Shiitake Mushroom Harvest and Cultivation Tips | Southwest Mushrooms

grow room 2 is full of shiitake mushrooms we're going to go ahead and harvest them today and get them boxed up in in refrigeration go grab some produce boxes so yeah we harvest all of our mushrooms into these nice little produce boxes and they help keep them keep them fresh and keep them from getting damaged this is a little cleanup bucket for when I'm harvesting my mushrooms I can put any debris off to the side wheel my stainless steel table right in front of my grill room and I'll just lock the wheels so what's not moving around on me I'll turn the humidity down while I'm harvesting right before harvest is recommended to kind of cut the humidity down just a little bit that way your mushrooms I basically you get a longer shelf-life out of them yeah shiitakes a really interesting mushroom it is one of my favorite to grow it's also one of the most labor-intensive harvests you have to cut each mushroom off one by one right so yeah we have some shitake mushrooms right here that are ready to go I like to harvest some right as the cap begins to open up but it doesn't open up completely and so yeah some of these blocks are really covered with shiitake mushrooms so yeah we'll go ahead and harvest these right now they are ready to go so yeah these mushrooms are growing off of a mix of oak hardwood sawdust that I've supplemented with about 15 to 20 percent organic wheat bran so that organic wheat bran gives the mushrooms mycelium a nice nice nutritional boost to kind of take over the sawdust and increase your yield so you could just grow on just oak hardwood sawdust with no supplementation that actually would make it a little bit easier for the cultivator because you wouldn't need the sterilization process which we utilize due to the high nutrition in our substrate to kill off any kind of competitor organisms that can out-compete or much from mycelium so when you're just using like an oak hardwood sawdust with no supplementation you could just pasteurize it or just pour boiling 170 to 180 degree water over your sawdust to let it sit for about an hour at that temperature and then at that point you can let it cool and inoculate with some grain spawn or sawdust spawn that's grown out with the shitake culture you can buy spawn or if you don't know how to make spawn you can buy it somewhere and and just use that to inoculate your substrate and and start growing your own mushrooms and start getting a bit of a glimpse of the process start familiarizing yourself with the fruiting process and the colonization process understand the mycelium and how it develops and learn from it so this blocks just been harvested so I'll just put it back and I just keep grabbing blocks and just keep cutting away and I'll weigh each box out to 5 pounds and when I'm harvesting these mushrooms I just cut right at the base as close to the block but not trying to cut into the block so I like this train because it does have small stems or short stems both of these strains do and the I grow shiitake 37 82 and 37 90 which are just two really cool shiitake strains 37 82 is the one that you're seeing right here and it grows these nice less-dense of a cap within the 3790 so this cap is really good for just like crisping up getting to like a nice light crisp faster or just less less of a dense cap so 37 90s real meaty real dense so yeah this is what I mean by just takes longer to harvest i'm yielding about two pounds per block and takes me a few minutes to harvest that two pounds as it compared to growing oyster mushrooms you can harvest two pounds in just one pull there's some benefits to both if you have the space to grow shiitake then that's awesome it takes up more space in the amount of time it takes to grow one crop of shiitake you can produce four crops of oyster or probably lion's mane too so yeah this is just a pretty easy harvest for the most part pretty pretty pretty basic just trim in the mushrooms off as clean as possible and if you wanted to you could actually second flush these blocks that would it involve just letting these blocks completely dry out for about two weeks so if you grow them in a grow room you could just shut your humidity offer for about two weeks and then at that point you would rehydrate your blocks with a nice dunking some cold water rehydrate them for about six to twelve hours some people do 24 hours I think that could be a bit long so just be careful with that then after that point you can just put them back in the grow room hose them down and within a few days mushrooms will begin to reappear and you can get another crop and continue that process until your blocks become spent here we just do the one flush we get most of our yield on our first flush and then at that point we just recycle the blocks into compost or whatnot so we have a shiitake mushroom mycelium is really interesting you can notice how the block is completely brown basically shiitake mushroom is the only one that really really does this it starts out white and then after about two weeks it begins pop Corning so you get this nice bumpy bumpy surface then after that it starts to brown and ripen so we let them go for about eight to twelve weeks depending on the strain before we even put them in the grow room that ensures you get a really nice crop of shiitake if you put them in there when they're still white you're not gonna get as much of a yields like shiitake is not gonna be as top-quality so as with any mushroom recommended preparation is to cook your mushrooms mushrooms should never be eaten raw and if you do eat them wrong you're not getting any nutritional content from them so I like to prepare these just like sauteing them a simple saute for 15 to 20 minutes over medium heat in addition with some garlic and a little bit of oil and you can ask also top it off with a little white wine and tamari makes a great addition to like a stir-fry or rice dish in addition to a brahman or anything like that it's really good shiitake is very very tasty mushroom and it's also very medicinal it's a good at boosting the immune function and it's been used as a food and medicine for quite a while it's also commonly used in like miso soups stuff like that you can find it in a lot of like pan Asian cuisine it's a classic gourmet mushroom it's also the most cultivated gourmet mushroom in the world as far as wood loving gourmet species go and it's a hard wood loving mushroom of course she meaning oh and talk a meaning mushroom its originated on oak trees so by cooking mushrooms you're able to unlock the in traditional value by breaking down this chitin layer that the mushrooms are made up of the so wall of the mushroom is made up of chitin like material so our bodies can't digest chitin heat treatment is necessary to break down the cell wall enough to where our bodies can access the nutrients one experiment is you know you can eat a mushroom Ron it basically just won't come out digest it you can't digest it so really interesting stuff when you're eating fresh mushrooms or people love getting fresh button mushrooms and their salads and you're not even getting any nutritional content from those except the water that they have so cooking of all mushrooms is necessary to retain that nutritional benefits or those nutritional goodies that that mushrooms can offer us so yeah we always cooked about 15 to 20 minutes on medium heat or up until the gills get like carmelization or light browning to them and that's where I find that really tasty you can enjoy them as a snack on their own which is really cool or toss them into really any dish that you eat shitake mushrooms are mostly dried and for us we we we sell quite a bit of our shiitakes fresh anything that doesn't get sold fresh or if we do want to do some dried we we just dry it in our drying room we also have a tional II offer like a shiitake powder we can dry the stems and powder the stems a lot of people will use the stem of the shiitake for like a stock so because the stem of the shiitake is actually very tough and really chewy so mainly your look after the cap with this mushroom so you can do a lot with the stem the stem also has nutritional benefits just like the cap so it's definitely recommended to get the most out of it yeah this mushroom has a really nice woodsy almost smoky flavor that a lot of people enjoy a lot of people enjoy including myself this could be any mushroom can be great for vegans or vegetarians I think or I know that this one is you can really utilize it I mean it I would say this one has a distinct flavor it's definitely unique it can it's not as a meat I think the lion's mane and like the trumpet are really good like you could shred them up and create like a pulled pork really get like a meatiness out of those these ones have their own flavor it's like robust meaty pear as well and I mean pastas stuff like that instead of eating a steak you can just do shiitakes kind of has a meeting this to it a nice smokey meeting this to it that really really pairs well with a lot of things and I've considered a great meat meat replacement a lot of these gourmet mushrooms contain up to 30 grams of protein per per quarter pound servings so or 6 ounce serving so you can get a lot of protein from them as well as central vitamins and other goodies that they offer the lion's mane is super really it has like kind of like a crab like texture some people say one of my restaurants uses it in that taco recipe and I think it makes an excellent taco we've done shitake tacos as well they also make really good mushroom tacos just depends on what flavor you're after so shiitake has a nice distinct flavor I think it prepares what best with pan Asian style cuisine or Asian style cuisine stir fries with fried Rice's soups like miso zan draman's I really like to use shiitake and that that kind of perspective it's a common mushroom a lot of people are familiar with shiitake so it's been a staple and and diets for quite a while I believe shitake was first cultivated or brought here in a commercial sense in the 80s so it's still about you know 35 years since the shiitakes were really brought out in a commercial a commercial way but they've been grown in like Japan and China for Oh quite a long time on the USDA Agriculture's sheets the price sheet shiitakes are a little bit more expensive than oysters that they averaged about like 450 a pound on like a commercial wholesale price average which is super cheap for the grower that's just growing them for this local local market where they average and a local setting I would say between 8 to 12 dollars a pound for like wholesale prices or grocery stores so it's still quite cheap for for the mushroom and since it takes so long to grow oysters you're basically averaging about the same price and you can grow them much faster so a lot of people do just stick with like an oyster mushroom because you're you're really getting close to the same price and you can produce four crops in the same amount of time as you can produce one of these we we just have a lot of space and we do like growing the shiitake so I have another warehouse set aside just for the shiitake incubation so they have their own incubation warehouse and then we can do our oyster mushrooms and our lion's mane and our fast fruiting strains here and our in our warehouse or other warehouse so we'll do like oyster mushrooms lion's mane pea opini stuff like that in our fast fruiting section even chestnut and then shiitake since it takes 2 to 3 months most of the time we're letting our blocks go for three months before even getting them into the grow room so that that does it so if you don't have much space and you're looking for a mushroom to grow and you're thinking you want to go crazy Wichita he definitely grow a few blocks and try it out but definitely don't try to you know it'll take up a lot of incubation space so take that into account be aware of that and you'll be good to go I just started growing shiitake because I just like to grow but I do notice people buy it often and it's an easy sell people are very familiar with shiitake I think that the best thing you can do is a lot of people say don't do it is try to focus on growing one strain and perfect it I just started growing up as many strains as I can and I like growing variety I feel like it's better for me and I'm able to offer more more more options for for people or clients so I like the fact that we grow a lot of variety throughout the year we can rotate through you know up to 20 different strains of mushrooms and we do really well with them I just started growing shiitake because I was really interested in it and I wanted I just started experimenting with small batches at home I was sterilizing all my blocks in a forty one and a half quart American pressure sterilizer so I would do you know 30 shiitake blocks a week and on top of that I was sterilizing every day and doing production every day I did about 36 to 40 blocks a day so I have one of my production days I would just set aside a shiitake day and I wanted to get familiar with the growth of it because I was really interested in shiitake just because I thought it was really fascinating mushroom and wanted to learn how it grows and basically learned that's that's it iced notice those shiitakes a great farmers market mushroom or like a grocery store mushroom it doesn't do as well with like chefs they'd rather get something more exotic or maybe it's the fact that they can get some cheaper shiitake from Chinese grower we're from a just bigger distributor that grows them at a wider wider level than me but most of the time they want something more exotic like the lion's mane the chestnuts the pea apini some colored oyster mushroom variety whether it be pink or blue gold but the shiitakes do excellent at a farmers market and if you can get in with a grocery store they do great there it's a common mushroom you know for gourmet mushrooms it's like our gourmet Portobello or button because everybody knows about shiitake this is my second grow room and this is must this is my shiitake and my reishi mushroom grow room it I grow in this girl room for shiitake because it does have a lower speed fan setting for the exhaust all the other rooms are more high-powered the grow room 3 has its own exclusive air system so that one I can really utilize to just power out some oyster mushrooms and I do lion's mane very well in there I can get the teeth to grow out very long and it's just perfect so each room is dialed in to their own specific species so grow room ones that one can does Pete peony and chestnut also does always stir mushrooms very well grow room 3 does my lion's mane and oyster mushrooms and then this grow room I use for shiitake and I'll do reishi mushrooms in here as well so these mushrooms do really well in there and it's just because it has a lower just room maintains like a little bit of a higher co2 level parts-per-million it probably stays around 500 in this room and then the about 400 so at this point we let our reishi mushrooms just grow out completely in the bag and then when we want to initiate the conch formation we'll just load them into the grow room and see and I'll just do ratio on a top shelf of my girl room that way the mushrooms have enough room and space to grow out properly so this is the Ganoderma lucidum this is the sensi cincy stricto i believe this is a california origin very nice it produces these beautiful beautiful and very nice thick stems good for teas so you'll just boil these up you can boil them fresh 30 minutes like I said this mushroom is very tough has a very thick cell wall and chitin is actually the same substance that the crab shells are made out of and hard materials like that so you can notice the very hard structure of the shell of this mushroom and all mushrooms have like a chitin cell wall so that's what we're essentially trying to break down so we can access the medicinal qualities or the the nutritional benefits of our mushrooms it's recommended that you cut them with scissors if you try harvesting them with your your hand you're likely to rip out some substrate and it won't be as clean of a harvest so just use these scissors to get a clean efficient harvest on our shiitake crop wax paper is good because it kind of locks in that moisture so your mushrooms don't dry out when they're in the fridge so I'll just put a layer on top keep some pretty fresh and if you don't use like wax paper and you try to use like another paper that's not like wax coated and I've seen like the mushrooms try to like eat through them try to grow onto like a paper because they love wood base substrate so most papers made out of wood right so your mushrooms will try to grow on to that these boxes are sent to wholesalers they go to shamrock foods peddler son or AJ's fine foods so it's a outlet of grocery stores out here in Phoenix that you can get these mushrooms from and then that's basically why we use these boxes we can sell them in lots of five pounds or as with oysters we do three and a half pounds per per case since the oyster so such a fragile mushroom it grows out on these big clusters so trying to put five pounds in our our in our boxes can get a little you can damage your mushroom so we just try to keep it nice but every other mushroom really about five pounds goes into in a box and then from there we have a have a few wholesalers come pick them up we'll deliver them out we also deliver it to our own restaurant clients so we'll just drop these boxes off with a restaurant after they put in an order depending on what species they get and everybody's happy and then we'll also use them to just to store our mushrooms in general we'll bring them out and sell them in at the farmers market right out of the box so these ones are ready to produce spores now actually these mushrooms if you wanted to take a spore print you could just take the cap off of this stem and lay it onto a piece of foil and the mushroom is actually sending out spores as we speak a lot of them are microscopic but sometimes if you look at them in the right light and you look at it like a mushroom block you can see little little plumes of smoke drifting from under the mushrooms and that's tons of spores just traveling off of our mushrooms I actually just saw some spores just drifting off right now so you can get a lot of spores from these mushrooms they're actively producing spores as we speak yeah and that's what I do I just dropped some on a piece of aluminum foil I dropped a cap on a piece of aluminum foil covered it with a quart sized jar the next day I came in and there was a nice little white spore print depending on each species of mushroom you get a different colored spore print depending on the the species or strain so like our pink oyster mushroom produces a pink spore print shiitakes produce a white one the chestnut mushroom produces like a chestnut browns for Peppino's also produce a chocolate brown colored Spore the lion's mane produces a white Spore so we get some different colorations with our spores after taking a spore print I am able to go into the laboratory and with a syringe filled with some sterilized water I can scrape the spores into a clean little unused petri dish that's sterile as well and throw some water in there and suck it right back up into my syringe and from there I actually planted it on some petri dishes the other day and now I already have some fresh mushroom mycelium growing from the spores so I just restarted my basically just restarted from a new culture that I'm gonna be isolating from because usually I just take from already pre grown cultures and they last for a few years but every few years I recommended that I start back from spores so I mean depending on how long your cultures last about every five years or so you can go back to a spore print and look for a new strain or you know try to develop something new and isolate it and then from there store that in a slant or a petri dish and then you can have access to that strain for years to come that's what I'm gonna be doing so yeah these mushrooms are already producing spores as soon as the cap begins to flatten out so something like this right here isn't producing as many spores well you might get some sports from it but mushrooms like these are producing lots of spores at this point so these new genetics that I'm taking from spore they'll be very unique they'll be different so it'll I'll definitely have to do some selecting to look for the most aggressive strain and also the best quality producers might want to make sure that it does a good yield for me and produces some beautiful looking mushrooms and also what I might do is that grow out the spore well I have the spores germinated on petri dishes the mycelium will grow out I will transfer that to transfer sectors of it to new plates once those are grown out I will inoculate sterilized grain spawn then actually grow it out onto production blocks like this then from there I can look for the best-looking mushroom on my production block and then take that mushroom into my lab and clone it by taking a piece of tissue from the center of the mushroom and planting that on a petri dish and from that point I will successfully isolate a mushrooms strain-specific to where each and every mushroom that I grew out and in my facility will be a clone of that mushroom and have the desirable genetic traits and yields that I'm looking for so pretty cool stuff yeah my 37 82 is actually from a clone it's from 2017 so just the other day I took a spore print and I felt like it's time to just add another add another strain to the library and just have the new most of time with shiitake we actually flip our blocks upside down no mushrooms grow out of the top so this is when our mushroom just sitting on the incubation this is actually the top of our bag so when we put it in a fruiting we just flip it upside down all the mushrooms grow out of the bottom I think that could be possible to gravity when the mushroom block is colonizing maybe most most of the moisture might be collecting down at the bottom just from like condensation and whatnot mushrooms will pin and form mushrooms wherever is they sense the most humidity so we just flip them upside down that way we're not getting mushrooms growing all on the bottoms of our blocks when we're in there trying to harvest so get better better fruits the fact that you see more garriga's mushrooms which would be your button mushrooms your Kamini your portobello mushrooms the reason why you see most of those on your dinner plates and I feel like in grocery stores is the fact that there's such a huge there's such a huge force behind the industry that are that are cultivating them it's a billion-dollar industry so they're super mass-produced and they're able to achieve really high yields and like small spaces they're also it's interesting they're not as nutritional as like a wood loving mushroom so like your buttons and permease and all those agaricus species are mainly cultivated on compost and manure based substrates wood loving species are definitely more nutritional than what you'd get from a button portobello or kamini they are known to contain like high levels of beta glucans and polysaccharides and also a lot of other compounds that are good for us like shiitakes produced lenten in it's also anti-cancer anti tumour which you'll find with a lot of the wood loving species they are really utilized they've been utilizing a lot of medicinal aspects ranging from like cancer treatments and dealing with fatigue and chemotherapy to even our alliance man or lion's mane mushrooms in general that can help with just the overall brain function cognitive function memory focus the fact that it contains like harissa nose and hearing a scenes that can repair you know nerve growth and neurons and the brain is really outstanding and there's so much to the world that mushrooms that you can find with hard wood loving species compared to just just agaricus so but you know I'm not gonna hate on any of the mushrooms I mean mushrooms are all good but I'm called specialty mushrooms I think it's not the norm with seeing like you know now we're starting to see more growers pop up but I feel like agaricus mushrooms were widely commercialized a lot before or before hardwood loving and specialty mushrooms were so there's a lot of big key players in the industry that are able to cultivate over a million pounds of agaricus mushrooms every month and those make their ways to a lot of grocery stores their mass produce so you see them on every shelf and you don't see much much of the specialty mushrooms a lot of growers have been known to ship in ready to fruit like shiitake blocks from China and grow those I know like 85% of the world's mushrooms are cultivated in shiitake for like specialty mushrooms so we're starting to see more of this growth out here in the United States so more growers are growing a lot of different species and there's there's a lot more diversity coming out so it's really cool I wouldn't want to grow compost living mushrooms just because the storage of all the compost like I can grow these specialty mushrooms in in like small spaces I can grow them and you know warehouses and I can set up these these growing rooms that are really nice and clean then I don't have to deal with manure all the time and getting truckloads of manure is sent to me I can utilize local hardwood waste and also if that's not available I can get hard wood pellets that can be rehydrated and turned into my substrate so storage is easy I can store things and on pallets with no smell I don't have to walk into my facility and smell a bunch of compost which would not be good for my lab is in the warehouse next door so that would be bring contamination into my grow so you got to be really careful when you're growing compost letting mushrooms for the fact that it takes a lot more space the fact that the those mushrooms usually average at about a dollar per pound or less you're not gonna get much money unless you're able to really mass-produce them so the guys that are drawn like a million pounds a week they're able to really dominate the market there's no there's no room for anybody else because you're gonna you know unless there's a really good local market for you that's one to pay top dollar for you know locally grown button and cremini then I would say to get your foot in the door the right way start with like an oyster mushroom and really maximize your space and the use of materials that are around you and then from there one day if you get the space and you want to really enter in the agaricus market and you can look at look into it but I think there's plenty of agaricus out there well as I was reading a few years ago up to 85% of the world's mushroom supply is coming from China China just has for a long time been just a leading producer worldwide for mushrooms so a lot of people have learned a lot from Chinese cultivation practices but the fact that a lot of mushrooms are coming from China definitely says something that we need to start growing more food here and teaching people about this so we can access good food I've read reports where mushrooms coming from China were shown to be sprayed with sodium phosphates and whatnot to make them appear or keep their whiteness and freshness longer so that's like going against what we're posed to be eating mushrooms for and to be eating them to remove toxins and pollutants from our body and not to put them in there so it's one of the good reasons why I like doing this so I can just give people healthy access to good good food I think it's mind blowing a lot of a lot of shiitake for one was cultivated in China a long time ago and in Japan as well but they found that like cutting down the trees that had shown fruiting some shiitake mushrooms and striking them as well as soaking them in water provided essential fruiting zs-- also China has like the landscape and environment where mushrooms can grow in these really unique basically farms where they're able to fruit all the mushrooms on logs outside in like hoop hoop frame tents where there's really no artificial supplementation at all everything is totally natural for the fact that the humidity is just out in the mountains and you know they have the tents really wide and open and air is able to travel through them really nicely so yeah China is just a place where they have been cultivating mushrooms for a long time and they have huge farms as well that just pump out lots of mushrooms I think the fact that they have such a really huge population they've learned to cultivate a lot of food for a lot of people

Channel: Southwest Mushrooms

Views: 848,780

Rating: 4.9438624 out of 5

Keywords: mushroom mike, mycology, southwest mushrooms, fungi, mycelium, mushroom farm, grow mushrooms

Id: btXfkWYlXEI

Length: 35min 31sec (2131 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020