How To Grow Lions Mane Mushrooms! | GroCycle

hi there welcome to this video where we're going to be showing you how to grow the amazing lion's mane mushroom [Music] blind's main mushroom is incredibly popular right now and I don't think it's just a fad either I think it's more a case people just suddenly realizing how amazing it is combined with the fact that it's more readily available and that's really down to the fact that both small and large-scale Growers are growing more of it than ever before and there seems to be an Ever increase in demand for it so why is it so popular well it's absolutely delicious to eat for a start but it's also believed to have a whole host of medicinal benefits including generative nerve growth in the brain improving focus and mental Clarity reducing inflammation boosting the immune system protecting against cancer improving heart health and alleviating anxiety and depression that is a pretty impressive list of benefits we'll do a separate video about the medicinal benefits of lion's mane sometime in the near future and you can watch that video there as soon as it's ready but in this video we want to specifically focus on how to grow lion's mane so Lion's main mushrooms are obviously fantastic but they're also relatively easy to grow so as a beginner you can have some success straight off the back and if you're more experienced grower do hang around because I'm sure that you learn something new about growing Lion's Mains in this video so why are they so easy to grow well they're not particularly fussy they're really fast and they grow a bit like other Gourmet mushrooms so it's easy to get some experience transfer that onto Lion's mushrooms now let's look at how you can grow them so firstly in this video we'll start with the easiest way of growing lion's mane mushrooms and then we'll delve into more detail we'll look into how you can make your own substrate blocks as well as your own spawn and we'll even cover whether you can grow limes main mushrooms using low-tech techniques so first up if you don't have much experience growing mushrooms it can make complete sense to buy in a fully colonized ready to fruit bag in this case you want to be looking for a lion's mane grow kit or a substrate block that has Lion's main mycelium in there they look a bit like these and I'll tell you what to do with them next so this bag you can see here is fully colonized and it's ready to fruit so what I'm going to do first is cut a little hole at the top here push up all of the air and then what you'll need to do is cut a 5 to 10 centimeter slit in the bag and what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut them slightly diagonally two slits here and then I'm going to tape them up so this is important to stop fruiting bodies from forming inside the bag and forcing them to grow out of the place you want them to and some Growers like to just open the top of the bag and allow the mushrooms to form there now this can lead to a faster Harvest Time so especially if pins have already begun forming on the top of your bag so if you're in a rush then this could make complete sense but in our experience fruiting from the top of the bag also leads to a lot of wasted spongy-like growth and also smaller and less dense fruit bodies than you would when you fruit in this way with the two slits on the side of the bag so when you fruit this mushroom like this you get these lovely dense and really meaty lovely Lion's manes mushrooms and when you have a smaller bag you can one slip will suffice when you have a bag like this four and a half kilograms of substrate or so I think it's best to use two slits in that bag now where you position the slits in the bag that depends a little bit on your own preference as a grower as I already mentioned you can fruit them from the top we prefer to fruit them from the side like the front and the back but you can also use the the narrower sides of of the bag as well much will depend on your preference as a grower and also how you've got your racks positioned and what works best for you what I will say however is that you do want to cut the slits at a sufficiently high level so that the mushroom and fruit doesn't touch any of the racks or the bottom of this mellow machine for instance you can see these are slightly higher so there's no risk of it touching the bottom of this machine if you look at that bag there there is obviously those slits are quite low so it drops down enough to touch the bottom not in this case because they're stacked on top of each other of course so now we've covered how and where to cut your slits it's time to move on and look at what fruiting conditions these gorgeous mushrooms need so first up you can grow lion's mane just at home on the windowsill if you then you know take good care of spraying it with water on a regular basis however if you live in an area that you know has dry air naturally already you might find you get substandard results like that you'll get lower yield your mushrooms will begin to sort of brown a little bit as they're starting to dry out so if you can produce the right fruit and conditions you're going to get much better crop you don't need a big fruiting room like this though you can do that in a much smaller shotgun fruit and chamber for example or a Martha fruit intent or even the Mellow like this little device that we have here so here's the lowdown on the ideal fruit and conditions for lion's mane you want to have some light between 500 and a thousand Lux humidity between 85 and 90 percent plenty of fresh air bringing the CO2 level down to between 500 and a thousand parts per minute million and temperature around about 15 to 24 degrees Celsius and that's really going to vary a lot per strain some will grow at cooler temperatures some will grow slightly warmer as well so in terms of when to start the fruiting process where your substrate block is fully colonized when you see a thin layer of mycelium across the whole block with a slightly thicker fluffy mycelium starting to form on the top of the block now Lions made my Serum is much thinner than most other popular Gourmet mushroom varieties and if you used to grow in something like oyster mushroom then you'll probably think something's wrong and that your spawn is really weak but don't worry this thin wispy mysterium is typical of lion's mane and most newcomers tend to wait too long to initiate fruiting it's not a big issue but if you wait until you see lots of pins already forming on the surface of the substrate this is slightly too long and some energy will be wasted on pins starting to grow that won't get a chance to mature so if your block is fully colonized and you're starting to get that thicker mycelium on top it's time to go ahead and cut the slits in the bag so you can see on this one here we just start to cut the slits here and already after around about three days and it can take three to seven days roughly for the pins to start emerging you start to see lid or tiny pins starting to form on the bag [Applause] within a couple of days those pins are then starting to grow out from the holes in the bag and they'll just continue like that over the next five to ten days so you can see we've got one here that's a few days further on again as they're just starting to enlarge outside of the bag and they'll continue like that for around about five to ten days until you get to the point of full maturity and the way to tell that really is just judging by the spines on the fruit body you can see that they've started to enlarge and drop down the mushroom feels like it's loose on the bag and it's actually ready to come off at this point and you simply just put your hand in underneath give it a Twist and it will come off the bag very easily if you feel like there's a lot of resistance and it's not coming off then it's not quite ready for Harvest yeah now knowing exactly when to harvest is just something you learn with a little bit of experience but what you're looking for really is just if you leave it too long then you'll start to see that the spines themselves they drop down really too far they sort of thicken and become a bit wider like this and the fruit bodies themselves become less dense they're at this point they're not as good to eat they're still pretty good but they're not as really at their Optimum and the shelf life is going to be much shorter as well so you really want to try and get it one or two days before they end up in a in a spot like that so these are on their second crop here and you tend to get around about two to three crops of lion's mane and a yield of about 25 to 30 percent of the wet weight of the substrate Eric is going to take a look now at how to handle and get those further crops so a decent quality substrate block like this should give you at least three crops of lions Mains mushrooms and most commercial Growers will probably opt to just use two flushes and that's because they optimize for the growing space that they've got because of diminishing yields they just make a make an assessment and feel like two crops that's enough and now I need to put higher yielding new blocks in but if you're not so fussed about optimizing for space but you want to optimize for yield it makes complete sense to go for three flushes four or maybe even push to five crops so to get your next flush then what you want to be doing is cut a section in a different part of the bag a part of the bag that hasn't been exposed yet so you could flip it over you could use the back of the bag you can use the bottom of the bag whatever suits you best and then you wait for one to two weeks before little pins start appearing and then you're back into the cycle of nurturing your next crop so I hope you feel really inspired to grow some Lions Mains yourself and I've got some tips with regards to the fruiting stage of lion's mane mushrooms and the first troubleshooting tip I've got is if you can look at these mushrooms you see some pink discoloration and that is really because these aren't being fruited in the ideal temperature conditions you can see on the temperature gauge it's only 13 degrees Centigrade at the moment here and that often leads to this sort of pink discoloration so the next tip is that when you see brown or yellow coloration that can be a sign of low humidity or wind burn so for instance if it's positioned close to a fan in this draft that will affect the bag the other one is if you see Coral or branching shape then that indicates high CO2 in your fruiting room so a need for more fresh air or it can also be a response of the bag to humidity being too high so making your own Lion's main substrate blocks is obviously a step more complicated and you're going to need a few extra bits of your setup which you won't need if you're just fruit shooting a ready colonized Block in particular you're going to need to have a way of sterilizing your substrate and a nice sterile space like this in order to inoculate in so if you don't have that I'd recommend just starting off with the block but if you do have that and you want to get into growing lines mean here's what you need to do lion's mane likes to grow on a predominantly hardwood based substrate either supplemented at around about 20 with something like Bran or a lot of people like to grow also on the Masters mix which is 50 soybean holes and 50 hardwood sawdust both these substrate types work really really well for lion's mane in order to prepare a substrate you simply need to hydrate it to around about 60 percent load it into your growing bags and then place them into your sterilizer vessel maybe you've got an autoclave could be a pressure cooker or perhaps you've got an atmospheric steam sterilizer barrel all of these methods are going to work well if you're using a pressure cooker or an autoclave you need to run the cycle for around about two and a half hours that'll be sufficient to sterilize the substrate and if you've got a atmospheric steam sterilizer Barrel that's going to be a longer cycle of around about 12 hours that you'll need in order to fully sterilize the substrate once the sterilization cycle has finished you then need to wait for the substrate to cool down to below 35 degrees Celsius and at that point you can then introduce the spawn into the substrate in a sterile space you want to use around about two percent spawn to substrate ratio mix the whole bag up seal it and put it into your incubation space and lion's mane is a pretty fast incubator it does depend a little bit on the strain but for most strains they're going to be fully incubated in around about 12 days or so there are some strains that take a little longer they're going to be more like 18 19 days but most go pretty fast growing and you can tell when it's fully colonized because the whole block will be covered in a very thin layer of wispy mycelium and you'll start to see just a slightly thicker layer of mycelium forming on the top of the block that's the ideal time to put it in to the fruit and Stage so only on in the video Eric mentioned we'd also cover if you can grow lion's mane in the low-tech non-sterile way and I have to say it's not the easiest way of growing lion's mane and that's I think because the mycelium on lion's mane is is thinner more wispy and not as aggressive as something like an oyster mushroom which does grow pretty well in a non-sterile way lion's mane and we've done many trials with lion's mane seeing if we can find a way of developing um that's sort of feasible to grow and what we found is that you really need to have a much higher spawn rate in order for that to work so you can grow lion's mane in a non-sterile way on hardwood sawdust just by adding a lot of Spawn and by a lot of Spawn I'm talking about 30 spawn rate or above and that's probably not really affordable to do for most people as an ongoing method of production but if you're at home you want to grow lion's mane you don't have a pressure cooker it's certainly one way that you can go about it so for most Growers we always recommend buying your spawn in and just focus in on substrate and fruiting within your farm but I know a lot of people also do like to mess around with this at home on a smaller scale so if you want to produce own Lion's main spawn it's pretty much the same process as it is for any other Gourmet variety you need to start with a culture either on a petri dish or maybe you have them in Slants you're going to take a small piece of that material put it onto an agar plate wait for that to grow out and then transfer that into jars of grain and then bags of grain you can also use Liquid culture so maybe you buy a liquid culture syringe you can introduce that into a jar of grain wait for it to fully colonize and then expand that on to 10 to 20 times more grain in bags and that will create your grain spawn that you can then use to add into your substrate blocks one final thing to note when you're making your own Lion's main spawn is as I've mentioned already the mycelium of linesman is really thin and wispy so if you look at your agar plates or your jars and you think oh this isn't really taking off don't worry that's entirely normal that's just what lion's mane mycelium looks like wow so we've covered so much information there and I hope you found it really useful and we'll be growing lots of different types of varieties of mushrooms and going into great detail in new course lessons that we'll be developing so if you are a course member keep your eyes peeled later on this year for those lessons coming your way so what we'll be doing at this Farm is growing lots of different varieties and documenting it and I hope you feel inspired to grow some Lions Mains yourself to eat maybe dry them or maybe make tinctures out of that we've got a separate video on how you can do that here too so thanks a lot for watching this video let us know in the comments below if you're going to give growing lion's mane mushrooms a go thanks a lot again and we'll see you in the next video foreign [Music]

Channel: GroCycle

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Keywords: mushroom farm, grocycle, commercial mushroom farm, grow mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, mushroom business, gourmet mushrooms, mushroom cultivation, growing mushrooms in a bottle, growing mushrooms in, growing mushrooms in bags, mushroom bales, mushroom production costs, cost of mushroom farming, mushroom yields, mushroom production method, substrate, mushroom substrate, ready to fruit, mushroom products, mushroom fruiting, lions mane, lion’s mane, grow lions mane, medicinal

Id: oZI9zjfMQ5k

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023