The SIMPLEST way to grow oyster mushrooms

today we are doing super low-tech oyster mushroom production [Music] oh my way to the neighbors a little alley way down the track here third man it's normally first so we are essentially making a bunch of these now this is and straw pellets that are used for horse bedding they turn out to be super cool for mushroom production because they are the heat and the pressure of forming the pellets that should sterilizes them now this is the lowest tech mushrooms technique you will see most people on the low-tech method would take straw or coffee grounds or whatever it is wood and then use lime which is a really high pH to sterilize it but then you have to neutralize that water so you'll do that like a couple hundred kilos of straw in an IBC with lime but then you have to neutralize that water with acid to then pour it out on the field because the pH but this method means we can just both order straw pellets bulk order mycelium add water mix it together and we get a 4 to 1 ratio return on these if we have a 6 kilo bag we get a kilo and a half of mushrooms out of it it's just pretty good this is third spawning of these oysters I dropped them so unfortunately they snapped but you can see when they've come out so our job today is hydrating the straw to about sixty sixty-five percent humidity and we add two point four kilos of straw to three point six kilos of water and it should be clean more than the green sea don't kill things and then we'll put 500 grams of this mycelium so this is blue King moister and Indian oyster which is a different type of oysters the tropical moisture so it says on the store their mycelium at one to five degrees in the fridge but Indian oyster wants to be at ten degrees so not in the fridge that's the same for the blue outside the yellow and the pink oysters which we don't have any mycelium or so these are inoculated onto millet usually grain or millet or whatever and then the mushrooms that has a special spore filter to allow gas exchange but no mushroom spores in these are nicely colonized but what we will do is crumble these up there's obviously at the bottom they're still mycelium in there but it's not so thickly colonized so we'll mix and crumble this together to evenly distribute it into these bags so the way like these have become really popular as bedding for horses because they are absorbing such a large amount compared to their weight so rather than having thick deep bedding from the horses you can get away with a really thin there so we have to add water at that precise ratio and it takes about 15 minutes for it to soak up the water so we have to leave it let it soak it up and then we're using this lay flat tubing now lay flat tubing is used for different things in different industries but it's basically a circular bag and it's sterile due to manufacturing so we have you know we are essentially able to run this enterprise without any more sterility than this mixing bowls mycelium that's ready to go clean bags and straw pellets that's it so it's super super easy way to do mushrooms and when you're not working sterile you get molds you'll get like Bluegreen molds it come into these bags but we've got there's a tiny little bit of mold now this is on the third fruiting do you see that's you know this has just been setting yep that's pretty impressive for the you know a lot of small growers do low-tech mushroom production but this is by far the simplest way you could possibly do so we're going to cut this in 2 meter links put a cable tie on the bottom put in layers about 2 or 3 inches thick we'll have weighed out 500 grams of Spawn for each bag and we'll just Rinku handful every few layers and his best to have layers like that because the colonization is much better than if you just mixed it through totally so little intense patches that will spread out and you'll see bands of mycelium as it starts to colonize and then that will spread and colonize all of it and then we put holes in the bag that'll cross shaped holes to allow gas exchange and the mushrooms will always pop out of these holes because that's imagine this is like a log and so where the mycelium hits oxygen that's when a mushroom fruit and so we're we're tricking them to fruit where we want them to fruit now oysters are such opportunistic mushrooms that they will start pinning or fruiting under the plastic if you're not careful and that's just the sign of how ferocious these mushrooms are like they're they're the easiest mushrooms to grow by fun you can do this with shiitake obviously we've seen them up with up and then we just table tied the top to make a little handle that we can hang these up these need to be worn now different mushrooms need to be kept with different temperatures for that incubation so incubation is in the dark and that's certain temperatures but for oysters you can get away with around 18 degrees for all of them so we put them in the lean-to greenhouse in the dark they don't need light at that point and they are turning a huge amount of this carbon into carbon dioxide during the process of eating it and so that's a perfect place to grow mushrooms in your nursery where they can be pumping out co2 co2 producer with the plant and one co2 once they've incubated for about 7 to 12 days we'll be observing them then we bring them out into partial fruiting these bags can get up to 35 degrees Celsius while it's incubating when they're sweating and then we'll bring them out partial lights the yutz has been fine during the summer this week so we'll probably put them indoors somewhere maybe up in your loft or something and hopefully get some fruiting before you go and we'll get one flush then we soak it in water for 24 hours then we get a second flush and this is now in the third flush coming so one thing that's really important in the economy of this is the rate of inoculation so industrial productions will go down to like 3% inoculation rates which obviously saves money in spawn but in this low sterility method you can't get away with that you would ideally like the target should be about 6% but you would want to start at about 10% so that would be 600 grams for a 6 kilo bag or whatever we're putting in 500 grams but you start higher and work your way down to the lowest you can reliably get away with but if you like you can't compete with the industry that's using sterile rooms and you know wearing hazmat suits stuff like that so that's an important point because the more mycelium we put in the quicker it runs the less infection we'll get but the more expensive it is to produce so the model that featured in our book is 56 of these a week producing about 84 kilos of mushrooms a week which is a lot that's a full-time job [Music] we are working to squeeze into you would actually have a HEPA filter on the outside of the building pumping clean air without mushroom spawn inside and you'd be working but we've been extremely impressed with the greenhouse hanging up in the air we have dinner no stability at all but they've been working extremely well with a four to one conversion ratio without even perfect conditions with heat and humidity now obviously if you were doing this commercially buying spawning small consumer backs is not economic and also buying the straw pellets in this way you would set it up a little bit differently and there'll be details of how this enterprise can be run in our book but you would be buying this from a company called mycelium Belgium and they supply in very large quantities so you would be buying like four to six to eight weeks worth of supply you would need a walk-in chiller to be able to store this at the correct conditions where you would buy in bulk in big pallets you wouldn't be buying it as a consumer pack and that would bring the price down if you do a gross profit analysis it's cheaper to buy spawn from a lab and get high-quality every time then it is to propagate your own spawn on the farm which also cuts down the workload of this enterprise to get it to a sensible full-time operation capable of producing you know decent family income you might remember from video before we grew shiitake like this altar just with a little bag of it we didn't test it out like we've been doing with the mushrooms we're thinking because I've dropped this now and the conditions getting colder we might rip this bag open and use it to inoculate some thing like a pair jeans anything that lived before will live again through these can live again through sacrifice so this is a copy of the book now I know some of you waiting for this and you'll be upset that I'm making holes in it but I thought it would be fitting turn to page 200 citizen and then knock you make this with mushrooms will use the same angle grinder attachment this is what we use to knock the logs with sawdust born like you've seen in other videos and for good measure will inoculate this t-shirt [Applause] so breaking up spawn just to get it even that we can distribute it evenly throughout growing medium okay that's looking pretty sucks now I did say in my last book and I'll say it again the reason I'm doing this is that if when you read this it's not useful you can do the same post me back to the dried mushrooms and I can eat my words so look at these pages it tells you all about the growing conditions of different oysters but it is the the blue-gray that we're growing this time not the pink or the yellow and here's all the details you need for conditions etc now it doesn't teach you how to grow them in books but that's right we're basically just gonna fill the holes as evenly as we can with blue grey mushroom spawn making sure that we follow the chapters and sequence and it looks nicer so that should go well and I'm gonna put a bit of the old bag of spawn in here too which is blue gray Easter so this is already their mycelium has only run through here so I'll just put a bunch of this in the agroforestry section we could measure that's it we're just gonna keep this moist in the warm place in the dark and then a few inches if you're doing a lot of these you would go the simple form add an ergonomic pipe with a bit of 150 ml pipe you can tuck the bag over so you can just work with both hands spinning and you get much better relation when you have big and finish these bags off we're putting holes and there's a formula in the books and working out how many holes but we basically put one two three one two three one two three and a couple on the top and bottom and that's enough for good gas transfer too much gas transfer hours day microgreens nice rockets Asian greens spicy message so low-cost schoolboy chiller project is gonna happen we are driving quite far north to get some secondhand panels and we're gonna build it out of used chiller panels it's cheaper than buying insulation here in Sweden that's the way to do a local Astatula we've already got the unit the AC unit to split unit and we'll talk all about that when we do a video on this as we build it so we're hanging these up here now they're gonna be not touching but you could hang it off this one if we squeeze another scalar and then these need to be in a duct so we're gonna wrap them up with a little marker gun clock and they will sit in here hopefully 1820 degrees it's just sitting quite warm today in this September day in the summer but with oysters are so opportunist that you can be you know within 15 to 25 degrees they really get away with quite a nice emotion okay fun day so it's the end of the video and I hope you enjoyed and get some information out of that there will be a lot of information about going mushrooms in the book as a whole chapter devoted to that and its really drawing a lot from the work of my friend Adam saner who's an excellent man and a mushroom grad too and he runs grow cycle in the UK so you can check them out in the links below if you want more information about intensive oyster mushroom production but hopefully interesting and we'll be starting to make route trainings tomorrow and then I'm heading up north to pick up some panels to make the cool bot chiller for the veg station so stay tuned for details of that and I'll be launching the crowd source campaign next week so you can pre-order the book bye for now you [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 12,814

Rating: 4.9725399 out of 5

Keywords: growingmushrooms, oystermushrooms, regenerativeagriculture, ridgedale, richardperkins

Id: -ZMozJW2N78

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019