Growing Shiitake Mushrooms

[Music] hi I'm Tony from fresh cat mushrooms calm and we're gonna be growing some shiitake mushrooms now I got these blocks of shiitake that actually inoculated almost seven weeks ago and they're totally ready to go if you look at them they're completely colonized and they're consolidated quite well and if you look closely you can actually see there's a little kind of blobs of mycelium that are kind of turning brown which is kind of the precursor to pins and that tells you that the mushroom is getting really close to fruit could actually leave this in the bag quite a bit longer but in order to actually initiate pinning more so and get the mushrooms to the fruit it's kind of a unique technique what you want to do is strike it and do a cold shock so what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna take these blocks and first we're gonna give them a good smack not too hard but give them a good smack and then we're actually gonna put them in the fridge overnight and let them kind of get cold shocked for about eight hours now you don't have to put them in fridge if it's cold enough outside you can just kind of leave them outside overnight or you know put them on the garage floor or something like that just something that'll kind of you know change the temperature really quickly kind of shocked the shiitake in the fruiting and we're gonna go ahead and take the block completely out of the bag and put it in a fruiting chamber and we're gonna get ready to grow some shiitake so now let's get going with this [Music] so quite literally we're just gonna take the block of shiitake just kind of give it a good smack kind of picture like if it dropped on the ground some people say it's kind of like the shiitake you know like a tree falling in the forest tree hitting the ground and then when winter comes along with the cold shock that combo of the tree falling and the cold kind of shocks the mushrooms into fruiting you can see shiitake blocks brown quite a bit after their Colin eyes when they're consolidating and that's totally normal in fact you want to see quite a bit of browning so I'm literally gonna go ahead and just put these blocks in the fridge obviously be nice if you had like a separate cooler a separate fridge just for mushroom blocks but if you're growing on the hall we might just have to stuff them in your fridge and make some room all right so these blocks have been sitting in the fridge overnight it's been about nine hours that they've been in here getting cold shocked so I'm not gonna take him out of the bag just yet I'm just gonna bring them over to the fruiting chamber and just kind of leave them in the bag and let them come back up to the temperature the rest of the room slowly so the shiitake blocks have been cold shocked where they're in the fridge overnight and now they've just been sitting in the bag for about a day and I'm gonna get ready to start to introduce some humidity and some fresh air to try and get these things to fruit I'm gonna be using this bucket with a simple floating disc humidifier so basically that just sits in the water we mounted a simple blower fan that's gonna blow fresh air into this bucket and a mix of humidity and fresh air is going to come out of this end and I'll pipe it in to this little greenhouse and it actually works pretty well so we're gonna completely remove the bag from the shitake box and just have it bear most mushrooms he'll either just want to cut an X or maybe even just cut the entire top off but for shiitake is you want to actually remove the entire bag now although the blocks at this point are fully colonized and really resistant to any kind of contamination I still like to wear gloves just to prevent any possible source of contamination so now we got the open shiitake block sitting in the fruiting chamber I just want to show you how well this humidifier actually works just go ahead and turn it on here so once the fan starts going it's gonna blow fresh air into this Inlet it's gonna mix the fresh air and the humidity in this bucket and then pump a mix of fresh air and humidity into the growing chamber it doesn't take much time at all for the humidity build in the chamber will really only have to run it for a minute or two every hour for enough fresh air and humidity through the of the shiitakes going now shiitake mushrooms unlike blue oysters don't require a whole ton of fresh air so only running the humidifier for a minute or two should be plenty now we're just gonna let these sit for the next couple days and see how they grow so the shiitake box have only been in a fruiting chamber for about two or three days humidity has been captive pretty much 100% and the fresh air hasn't been too much about a minute or two every hour but if you take a look at the blocks the edges of the blocks are forming these really pronounced shiitake pins these pins will continue to grow until in no time we should have some full-size mushrooms [Music] [Music] so this is the for now in the fruiting chamber and as you can see the caps are starting to open up and the mushrooms continue to get bigger this one here is kind of weird it's like a double stem so I'm kind of one cap that's merged together and the stems are kind of merged together as well I was signed it it's kind of a weird blob and that will happen a girl once in a while with shiitake forget these kind of mutants or genetic mutations sometimes that can happen because you have too much nutrition in the substrate shiitake fruiting blocks generally like a little bit less than most other mushrooms or else stuff like this happens and if you have way too much nutrition in the substrate you'll get a whole bunch of mutants so this one wasn't too bad I only got this guy that kind of looks funny everything else seems to look normal so it's been six days now that these blocks have been in the fruiting chamber and I think I'm gonna harvest them I could probably let them grow quite a bit more until the caps kind of flatten out but I like to get them around this stage well caps are still a little bit curled over so we're gonna harvest these blocks and see how many mushrooms we get so really all you need to do is take a sharp knife or blade and cut the mushroom off rate of the stem so just on this one block alone you managed to get about 1 pound of shiitake so that's actually not too bad for a first flush now we still have three more blocks to pick so we're probably gonna get about four pounds of mushrooms from the first flush out of these four blocks now it doesn't really work so well to pick the mushrooms off you kind of end up damaging the block a little bit as it pulls off some of the sawdust and the fruiting block and kind of leaves a bit of a wound on it so you're much better off to just take your knife and cut it off at the stem as close as you can to the block without actually damaging the block so off these four shiitake blocks was able to harvest all these mushrooms so there are all different stages of growth but most of the mushrooms almost have kind of a perfectly rounded cap the cap started to open up but they didn't get too flat definitely could have let them grow a little bit longer but overall this is a pretty good stage to harvest them so one of the good things about shiitake mushrooms as well is that they actually have a pretty good shelf life one of the best shelf life's of any of the gourmet mushrooms if you let them dry out just a little bit you can actually put them in your fridge and shitake mushrooms will stay good for up to two weeks which is you know way longer at least twice as long as oyster mushrooms we're getting a second flush off of shiitake mushrooms is a little bit different than getting a second flush off of other mushrooms the oyster mushrooms for instance I would just leave them in the grow room or leave them outside wherever they happen to be fruiting and they were just kind of continuously fruit and I would get a second flush and a third flush etc shiitake blocks on the other hand you actually got to leave them to have kind of a resting period so we're actually just gonna leave the shiitake blocks on a shelf just help me open for about two or three weeks in order to get a proper resting period the blocks are gonna completely dry out and then about three weeks later I'm gonna take the blocks and rehydrate them by putting them in a tote full of water or a five-gallon pail full of water we're just going to soak them overnight at which point we're gonna reach shock them and give them another smack and put them right back into fruiting conditions this way you can get at least another second flush out of your shiitake but that resting period where they completely dry out is really important otherwise they likely won't fruit again that's all subject for another video so I hope you like this one I'm gonna go cook up some shiitake mushrooms right now thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: FreshCap Mushrooms

Views: 463,283

Rating: 4.9361434 out of 5

Keywords: shiitake, growing mushrooms, growing shiitake, shiitake mushrooms, harvesting shiitake, when to harvest shiitake, how to grow shiitake mushrooms, how shiitake grows

Id: ghNwnXYfsLI

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2017