provides a lot of great nitrogen content for the mushrooms to feast on and produce fullbodied mushrooms that everybody will love. The mixing process usually takes us about 30 to 40 minutes.
And then from there, we'll start bagging our substrate and uh folding bags. And then from there, they everything gets loaded into our sterilizer for sterilization. That takes about a day. Then after that, we'll come back and inoculate once the uh substrates cooled down. I like to hydrate my oak hardwood before I add in my supplements or my soybean holes just because the wood pellets, they usually take a little bit longer to break up and they're or they're a little bit tougher to break up.
They take a little bit longer to hydrate. So, we let this mixer do its thing. And I'm going to be looking for a consistency where I can grab a handful of my substrate and squeeze it as hard as I can and really not even a drop should fall out. I want it at field capacity. We don't want our substrate too wet.
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We want our substrate about 50 to 60% hydrated. So that way we can uh let our mcelium just grow through it without any issues. Just hard as you can. We don't really see a drop. It doesn't leave a stream of water, which is you you don't want that.
Your mcelium is not going to be able to tear through your substrate properly and it's going to slow down colonization or and I could squeeze it very hard and uh not any water comes out, but it still takes its shape. It's thoroughly hydrated, so it's perfect. That's field capacity. And that's perfect for mushroom cultivation. A lot of people get the mistake of thinking the substrate just needs more water than it really does.
And better be be on the dry side than on the too wet side, but this is perfect. I just do three of these uh these scoops right here, which will bring you to about a 10 lb bag. And then from there, just shake it to evenly settle the substrate. And also just shake off any debris that might be here at the top of the And 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 uh micological grow bag or mushroom growing bag. So you can use these bags mainly for these are the 5T filter patch bags. So I use these for my substrate production blocks.
For spawn I make sure it has a 0 2 micron. So yeah, these are the.5 micron. This filter patch is a.5 micron filter patch, meaning it can filter out air and everything down to 0.5 microns. So really not many contaminants can get through with supplements. Then the filter patch bag is necessary because you need to sterilize all the contents in the bag and then opening it opening it up in a laboratory setting or in front of a flow hood just because this is a this is a highly nutritious substrate.
So it's very easy that it can contaminate if sterile sterile technique and precaution isn't cons. All right. So we have finished making up our substrate. Now it's time to sterilize everything. So, we'll wheel our sterilizers out and start loading up our loading these up with our blocks.
So, yeah, I have these things on wheels and it makes it really easy to move them around. So, yeah, we have three of these uh atmospheric steam sterilizers. So, when we're running all of them at the same time, we can sterilize about 18 16-800 lb of raw substrate at once. We'll just load the substrate in here. And it's hooked up to a PID controller.
So, this will monitor our temperature as well as the time. So, this will cook for depending on the recipe 12 to 14 hours. Uh after which this will automatically shut off the the heating element and it'll start cool down. I'll let it cool for about 2 days. Then that at that point, we can load it uh unload it into our laboratory, allow it to cool further, then inoculate it with a fresh mushroom mycelium.
We'll cook at around 206 to 210° for 12 to 14 hours. That way, we get effective sterilization and we don't experience any contamination. We're also cooking a lot a lot bigger uh a lot more substrate at once. It's going to take a little bit longer to reach those core temperatures we're looking for. For these ones, we're going to want it to be around 207 to 210 degrees for basically majority of the sterilization time.
It usually takes about about 3 to 4 hours to get up to core temp and then we'll just hold it there for about 10 hours. Watching the all- Americans on top of the high-owered gas burners and trying to play with the flame. So, this this is really nice being able to just set it, forget it, walk away, come back tomorrow, and the everything will be done. You can reach temperatures that you can't get to normally at atmospheric levels. So in this sterilizer, we can get to temperatures around 250 to 270° during the sterilization process.
And without the pressure, we're usually at around 212°. So this will sterilize spawn in a matter of 4 hours compared to 20 hours. So, it's 1/5if of the sterilization time, and it's just much more efficient. You can, it's kind of like an insurance policy. So, they've been sterilized at a high rate of pressure or higher than normal to uh basically kill off any kind of spores or microorganisms that could most likely survive uh 212° temperatures.
So this way we're able to super sterilize our spawn and that's super important for this part of the process being that spawn's going to, you know, be a big part of the the cultivation process as far as inoculating multiple times its weight and substrate and producing mushroom. All right. So, we're uh going to inoculate all the blocks that we just unloaded from the sterilizers. Uh we just have a variety of different strains that we'll be inoculating with. Today, I'll be doing uh inoculation with this uh bag of spawn that I actually inoculated with the liquid culture on the last video.
This is the blue green oyster. So, I'm just showing uh how simple it is to grow uh mushroom spawn. So yeah, not long ago, uh just a couple weeks ago, this was just a bag of sterilized grain. So this can just be used to inoculate now, uh up to 20 of the 10 to 12 lb production blocks. Or I could break this up and I use it to inoculate more bags of grain spawn by doing grain to grain transfers.
Um so a lot of different ways to utilize the liquid cultures and spawn and expand it and grow a lot of mushrooms. So one big piece like this would just be effective just as effective as one of these smaller ones. So when you break this one up, it just becomes a bunch more inoculation or a lot more inoculation points than you would have had previously. So this aids in the speeding up the colonization time and getting a more thorough thoroughly colonized sub. Mike is um inoculating these bags with this um inoculated grain.
And uh is 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 in about 2 weeks, you'll have a fully colonized substrate block ready to go into the grow room and grow some mushroom. Each of these bags will be used to inoculate 10 more blocks. So, if I were to go ahead and fruit these now since they've been inoculated with grain spawn, I'd probably get about a three lb first flush, but I guess you got to weigh the pros and cons of uh using sawdust spawn as opposed to grain spawn because, you know, I could get 3 lbs on the first flush out of this one block, but then again, I could also take it and turn it into 10 blocks and get 2 and 12 lbs on the first flush of those bags. These blue oyster, these are This is blue oyster. Takes about 2 weeks to fully colonize.
It'll turn into these blocks here and then they'll be ready to go into the grow rooms. Hallelujah. Heat up here. Heat. Heat.
Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.
Heat. Heat. Heat up here. Oh.