LIONS MANE ON PASTEURIZED FUEL PELLETS, Baseline Unsupplemented Substrate Experiment

hey guys welcome back to the basement mushroom palace so we're going to get another species growing in our winter grow series here today we're going to do lion's mane um specifically i'm doing herichium americanum now lion's mane for some people means horicio marinatious is the traditional lion's mane species but i kind of call all the heritum species lion's mane as a as like a general group i've grown a lot of different species and strains of lion's mane over the years and my favorite one is the one i'm going to show you today uh it's herichim americanum it's actually native to my area here i do find them wild in the woods so i'm gonna get that rolling today again uh like my oyster grow i'm not doing a big run here i'm just gonna do a three bag run i have three pounds of grain spawn already prepared and we're just gonna do three uh pasteurized fuel pellet bags so i can show you guys the process and similar to oysters lions may need a lot of fresh air and a lot of humidity to develop normally so you can kind of do them as a companion grow as well you can fruit them out in the same kind of environment and they'll both do well but with the lion's mane i'm not going to add any of the aspen shavings or aspen bedding we're just going to go straight hardwood fuel pellets i do want to play with trying to add a little wheat bran in but i'll probably do that in a later grow right now i'm just going to go with my standard recipe and we'll go from there so the fuel pellets i'm using are the same ones i've been using in all my groves lately it's uh these instant heat wood pellets they're made right here in new york um just their hardwood fuel pellets what kind of tree they come from who knows it's uh you know whatever they're milling at the hardwood mill at the time but they've been working good for all the species i've been trying them on lately so that's what we're gonna roll with so turn on our scale and we're going to weigh up two pounds of fuel pellets into our container that's two pounds of dry pellets right there uh as always i add just a pinch of granulated gypsum the gypsum will give some minerals to your mushrooms and it'll also help to create looseness in the sawdust substrate so you can shake easier and uh i already have our standard filter patch bags here we'll label them on the bottom of the filter patch with h a for reaching americanum all in there just like that and i have my water heating up so once i get these all bagged up and ready we'll be adding our boiling water for the bags to get the pasteurization process rolling okay i have the camera zoomed in so you guys can watch me work i got my water boiling here i have this container all marked off and uh two pounds of fuel pellets comes up to this level right here and basically you want to go that same level with your boiling water and that's going to not only pass your eyes but perfectly hydrate your fuel pellets as always when you're working with sawdust it's better to go a little under with your water than over because a little too dry is okay a little too wet is usually not okay so once we uh add our water in uh i'm gonna impulse seal the bag right away that's gonna keep all that steam in there and we're gonna move these bags right to uh i have a clean plastic storage tote right over here they're gonna go right in the storage so we're gonna pack them in nice and tight and uh they're gonna sit in there for an hour and a half to uh pasteurize as always be careful when you're doing this because you're working with really hot water obviously you gotta be careful so we got the water right up the line i'm gonna use our handy dandy funnel here that we made out of the uh gallon water jug helps hold our bag open so as soon as that water hits those fuel pellets they're going to start expanding right away the bag is going to fill with steam so asap just want to move it over to your impulse sealer just give it a good seal right at the top that's it go over to the tub and go on to the next okay i actually have two groves going at once here so i have a bright blue oysters and uh arichum americana bags in here they're gonna be keeping each other company snuggling keeping warm here so i have them all in the tub i'm gonna put the lid on and i'm gonna wrap the whole thing in a blanket i always put a blanket over the tub to kind of hold the heat in and they're just going to ride there for about an hour and a half our ericium bags are all cooled down and ready to inoculate what we did is after they sat for an hour and a half in the tub obviously hot pasteurizing we just pulled them out and sat them on the table over here and just leave them for about two three hours to cool down it does take a little while but you can just sit them on a table allow them to cool down obviously you don't want to inoculate any hot substrate as always you do that you're just going to kill your mycelium and your grow's not going to go anywhere and that's not what we want we want some awesome lions main mushrooms if you guys have never messed with lion's mane or richie mushrooms before they're delicious for one thing but they also have tons of really good medicinal benefits and let's check out our spawn here this is our uh this is wheat and believe it or not this is fully colonized growing herichium does take some getting used to because the mycelium is very different from a lot of other mushrooms it's very wispy when it colonizes and the grain a lot of times won't even look fully colonized but you'll start to see these little dense white dots like you see here and uh that means you're basically fully colonized um and let me see if i can get another jar here show you guys another angle there you go see all those dense white dots and you can you can see that real this looks like spider webs real wispy mycelium running through there not real dense like a lot of other mushrooms so that takes some getting used to but this this grain is fully colonized it's absolutely ready to use now when these blocks are fully colonized it's going to be the same way they're just going to look they're not going to white up real nice like a lot of mushrooms do uh they're just gonna have that real wispy colonization and when you start seeing these real dense you'll see real dense little white patches of growth here and there around the back that basically means they're ready to move to fruiting so growing heritum definitely takes some getting used to but what we're going to do here is we have our scissors we're going to cut the tops of the bags off and our quart jars that's about a pound of grain spawn in each jar so we're just doing one jar to one bag so we'll cut the top off give the jars a little shake dump the spawn in there then we're just gonna move over uh to the impulse sealer and seal up our bags set them aside once we have them all done uh we'll go ahead and give them a shake and this is of course far from uh perfect sterile technique here but that's a cool thing about this pasteurization process as i mentioned in all my videos with this pasteurization method you don't have to have perfect sterile tech and you can pull this off i'm doing it in front of the flow hood but you definitely don't need to do it in front of a flow hood uh you can pull this off just in a clean room with uh still still having really low contamination rates so i did just kind of spray everything down with rubbing alcohol and clean it up a little bit but other than that we're uh we're just going for it [Music] so okay the flow hood turned off now because the only way really to find leaks when you're doing these filtered batch bags is to listen for them so if you're all quiet you just give them a little squeeze and just kind of listen you'll hear if you have a leak you'll hear that air seeping out if you don't hear anything you're good to go so what you're going to do is kind of do a shake and roll here and uh you're trying to break up the spawn and also evenly distribute the spawn throughout the sawdust so you get a nice even spawn run so usually what i do first is i just squeeze from the bottom of the bag up and that kind of brings some sawdust up and move some grain spawn down and once i do that i'll just start shaking and rolling it's important too to get this moist sawdust down here that gets trapped in these gussets to get that out of there too sometimes you'll have some extra moisture trapped down in there you want to just get everything nice and evenly distributed [Music] all right we got all the grain pretty evenly distributed there so you want to try and get as much of this sawdust out of these gussets as you can you want it all down on your block so obviously you want mycelium hitting as much of this as you can try and get your top nice and level here and then what i do is just kind of tap it on the table a few times just to kind of pack it down and that's it that's ready to go on the incubation shelves so what we're going to do i'm going to move these over to just some wire shelves where we always incubate them and uh they'll probably take probably a week or two and like i said at that point you'll start i'll start seeing some dense white patches here in different areas of the block and at that point you gotta be pretty quick and uh move to fruiting and there's some things you have to do at that point which obviously i'll cover when when we're there so quickly i just want to show you guys my environmental conditions i'm working with here too um this is our temp humidity monitor 45 humidity 66 to 68 fahrenheit on the temps all right it's update time on our ericium americanum grow and we're about a week after inoculation here and you might not know it by looking at them but we're starting to get some nice colonization here our blocks are looking really healthy they're looking good but like i said if you're not used to growing heritum this may freak you out you may be thinking what did i do wrong here i'm not seeing any white uh my blocks aren't looking good but this is totally normal for uh most cerecium species at least the ones i've grown and what you can see there is a couple little points of white down here towards the bottom those are individual kernels of wheat and but most of it back up here a little bit you can see there's it almost looks like wet spots on the uh the surface of the sawdust and that's totally normal that's actually that fine linear mycelium starting to spread across the block and that's what those wet spots are so we're actually getting nice colonization here these are looking really good um and what will happen is probably you know we're a week or two away from fruiting time here but all of a sudden uh this black will be colonized with this you know this wispy fine mycelium and then all of a sudden you'll just start seeing some really dense white spots a lot of times they're up here near the uh the open air part of the bag and that's actually pins starting and it happens really fast so you've got to be on top of it and then we got to switch over to fruit mode our hiricum americano blocks are begging to get turned loose here you can see we got a lot of top pinning on on the tops of the blocks we got some nice pins on the sides here as well this one's got a ton of pins on top back here so they are absolutely begging to be turned loose here which is what i'm gonna do right now um parichim is a little different than like some other mushrooms like oysters with oysters pre-primordia formation i'm basically cutting x shaped slits in the bags to kind of try to dictate to the block where i want them to fruit most the time that works sometimes they'll kind of change their mind on you and you have to adjust but uh with heritum i usually let them tell me where they want a fruit so i wait till some of these dense primordia start to form and then i'll go ahead and turn them loose so we're at that point now first thing i'm going to do is cut the corners off the tops of my bags and i'll fold them back tight and tape them with packing tape again i'm trying to eliminate all this free air space up top and stop all this top fruiting and that will force them to fruit out the holes that i make so we'll go ahead and uh trim these corners off tape them back and then we're going to go through and we're going to pick three of these dense white primordia to cut the bag out around them and turn them loose and once we get that done we're going to go ahead and move them over to the fruiting chamber which is running over there i have three oyster blocks in there right now that are that are just starting to pin as well so we'll do them up and move them over make sure these gussets are tucked in nice and tight as well now that i have the tops of the bags taped back tight as tight as i can get them anyway i'm just gonna take my uh scalpel and just pick a few of these primordia to kind of turn loose like right here i have some nice dense fruit bodies forming here i'll probably cut this area out and uh maybe one other spot you know maybe over on the side here or something um and right here like this i really like this nice dense one for him in here i'll cut around him maybe over here like i said just uh pick a couple two three per bag and turn them loose i don't want to leave them sitting out too long uh let these primordia dry out i want to get them right into the fruiting chamber but i'll just show you quickly i just uh exercised some holes a couple spots there there a few on the side here a nice big one there and a couple over here so hopefully those ones that turn loose are gonna develop into nice fruit bodies for us and i'm to go ahead and move them over to the fruiting chamber just want to take a quick peek in the fruiting chamber here i think our herichium americana were just about ready to pick um you can see that they're opening it up and starting to get kind of toothy looking there and uh get some really nice mushrooms got some over here too uh it doesn't look like it's gonna be uh awesome yield on the first flush but we're getting some nice mushrooms anyway one thing i noticed with this method and this strain is that usually my second flush is equal to or actually sometimes even a little more than the first flush which is really uncommon i'm not sure why usually your first flush is your biggest but probably going to come back in a a day or so and pick these guys off so i'm going to go ahead and pick off these heritium um they're looking pretty nice they're really opening up getting toothy so they're definitely ready to pick um not great yield for the first flush um but i have a feeling that they're not loving this uh sawdust or whatever wood type these fuel pellets are made out of because the uh the spawn run was a lot slower than it usually is too so probably for the next run um i'll probably try a different brand of fuel pellets that i have and maybe mix in some aspen shavings as well and uh but we're gonna go ahead and pick these off and uh see what our see what we get uh when i pick these usually i'm gonna be real delicate with them but usually they twist off pretty easy looking pretty nice almost four ounces that one was you may have to do a little trimming there may be a little substrate stuck to the back of the clusters not too bad just a little bit of sawdust i'll keep these around for at least two flushes sometimes three flushes and like i mentioned before with this strain for whatever reason sometimes the uh sometimes but a lot of times the second flush is just as much weight as the first flush was it's our last fruit body here she's a beauty see what we got looks like one pound two ounces so we got some beautiful mushrooms not great weight for our first flush i wouldn't say um so we'll keep playing with our substrate recipe like i mentioned the spawn run was way less aggressive and slower than what i'm used to so i'm guessing they're not liking the wood type that's in these fuel pellets that's one catch with the fuel pellets you don't really know what kind of wood you're getting and it can vary depending on what whatever the hardwood mill is milling at the time they make the pellets so uh we'll try some different additives the uh the next time we do a run of these and see if we can increase our yields and still do pasteurization just because i'm trying to avoid uh doing bulk sub sterilization i actually think i'm gonna dry these and use them in some medicinal extractions so it's kind of a shame i'd love to eat them too they look amazing but uh i need them for some medicinal stuff so anyway i'm gonna just uh go through and just trim the substrate off the backs and uh these are gonna go right into the dehydrator so hope you guys enjoyed the video hope this helps and uh we'll keep working on it playing with some different things but uh it's gonna be it for now i'm gonna keep these blacks around for another one or maybe even two flushes and we'll see see how the yield goes as the as the fruitings progress but that's it for this video and hope you enjoyed it and let me know what uh what strain of hericium you guys like to grow uh what your favorite strain is in comments and what methods you use and what kind of yields you're getting i love to hear that stuff from you guys so catch you next video

Channel: Renegade Mushrooms

Views: 62,845

Keywords: lions mane mushroom, grow lions mane, grow mushrooms, grow mushrooms home, how grow lions mane, lions mane sawdust, easy lions mane grow, lions mane substrate, pasteurized fuel pellet mushroom, pasteurized sawdust mushroom, hericium americanum, hericium sawdust, hericium mushroom grow, best hericium strain, lions mane spawn, beginner mushroom grow, pasteurized fuel pellet tek, beginner lions mane grow, how grow hericium

Id: N-Qpb3K8EL0

Length: 21min 50sec (1310 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 23 2022