The Mushroom Grower - Vol III: The Grow
So from start to finish with mushrooms, you're either going to start from a spore print or you're going to have a a already grown out culture, whether it comes in a test tube, a petri dish, or even like a liquid culture syringe. And uh with that mcelium, you're going to basically be responsible for growing it out and ensuring you get to the point of mushroom production, making sure it's uh homogenized. And after that, this is about 24 hours, we can see mushroom starting to leap off of the each grain kernel and onto the sawdust, basically starting to utilize it as a new food source. So that's the it's a little bit of uh the magic here. And then from here after everything comes out of our lab after post inoculation um we move to incubation.
So this is the area where our blocks will come out to just hang out until they're finished colonizing. So we have some blocks that were just inoculated yesterday and they're just starting to show growth. And uh you can kind of see after the spawn is poured in, you can kind of see little spots of uh the mcelium starting to recover. So each spot you see is a basically a grain that's been colonized with a mushroom mcelium. Once broken up and inoculated into a a sawdust or another substrate the mushroom mcelium can eat on.
You'll see that each each point of inoculation will will start to spread and you'll notice the mcelium just weave its way throughout the substrate. Knitting everything together and pulling it uh into a really nice block. From there, it can be placed into our grow room uh after an incision's made uh to let the mushroom these blocks were just inoculated a little over 24 hours ago and uh so they're starting to grow out already. It's time to get him into incubation. So, yeah, usually after inoculation, I can see see the mycelium start to grow out.
Usually after 24 hours. Um, so it happens pretty quick. This is the pink oyster strain. So, this will be fully colonized within the next 9 days. So, we can get it in fruiting.
It's a very aggressive strain to to c to cultivate. The basically production block has been inoculated in our laboratory in clean sterile conditions and also sealed in this uh basically filter patch growing bag. So it's equipped with a nice filter patch not to allow any contaminants in through colonization but also to let air and CO2 pass out. So, since it's sealed, I can let it colonize in a not so sterile space, but it's pretty clean over here, but it's it's not sterile like a laboratory. And these bags are just fine.
You don't have to worry about contamination getting in. And I uh make sure to space the blocks out because they do produce heat. So, you have your blocks touching, they'll definitely transfer heat throughout each other and it could heat your substrate up to dangerous temperatures. I mean, I've seen it happen myself. So, the incubation area stays between 70 to 73°.
We uh let our mcelium grow at about between that range, anywhere above 75. And you know, it still grows well, but you want to basically not give an optimum environment for contaminants to thrive. Contaminants do thrive at like warmer temperatures. So 72 between 72 and 75 is a good good temperature for myial development. We keep our whole facility at 70° and then during the winter time it's uh we really don't have to use any kind of cooling or heating because the blocks kind of naturally heat the space when it gets in like the 50s outside.
It still remains in the upper 60s to lower 70s in here. So pretty cool. Good rule of thumb is just doing it like finger width apart. If you can place your fingers through the bags on all sides, you're good to go. Classic blue oyster mushrooms.
So, this is 6 days after inoculation. And we can see that the block is coming along pretty nicely. It's a very aggressive strain. It usually has the substrate colonized within 10 days. So, it's an excellent uh candidate for commercial production and uh just basically having a consistent crop of mushrooms.
We also have some golden oyster mushrooms growing. This one is colonizing a little bit slower, a little bit more of a sensitive strain as far as the mcelium goes. Uh so, but yeah, we're at six days here and we can see that the mcelium is starting to get a nice grasp on the sub uh substrate. Uh I would say in about the next 4 days, uh this should be completely colonized. Uh with most oyster mushrooms, you're looking at about 10 days before you reach full colonization and sometimes up to 14 days before you can get it into the grow room.
Um, and a lot of things I come into the incubation area and this is where all the longer colon colonizing species come such as shiitake. We have reishi growing in this area. We'll put turkey tail in here. Makei. Anything that's going to take uh quite a while like you know six to eight weeks or more kind of comes to this area.
Uh at this point too, we do have some ininoi over here. Plenty of shiitake at different stages of colonization. Um and then yeah, more reishi of course. Uh some of the rati we've left for quite a while. It's been here since March.
Written protocol
Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
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Been colonizing for about 3 weeks now. Uh shiitake goes through several stages after inoculation. You'll notice a nice risomorphic or ropey mycelium running through the substrate. After it reaches full colonization, it begins another stage called popcorning. So the block will get these nice uh this nice topography of these rigid little bumps and that's just totally normal.
After that stage, they sit and ripen and that's when the block becomes completely brown and at that stage we can get it into the grow room and get a beautiful crop of shiitake mushrooms. So, yeah, when you're going through, I have one of them right here to show you kind of what it looks like when the block begins to ripen. This is 2 days um before the two-month anniversary of the inoculation of this block. And we can see the nice browning that we have going. We could let it go for um another month and it would be really brown.
But at this point, it's safe to fruit the mushroom block. You'd get a great yield off of it and really good quality mushrooms. So, shiitake is one that requires patience and whatnot, but it's well worth the wait in my opinion. Takes quite a while. I just let the mushroom kind of sit in incubation for about 4 months or so until you start getting these uh little fruings that start forming inside the bag.
Uh, a lot of people have difficulty with this strain because it takes so long to fruit. Um, so people basically can get impatient. So, really it's just about patience with this strain. I like to let them form until they get about this size and then I'll put them in the growing environment. I like to let the ratio mushrooms form these antlers inside the bags due the high CO2 levels within the growing environment.
The basically ratio mushrooms create these antler-l like formations in which they're kind of reaching for O2 in nature. That's how you'd find this mushroom growing. It produces uh it looks for O2 in its environment, meaning oxygen. And once it finds it, it basically forms a discshaped conchk and that helps in which spread its spores and produce tons of spores. So I'm just taking uh some shiakeis that are ready to ready to go into our fruing uh growing rooms and uh yeah, getting them ready to go.
So these were inoculated uh 3 months ago. So we let them grow for about 8 to 12 weeks. Then also with I grow 3782 and shiitake 3790. With the 3782 I found giving the b the block a light smack on each side helps stimuli stimulate uh fruit body production. So do that before I put them in the grow room.
And they say that it kind of acts as a simulates nature as when the tree falls and hits the ground, it shocks the mcelium into producing the the mushrooms. So they can kind of spread their spores and repeat the repeat the full white block. It's also very dense. The mcelium has really pulled all the sawdust and all the materials in this block together very tightly. So, you just uh you can just feel it after after a while of doing it.
You'll look at a block and you you'll just feel that it's ready to go in and these oysters are ready to go. So, yeah, I just look for full colonization. I don't want to see uh just big spots of uh sawdust in my bags. Anything that's uncolonized by the micelium will basically be at risk for once you put it. Now, we're at time for fruiting.
So once we open this bag, we're going to expose this mushroom mycelium to the rich O2 levels and high humidity levels in our growing room, which is going to signal for the mushrooms to just really explode through these blocks and just cover them with beautiful shiitake mushrooms. It's a very quick producer. We can expect to be harvesting these mushrooms 7 days from the day that we put them in. So within two days, we're going to see little primordia starting to pop up all over our mushroom blocks. And then every day they'll start to double in size until we reach full maturity.
So it's quite an amazing process. And shiakeis are quite an amazing make a nice slice. With the oysters and some of the other species that we grow, we can just leave the bag right on. We fold it right underneath and set the block right on the shelf. And then from there, nice little incisions made uh through the plastic.
And this will basically allow the mushrooms to form where we've made these cuts. They'll sense the heightened oxygen levels in our grow room as well as the nice high humidity. And that'll basically uh trigger the mushroom mycelium to send the mushrooms uh to develop right out the right out the I currently have the humidity set to about 88%. Since I'm just putting these blocks in here right now, we want that really high humidity to encourage these mushrooms to to really come out. So, as they continue to grow, we'll gradually lower the humidity up until harvest to around the low 80s.
That way, we can kind of preserve the shelf life as we move the mushrooms into refrigeration. But during the beginning stages, we want that 90% as close to 90 to 95% humidity as possible to encourage the really good pin. Really, it's the same thing for all of them. I'll just kind of cut the top of the bag or a little corner at the top of the bag so I can deflate it. Make sure to cut at the top.
Uh if you cut too low, like at the bottom, I found that the oyster mushrooms might grow out of that hole. When I first started and I accidentally folded a bag like that, I found that the mcelium was actually able to creep up and grow throughout this filter patch. And I found mushrooms growing throughout the filter patch as well. Same with lion's mane. A lot of these strains, if you're do if you are like side fruiting, make sure you're folding this filter patch inwards.
That way the mcelium uh the oxygen and stuff like that is blocked off. If the mcelium grows up here, it's not going to produce any fruit bodies. You get like a 2-in growth on top of your your bag. You can open it up and you can kind of scalp it, take the lion's mane growth off and and fold it and and still get those fruitings off the sides. But the benefit to growing it on the top like that, I found is you get lion's mane quick.
So, if you have clients that really want lion's mane, which I've had in my case, I get this top fruing to grow. Um, and then once I put it in the grow room, it's about 1 week until it's time to harvest. And you get a good yield. We can get them into the elevated CO2 levels. And from that point, they'll begin to form disc-ike formations instead of the antlers.
And we call those conchs. So, those will form out. And those actually really for the mushroom it's uh helps produce a lot of spores. So you'll get a lot of racy spores on the mushrooms. If for me the best way to do it has just been to simply just cut the top of the bag off.
And basically I'll just let the maki grow up in the bag like that. Um, I've tried just making cuts on the bag when you see the growth. Um, like let's say I see it right here. I've tried making cuts and and you know tucking the bag down to where just the fruit body sticks out. That's another way that can work.
But for me, this is the best way that I found. Um these turned up really high to kind of um really it's to stimulate the mushrooms to grow to get a really nice pin set at the beginning. Kind of like in nature when you get this fresh rainfall and then within a couple days later you get nice fruitings of mushrooms in the wild. So it's kind of like what we do in our grow room really really wet environment for the first couple days. Once we start seeing mushrooms come out, gradually lower the humidity and uh kind of work our way down into the 80s up until harvest time.
Having fast, usually about 10 days after inoculation, you'll start to see mushrooms starting to form uh in the substrate. So, it's kind of like a race to get it into the grow room because if too many mushrooms grow before you can get it into the grow room, I found that it does deduct from the total yield that you'll get off of the first flush. So yeah, and we have a bunch of the oysters coming in right now. We can kind of just see them at different stages growth. These will be ready to harvest within the next 24 hours by tomorrow morning.
Honestly, 12 to 24, they grow very in doing so. I would get a lot more weight, but also I wouldn't get as durable mushroom fruit body. The caps, we could still see the very edges are slightly enrolled, so curled in. Uh, as they mature, these will kind of fan upwards and the caps can kind of start curling out. Also, the color will start to fade and you'll start getting like a light grayish mushroom, even a silver, and uh, you get a lot more of a fragile mushroom.
I would say the flavor is not even as good. And also, the shelf life just goes straight down the drain. And you're, you know, the mushrooms just don't look as good after a few days. If everything goes accordingly, we're doing about 600 of these bags a week. And each of these bags, depending on the strand, we're going to be pulling about two to three lbs of mushrooms off of.
And you know, on a good week at full full capacity, that could be anywhere from 12 to 12 to,500 lb of mushrooms for us utilizing all three grow rooms at once. And uh it's quite a bit of mushrooms. Everything else is super easy. You know, grow mushrooms, keep your stuff clean, clean your facility, get a schedule down for your team, make sure everybody's on the same page, and have a good time. Grow some mushrooms and and feed Heat up here.
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