Growing Mushrooms Vs Microgreens (& Why They Work Well Together) | GroCycle

mushrooms and microgreens are both booming in recent years and we've been growing both on the farm here in this video we're going to take a look at the similarities and differences between the two so like Adams said interesting growing mushrooms and microgreens is booming have a look at this chart from Google Trends shows the search volume the number of people it tracks that the number of people looking for growing these two crops and you can see there's a really clear upwards trending and there are some good reasons for why these two crops are gaining so much in their popularity they're a high-value crop they're relatively simple to get started with and they don't need a lot of space and that all is really attractive of course when you're looking into growing these kinds of crops so we're looking into what you kind of think you need in this video and then later on we'll also give you two good reasons for why you might want to grow these two crops simultaneously at your farm so let's first take a look at the growing cycle and what that looks like for each of these crops so with mushrooms the whole process starts out when you inoculate the substrate and you're adding the spawn to the material that the mushrooms are going to grow off of and that then gets placed into an incubation room which is almost like a kind of summer environment it's dark is a little bit warm and the mycelium begins to grow across its food and once it's fully colonized the substrate it then moves on to the fruiting stage where the mushrooms actually grow to the point of harvest and then with mushrooms you can then leave them in the fruit and room for another 1 to 2 weeks and you get a second crop and after that you take the substrate out and compost it now with microgreens the process is a little bit different first of all your germinating the seeds so you soak them in water and then germinate them and after a few days you'll notice the chutes start to grow and at that point you put them underneath the lights for the greening up phase and that lasts another few days until the point of harvest which does vary depending on the type of microgreens that you're growing but for some it can be as quick as 10 to 12 days others might be 3 to 4 weeks so that's one of the differences between them the fact that with mushrooms you can get more than one crop from a batch let's have a look at some other differences so first up is the fact that mushrooms don't need energy in the form of light in which to grow they are phototropic which means they grow towards the light and with oyster mushrooms they need that light to form properly but they don't get energy from it in the same way that plants do so there's less energy input than there is with the microgreens that's one difference and finally you'll have noticed the other difference between the two is the speed of the crop cycle so mushrooms are already pretty fast you know you're talking three four weeks to get to the first harvest microgreens are even quicker we're looking at two-week turnaround to go from seed to harvest and that's incredible that just means you've got this rolling cycle every week of the year multiple times in a week even if you wish and that's a really attractive thing with growing microgreens I think just the speed of the crop so you'll have noticed there's a few similarities here as well and in particular the fact that they both have a quick growing cycle means that you can be harvesting a crop every single week of the year so that's quite different to a lot of other crops whereby you might plant something and harvest it quite a few months later with both of these is such a quick turnaround that it makes sense to make a new batch every week so that you can be harvesting every week and also it means you can grow all throughout the year which just extends the growing season basically because you've got a controlled environment that you're going to be growing them within another similarity is in the use of space let's move on and have a little look at the type of setup that you need and the type of spaces you're going to use for each of them so with the mushrooms you've got these distinct phases in the process each requiring their own space you've got a mixing and inoculation room somewhere where you can mix the substrate up and load into bags you've got an incubation space which is held in the kind of warm dark conditions and you've got a fruit in space which is really humid has lots of fresh air and a bit of light a little bit like autumn and then of course you need another space for harvesting and packing your produce and also for storing any of your equipment and materials with microgreens it's slightly different you've got a similar kind of utility space where you might store your materials way things out harvest and pack and then you've got a space where you're going to be seeding your trays and leaving them to germinate which might just be on a workbench somewhere nearby could also be on shelving then you've got your greening up space where the lights are set up for the ready germinated seeds to go under and then you're probably going to have a slightly separate space for harvesting and washing your microgreens at the end this could be indoors it could be outdoors because you're also going to need to drain and dry your microgreens after washing so let's take a look at some of the similarities and differences here both of them make great use of vertical space which is one thing I particularly love about each of the crops you can grow them making a lot of use in just one meter squared for example you can have a lot of crop growing in that space that's also lends itself really well to grow in indoor spaces that don't have other uses so for example years ago we ran a mushroom farm inside an office block that was not in use and we grew the mushrooms there on the third storey of an office block in the middle of a city center and we've seen plenty of other farms and similar things like that with microgreens growing in basements or in railway tunnels there's a great project in London that grows in an old Second World War air-raid shelter so both of these crops make great use of spaces that don't necessarily have any other use and you can grow a lot in that space as well so that's a similarity for both of them they're very higher yielding for a given area another thing that I love about both crops is the fact that they can be grown in controlled environments this gives you two benefits in particular one it means you can grow all through the year there's no distinct points in which you have to grow and number two is the fact that you've got a controlled environment gives you a lot of reliability over your crop and that might sound difficult to create a control environment but actually for both of these there are some fairly simple ways of doing that which mean that it's pretty easy to do in any given space so you'll have noticed one of the key differences between the two crops is the fact that with microgreens you don't have a different space for the separate stages of the growing cycle which leads to the question well how much can you grow in a given space so we're going to take a look now how much you can grow in a 10 metre squared area so as you can see both these crops produce a really high value output from a pretty small space microgreens produce a particularly high value output but before you go ahead and start planning the 100 meters squared microgreens fun do bear in mind that it can be more tricky to go ahead and sell that much produce in microgreens and we'll come back and discuss that in a bit more detail in just a minute so don't let us talking about 10 square meters fool you into believing that you actually need that amount of space of course you can start in the simplest way possible by just grabbing a few seeds in a tray and put it in a windowsill of your kitchen and similarly with growing mushrooms you can there's plenty of kits out there that make it super easy to grow them at home in the simplest way possible however if you intend to derive some income from your growing endeavors then you will need to get some of these supplies of course and I think this is a good moment to make the point that for both of these crops the actual techniques in the skills required to grow them successfully are absolutely manageable to newcomers so don't let this stop you at all so I've seen it a lot with people who might have a feeling of being slightly daunted by the prospect of starting to grow but especially with the growing of mushrooms and the help that we provide to people it's time in a time again that you see these success stories of people being complete novice and just growing a few weeks in and that's just lovely to see and it was the same experience for us when we started to grow microgreens here at the start there's a lot of things to get right and you feel like oh how do I go about this but if you just take a step-by-step approach to it you'll soon see that you've just got drops on the go in a matter of weeks it's absolutely doable so with both of these crops when it comes to selling I found they pretty much just sell themselves and there's a couple of good reasons for that so one is the nutritional value of these two crops so let's just talk about that for a minute mushrooms have got high levels of protein they've got iron and they've got B vitamins and they also have got antioxidants in the matured is good for your body now microgreens like many other veg have got high levels of minerals and vitamins as well but they are some really cool little fat facts about microgreens and the one that stood out for me is that by weight microgreens pack a real punch in fact they can pack between 4 and 40 times the nutrients of fully developed vegetables which is just an amazing statistic anyways the other thing that you want to know about microgreens is they contain polyphenols and polyphenols or again they act as an antioxidants because they attack the free radicals in your body and that is just good for our bodies so this kind of information is obviously valuable to a chef or anybody else who cares about their health and having a healthy diet and that's just the fact with these crops they are healthy so they're not just nutritious of course they're also really nice they're delicious and versatile to cook with so one of my favorites is mushrooms on toast and the microgreens I mean they're just so easy to jump on them like a Punnett of sunflower microgreens they'll just disappear in no time within my family so so far in this video we've been comparing the two crops to one another but we actually think it makes a lot of sense to grow the two alongside each other and they complement each other in a few different ways so for example this huge benefits if you already grow in one of these crops and you've got customers lined up and routes to market to sell the produce to add the other one alongside it makes a whole lot of sense you don't need to go out and find new customers they're already there and waiting and they trust and know you produce good produce just to add another line on alongside that makes a whole lot of sense and makes it a lot easier actually to just get started with it and be in production they also integrate pretty well together in terms of your daily workflow so you can be doing some tasks for one of the crops and then just sort of wander over do a little bit for the other one and there's a fair bit of crossover in terms of just needing regular care and attention and it makes sense if you're already at your farm doing that for one crop to do it for another crop alongside you also work pretty well together in terms of utilizing some existing infrastructure that you might have for example you might have a building with a bit of spare space that could be turned into production likewise will help you to spread the cost you know some of your overheads across two of the different crops instead of just one of them alone and then finally there's two really nice synergies that I would like to share with you where the two crops work well together in terms of inputs and outputs so the first one is in reusing the co2 that the mushrooms produce during the incubation phase so mushrooms are a little bit like humans in the sense that they take in oxygen and they give out lots of co2 and if you leave a incubation room to itself with no ventilation it pretty quickly fills up to a really high level of co2 so you could duct that co2 out of the incubation room and into your microgreens production room so as I'm sure you already know plants use co2 in order to grow so by piping in additional co2 into the microgreens room you're going to help your plants to grow faster and give them a boost to their general all-around health and before you wonder why can't you use the air from the fruiting room well it is true that the air is rich in co2 there as well but it's also very humid and Wilkin paying some spores in the air as well so ducting that air into a microgreens room is not advisable you've going to create problems with mold from a high humidity and potentially contamination from other spores in the air as well using it from the incubation room though it doesn't have that problem so that is a synergy which is really worth implementing if you grow the two crops together the other synergy between these two crops is something we're really excited to test and that is that you could potentially use the spent mushroom substrate after you've harvested your crops as the compost to grow your microgreens in we've seen a study that suggests doing this and we're really looking forward to testing it ourselves because if it works it means you can do away with one of the inputs to the microgreens process so you're not going to have to spend money on that soil and you can just keep the whole nutrient cycle in a nice little loop reusing it as the compost for your microgreens so as you can see these two crops can work really well together but don't just take our word for it we found actually when we were researching this video numerous examples of other farms out there popping up growing mushrooms and microgreens together for example there's a great project in Paris called lack of earn which is based underground in a disused car park where they're growing mushrooms and microgreens together to sell to restaurants outside in the city of Paris and we expect to see more growers starting to grow the two crops together in the years ahead so if you're interested in growing either one of these crops we've got a couple of guides for you below there's an e-book on how to set up a low-tech mushroom farm and another one on how to get started growing microgreens thanks a lot for watching do subscribe to the channel for more videos like this and I look forward to seeing you again soon [Music]

Channel: GroCycle

Views: 152,991

Keywords: mushrooms, microgreens, growing microgreens, growing mushrooms, microgreens farm, mushroom farm, mushrooms vs microgreens, how to grow mushrooms, how to grow microgreens, profitable crops, growing food, mushroom cultivation

Id: L_X-i-qbZRs

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019