How to Cultivate Cordyceps Militaris Mushrooms | With William Padilla-Brown | Grow in Jars or Bins

[Music] i'm the founder of microsymbiotics microsymbiotics is an environmental research business based in new cumberland pennsylvania that i started in 2015 i made it one of my priorities to achieve some sort of balance with my local ecology and the community around me hey everybody it's william padilla brown from microsymbiotics coming at you with the second harvest from our commercial quarter steps militarist grow here um cordyceps lends itself in two desirable ways to humanity as an aphrodisiac and then for the energy on a cellular level that doesn't have that same crash like caffeine does and also they can be found in high altitudes i found cordyceps at some of the highest altitudes in north america and they can increase the amount of oxygen that's in our blood but i think as more people start to understand it's its role i think that uh it'll have all sorts of use in a new world of a molecular industry i just think that it's important to encourage citizen science and you know public acts of citizen science i don't know i think i'm just a good representation as like a high school dropout like brown skinned person doing science shows that it's really approachable and the more people that are doing it the more that we're going to uncover the more research that we're going to find and the more practical applications of science that we're going to find today we're going to be preparing substrate for cultivating cordyceps mushrooms basically what we're doing is we're creating a matrix something for the mushroom fungus to grow on which is the rice the rice is a solid state matrix it's something for the mycelium to live on and then we're enriching that matrix with supplements you know because cordyceps grow in the wild on nutritious bugs so we kind of want to recreate that nutrition for them so they can produce all those beautiful compounds that we like and it doesn't really take a big fancy lab or anything like that whenever i first learned how to grow it i was just doing it in like a box in my house there's information into tutorials online on how to set everything up with just a uh instant pot so i mean really with the small investment of an instant pot and a clean space in your house you can start doing everything that we're doing right now we're going to start with a nutrient broth and the base of our nutrient broth is going to be coconut water today a lot of times we'll use water but coconut water has potassium in it that is also very beneficial for cordyceps so we're just going to rock out with some of this coconut water today one of the other very important ingredients we're going to need is some tapioca starch the starch is really important it breaks down into sugars which the mushrooms then use as a carbon source to actually create their bodies we have some magnesium sulfate which just acts as a mineral supplement and for the rest of our mineral supplementation sometimes i'll use rock dusts but you can totally use crushed one a day vitamins we have our brown rice to act as a matrix for our mycelium to grow on and we have soy peptone so soy peptone and nutritional yeast can be used in replacement for one another um more labs may have access to soy peptone this isn't something that you can just go find at a grocery store where you could find nutritional use at a grocery store we have some kelp powder here this is great for macro micronutrients and minerals so this is great for mineral supplement macronutrients micronutrients and this just helps to make sure that our cordyceps grow healthy and produce all the compounds that we want from them last but not least we have some gypsum we use this for the same reason we use gypsum for all other mushrooms to add a little bit of calcium magnesium and add a little bit of rigidity and structure to the mushroom [Music] here we have some of the tools of the trade we've got some polyfill we're going to utilize this for making some filters on our lids for our jars which we will be utilizing for fruiting some of the mushrooms we have a nice little spoon here for aiding and mixing things a smaller spoon for measurement uh we have some culture here we're going to use that later um and got a nice little scale little skis here for measuring out our dry materials that we're going to be adding into our broth and then we have a nice little scale scoop for measuring out our materials for our broth like a nice little vessel for mixing and a tool for mixing as well like this whisk here um you could also you could also uh use a blender put all of your dry materials after you weigh them into a blender with your liquid blend it up and then use it like that um but you know this gives you a nice feel for it i mean if you want to hit him with some of that biodynamic a little mix a little to the left mix a little to the right underneath the moonlight you know that's the way to do it all right let's get into it [Music] i'm going to start introducing the dry ingredients and mixing them up into solution with the coconut water so i'm going to put the dry ingredients in here first [Music] all right guys so we got all of our dry ingredients here and we're going to go ahead and start adding in this coconut water [Music] get everything unstuck from the bottom there there we go upon the weird powders all right guys if you have any um pesky clumps in there you might want to grab an immersion blender or instead of using a whisk you can just invest in an immersion blender for your setup [Music] that's fun i'm not even in front i was doing that longer because i was having fun with it [Music] [Music] all right guys we are going to prepare some lids here for uh filtration um so one of the things that i would like to note is that whatever your hole size that you're going to drill into your lid should be big enough for your needle to go in that you're going to be utilizing when you inoculate your substrate so i like to use an 18 gauge one and a half inch needle so you're going to want to make sure that whatever you're drilling into your lid is at least bigger than 18 gauges [Music] simple as that [Music] and we're going to take a little bit of this polyester fiber um one of the tricks that i've learned over the years is that if you get acrylic fiber yarn you can take a crochet hook and you can pull it through more than one of these lids at once with a crochet hook you might even be able to take the polyester fiber but the yarn you're able to get a nice solid piece through more than one at once so if you're going to be making a lot of these you might want to try the acrylic yarn it works just as well as the polyester fiber there you go and all you need is just a little bit of that to get nice and tight through there and we have a nice little filter for our cordyceps to breathe and we can also introduce our culture through there [Music] all right guys we're uh measuring out 46 mils of uh broth here and we're going to measure out 28 grams of rice per pint jar [Music] and that's ready to go right into the pressure cooker all right we're going to load up our jars into the insert for the all-american we're going to be using an all-american today but you can use whatever pressure cooker you have at home whenever i started out i started with a presto you're going to want to make sure that you can at least get 10 psi that means pounds per square inch you can look that up online what your pressure cooker's capabilities are but you're going to want at least 10 psi for 45 minutes to an hour and a half if you're getting contaminations you're going to want the longer times with the all-american because we can go to 15 psi i'm gonna run this for 45 minutes and we're gonna get this thing loaded up [Music] there's research right now that is you know what i believe to be pretty cutting edge that shows um two active compounds and quadriceps militarists cortisepine and cortimon are capable of inhibiting hiv one reverse transcriptase for a natural product to be able to inhibit the hiv virus from replicating its empower is incredibly powerful and i think that there's going to be a lot more eyes looking at it and i think that as we have more eyes looking at it and as we start to develop the analytical protocol for it we're going to start to discover a host of other compounds in it you know i'm really excited to see where holistic medicine goes where we start to when we start to realize that every single body is different and treat everybody different instead of giving everybody the same pills in every body the same dose for the same medicines when everybody is different [Music] so one of the methods we're going to run is the instant pot technique which is way easier for beginners to get into if you haven't practiced any other kind of mycology or if you just want to focus on cordyceps only instapod is a great technique to lock into so we're going to separate a liter or a thousand mils by separating two 500s out and putting it into our insta pot all right guys uh we have here the insert for our insta pot so we're going to mix the things that we're gonna are gonna go in there into here um and all that's gonna go in there is our rice and our broth [Music] all right and it's important to weigh the rice out and make sure the measurements are accurate um when you're preparing your quarter step substrate because too much rice or too much liquid can end up with your substrate not having enough moisture or being too saturated not having enough moisture your mycelium won't grow too saturated bacteria will grow [Music] all right guys we're just gonna set this in the instant pot and uh run it for the right setting [Music] so um we have our instant pot all done and the all-american is all done sterilizing so we're gonna go prep the flow hood area in preparations for introducing our liquid culture to our substrate [Music] all right guys so we have our jars uh sterilized and cooled down and we're gonna take them out of the pressure cooker insert here and you see the rice is nice and cooked there is a little bit of moisture in there but that's okay you don't want too much standing water but you want a little bit of excess moisture which is going to provide the mushrooms with their humidity inside of the jar as they grow when you receive your culture you're going to want to remove the cap and quickly attach your sterile needle and when you first open your needle it's sterile so you can go directly into a jar and you're going to want to introduce about one to two mils in a circular rotation through your jar then remove the needle and set that aside um you can sterilize your needle in a back incinerator or with a flame i'm going to go ahead and stick it in the back generator and now that it's sterile i can go ahead and insert it in through one of these injection ports here and the same introduce two mils and circular rotation and this allows the mycelium to be distributed so you can see it grow out in a broader fashion [Music] all right for the amount of substrate that we made in the instapot i'd recommend at least 120 mils at most 300 mils of liquid culture and then you can mix up your liquid culture into the rice [Music] all right i'm gonna clean up my spoon here i'm gonna make sure you got like a stainless steel or something like that and clean it up with this uh diluted ethanol or isopropyl and make sure that uh that your solution is dried up your sterilization solution your ethanol or isopropyl is dry before you stick it in there to mix it up so that you're not killing your mycelium now we're just mixing our liquid culture in [Music] we don't need uh too big of a layer like no more than a half inch if you pile it in too much you're gonna be uh reducing the amount of space you have for your fruits to grow so if you have a culture that has really tall fruiting bodies and you put too much rice they're not going to be able to grow as much in there so because this one doesn't have a rubber seal but it does have these clips i'm just going to let it clipped and put it in dark incubation if you have a rubber seal what i would recommend doing is putting a hole and putting a filter patch on it if you have a tub that doesn't have clamps that just has a lid that clicks on i would recommend not using that at all because there's going to be too much airflow if you run your whatever bins that you get if you run them and you're noticing that it's drying out you may want to try putting a line of tape to kind of create your own gasket or maybe search for one that has a gasket um i've had plenty of success with just putting a line of tape around and no filter so yeah we're going to set this in a dark space to incubate over the next three days incubation should be in the dark cordyceps are very photosensitive and they'll start to change the color of their mycelium when exposed to light generally with a healthy culture it'll take about three to six days for the mycelium to grow through the substrate and then after that you will introduce it to light and you're going to want to keep the environment about 65 degrees from incubation time until harvest [Music] harvested in cordyceps is like a little nuanced um you're going to have to like do it a couple of times and know your strain because it's going to produce parathesium on the top of the stroma perithesium are technically the fruiting body and the stroma is like means of the fruiting body not being in the dirt like the straw like the the little finger looking cordyceps thing that you see there's bumps on the top of it those bumps are the fruits the whole finger thing is just a fungal stretch of fungal material for the fruiting bodies to be in the air so when those come out and though those get mature that's when it's ready to harvest after those are mature then it starts to die so like you're looking for the little bumps on the top to get ripe which is like takes a while to know what you're looking at you can store them in ethanol for you know extracts or just for preservation you can store them in vinegar you know for extracts or just for preservation where you can dehydrate them and you know just store them in a container in a dark with silica packets and then make teas or foods or extracts or whatever [Music] the most common contaminant is going to be calculosporium corticola which is some sort of fungus that lives inside of the cordyceps and exposes itself when the conditions aren't ideal so usually when it's too warm um anything like above like 68 69 for any long extended period of time you'll probably start to see this white fuzz growing on top of your orange mycelium or growing on top of your cordyceps so that's the most common thing and then just general bacteria and molds that you're going to be encountering in any kind of mycology and mites if you get mites they like to go in and out of the jars and eat your mycelium so you'll see patches in the mycelium mites aren't common if you're not doing wild culturing if you're just growing only fruiting bodies in lab and stuff like that you might never ever get mites i definitely encourage people to follow me on instagram that's where i post a lot of really cool information that's michael senbaio you can also check out microsymbiotics microfest every august first weekend of august it's our festival that we host that's a lot of fun for people to get engaged with michaelsonbiotics.net has good information apex grower on youtube has a lot of good information and if anybody wants to support us monetarily i'm on patreon as permaculture poppy or you can check the link in my bio on my instagram just for general donations all the links are down below let's go [Music] you

Channel: North Spore

Views: 54,026

Keywords: mushrooms, edible, fungi, growing, cultivation, homesteading, spawn, foraging, wild foods, oyster, shiitake, grow, cultivate, north, spore, spores, laboratory, cordyceps, militaris, william padilla-brown, mycosymbiotics, how to, diy, growing cordyceps, how to grow cordyceps, instapot tek, pressure cooker, instant pot

Id: ei9J04C1MPU

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021