mushroom farmer

I'm Tom Wyatt and I started Killbuck Valley mushroom 15 years ago I was a mechanical engineer we're in the midst of doing a production day today which is on straw columns for various varieties of oyster mushrooms well pour bales does a day that's all we need we'll go down chop that up fine things just get more busy every year it seems get ready to chop you just take these make ourselves a little surround to catch the straw from getting blown off into the yard I don't just chop the straw by running it through a standard square bale proper but I run it through two or three times because the the goal is to end up with a chop straw that has basically all one to four inch length pieces in it if you can get it down to this size it saves the tremendous amount of labour in terms of packing it into the column this is all just sort of grunt labor here it's got to cook for about half an hour to an hour to get good and sterile and soak up all the water that it can first dunk the core temp goes to 140 degrees second dunk about 160 and the third dunk you attain about 170 160 to 165 is kind of your minimum pasteurization temperature that will kill most of the harmful contaminants that live in the environment and in the straw for that matter so we want to do a three dunk which will attain a nice pasteurization temperature grab up cinder block here put that on top it's called a block and tackle I don't like new equipment I don't use a winch or anything this is very old stuff this last dunk will attain that hundred and seventy degree pasteurization temperature right through the core and a block on top and that'll seal the environment there and allow that to cook first thing we're going to do is move some columns to make room for from the new columns we'll be putting up today these are the ones that I did Monday and right beside them are the ones that are two weeks old we need to clear that row to make room for the new ones we're going to be doing today I used to just maintain a strip door between the sterile room and my fruiting rooms I have found that taking the time to put an extra layer of plastic up and feeling it thoroughly dramatically increases my my sterility this is what I call a fruiting room and in the fruiting room we take the fully run columns and we well we set them out to fruit or produce mushrooms well you find out if you try to make a living at it it's a fair bit of work this is not a trivial pursuit but that's okay keep gin shake and there's nothing wrong with doing a little work turn your money I've already fluffed this a little bit so I want to get this cool this part on the bottom and we're gonna spread it out and fluff it and spread out half of a basket in my inoculation chute and I have fluffed it once now I'm gonna go along here and turn it all over so while that's cooling we've already pre-cut lengths of this is 10 in a 10 inch diameter tubing seemless 4 mil polyethylene tubing we cut off about 7 feet tie a knot at one end and we hook one length of that up to the end of our inoculation chute there's a funnel at the end now what I'm doing here is I'm breaking up our rye grain spawn all right we're ready to pour here just trying to spread it evenly all over the top surface here get that ride rain spread throughout and then I go through my little funnel here and I just want to twist and fluff and I'm holding the tube so it doesn't want to come loose take our bungee cords off there shake down the loose straw now this I will punch hole full of holes but I won't do that until the end of the day because I don't want to increase my odds of contamination so at this point this will stay closed until I'm done hanging the other nine columns as you can see I've already got my steel hooks that I make with little piece of string on a loop knot so that I can slide them right on once I move them to the fruiting rooms we get about I'd say I produced most of my mushrooms off of them in about a month and a half back to the straw chop now hey I always leave the the real fine stuff in the dust in a pile here after I'm done for the chickens to pick through a little bit of resource recovery there all right well back to work now I am a medical technologist by profession I worked several years in a hospital laboratory well it sort of uses what I already know with the laboratory background but I you know I can set my own hours which there's a lot of them but you know it's not a lot of phone ringing and whatnot so this is this is actually an old summer kitchen that we converted into a laboratory this is called mycelium this is basically the vegetative state of the mushroom so it's where it all starts now you normally don't see it because it's either under the ground or it's inside a log so I start with a culture plate and then I go from the culture plate to a liquid fermentation and you can see some bottles shaken basically a nutritive broth that's in there and my and gross throughout the bra once it's pretty much grown out i will sterilize some right and pour a little bit of the broth into each bag you can see there's some fuzzing out and a few spots and the idea is to get it completely throughout the grain so the Pink's actually the mycelium starts to turn pink as it matures so that's kind of cool how we started is I just went and bought mushrooms at the grocery store and I got a tissue culture from one of those mushrooms the lion's mane produced spores all over the surface that's what all the little hairs or icicles are there it's each individual hair produces spores so if you feel them you feel a little bit of stickiness on your finger that's just the spores they do better on the completely sterilized sawdust but they will find holes if we poke holes in the plastic so that makes it a little bit easier as far as handling is concerned you gently touch them because they can bruise and you just kind of twist and pull so you can tell the maturity on these not so much by the size as by the the length of the icicles well this one is actually very small but you can see it looks pretty furry so it's ready to pick the figure we do say between 200 and 400 pounds a week lion's mane we only do maybe five or ten pounds a week there are delicate mushroom they're unusual there's a smaller market for them because they are unusual it's a little harder to keep enough heat going for them to grow but they will slowly grow with our heating process some can grow in the dark the button mushrooms can but some mushrooms are what you call phototrophic which means they don't photosynthesize like plants but they use lights as a trigger to know that it's up out of the surface and it can spread the cap and drop its spores so the ones we grow tend to be more phototrophic if you left the lights off all the time you'd have a very long stem like it was trying to grow and grow and grow to try to find the surface and the light was the mushrooms actually breathe and they they transpire water from and that's how they move nutrients to the mushroom itself so if they stay too moist on the top they can't transpire when I put the smaller ones in the bottom box or the larger one in a way the mushrooms are like my children they need to be taken care of you got to make sure that you know the environment is well suited for them to grow make sure they've got sufficient humidity all the time because if they don't they'll get very angry and the temperature you want to keep the temperature high enough in the winter so they're not just sitting there dormant that they're actually producing mushrooms at summer you don't want it to be too hot because some of the varieties actually won't fruit if the temperature gets too high with the shiitakes we actually completely sterilize the sawdust so I bring it up to fourteen point nine psi for about four hours to kill anything that's in it and then we put a little bit of the grain spawn into each bag of sawdust now these it's just the wet sawdust you really can't see anything growing I just did those yesterday there are ones that I did a week ago and you can see they're really fuzzing out white but there's still a little bit of sawdust you can see and then they will come to completely white out and let's see those start going through a stage called pop Corning where they they form a lot of bumps and then they'll start going through a browning stage here's one that's nice and brown and at that stage that's when we we will put them in the other room for fruiting I put them by the window to give them a little bit of a cold shock and that'll induce them to fruits so once I start seeing baby mushrooms then I'll put them on the shelves I mean it's just it looks kind of like a pinhead is the way they call it pinning and it'll continue to grow over the next several days and it will eventually open up to expose the gills now these are at ones that are a nice stage for picking you can see the gills they're open but it's not completely flat you want to pick them before the mushroom completely flattens out that's at the ideal stage they'll fruit once and then they'll go through a resting stage where the mycelium is just metabolizing nutrients inside the blocks and after its rested for about two weeks then we soak it in a big soak tank and that's to get the moisture back into it that's a disadvantage of taking the plastic bags off because they do dry off more quickly so put it in the soak tank of cold water and then we put it back on the shelf swarm to fruit again so we'll pick all the mushrooms off and then they'll rest again for a couple weeks and then we'll soak them again and typically we'll do that three or four times and each time it'll be fewer and fewer mushrooms because there's not as much food and nutrition left in the block and then by the time we go through the last flush then we use it on the garden that's not sure I'm usually known as bird that's what I do see and if I can find any critters this is a northern two-line salamander and when they're out in wider areas they shirin like a golden color this is one that's really common this is jewelweed sometimes called touch-me-not and racing they're called touch me nuts is because their seeds explode but the young leaves and the flowers are edible and you'll only find those growing along the creek they're about the only thing that'll grow in the gravel up there are some spicebush which I really like their berries kind of got a flavor like allspice it's not like you most varies it tastes like something you would put on like a steak or something very good this is probably my favorite kind of mint like ever if you try it it's really really strong it's a little fuzzy but the best really good these are Nettles here kind of fuzzy I've kind of gotten used to how to hold them but if you brush up against them they'll leave little welts kind of like a whole bunch of tiny mosquitoes like this jelly stuff inside do it okay yeah and then you rub it wherever it is right there the two-year parsnips are the ones that are flowering you usually only the parsnips that are one year old and those ones are nice and tender the two year ones become woody I'll eat those anyway I like the buds just fried in some olive oil they're actually kind of spicy these are dead lilies they grow wild all over the roads and you can fry up the flowers or the buds I personally prefer the buds but they're actually kind of spicy and really good here's a volunteer sunflower we can come out and eat the seeds later in the air and this here is actually one of my paper at edible plants this is wood sorrel it doesn't do well in the Sun so that's why the leaps are all folded up but it's got little three leave groups and they're shaped like hearts and kind of lemony flavor really really good like my favorite thing to have in salads if we were to head back there we would find a whole bunch more edible plants probably the most useful of them would be the cattail if you get them when they're just sprouting cut them off the white part at the base actually tastes like cucumber then their roots can be used to make starchy flour and their pollen can be used to make a much lighter flower with a certain sweetness to it it's actually really really good

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Views: 1,561,776

Rating: 4.8852935 out of 5

Keywords: mushroom, farmer

Id: 9-JoxKte1yQ

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 18 2012