Cultivating Gourmet Medicinal Mushrooms | Mushrooms Farming Business

Cultivating Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms | Mushrooms Farming Business

A day and a half ago this thing was the size of the tip of my pinky there's been stories of toxic waste cleanup by mushrooms without mushrooms we would be over run with waste there would not be any life on earth Ganoderma lucidum since this trick though it's known as the mushroom of immortality their antiviral antibacterial it's been shown to shrink and terminate tomaro growth and we do about a hundred and eighty bags per cycle and we do that three times a week yeah this used to be done in my house.
Now we have some shitake mushrooms right here that are ready to go there's thousands of ways that these guys can save our world to make our environment that much better to live in cultivating fungi and mushrooms is like a balance between science and art I'm gonna be taking a look inside of my this is the spawn incubation slash culture media room and I'm just gonna select out some cultures,Today and take a look at some of my spawn.

Mcelium Sterilized Grain Mushrooms

Today I will be taking little pieces of tissue from these plates and dropping them into nutrient media bras to basically expand the mycelium
Mushrooms here we cultivate a wide variety of medicinal mushrooms there we just drop a couple chunks of mycelium tissue of cordyceps my ecology is the study of fungi and basically the growth of different fungi people don't realize that there is such a wide array of different mushrooms out there molds and fungi starts from spores rather than seed to compatible spores will mate inform mycelium the mycelium starts out.

We planted on a petri dish and from there we transfer healthy sectors of mycelium into bags of sterilized grain here we have organic wheat berries that we use from their mycelium will spread and devour whatever food source said it's working with full colonization occurs you'll see a big nice healthy bag of white mycelium this can get broken up and utilized to inoculate you are from20 to 30 of our production blogs with good spawn you don't have mushrooms.

A lot of people that will get into try to get into growing mushrooms because they've grown like a lot of plants before think that you know it'll
Be basically like kind of similar but it's definitely totally different to germinating spores on petri dishes you're growing out the mycelium you're doing transfers into like sterilized grain substrates as opposed to soils yeah this is our production area.

This is where our substrate gets made we use a blend of oak hardwood sawdust plus added supplements like organic wheat bran and certain seed holds to basically formulate our substrate to get the maximum efficiency from our mushrooms bags are filled up to approximately 10to 12 pounds and then from there we make our way into the sterilization area.

Growing-Temperature Medicinal Mushrooms

Where the substrate will be sterilized for a prolonged period of time to make sure we kill off any microorganisms or competitor competitor molds or fungi nothing's needed it's all sterile so you don't need to use any kind of like pesticides or any kind of fertilizers or additives have to really take a lot of care and making sure that you're only growing the fungi that you desire.

This is a sterilization room this is where we sterilize all of our substrate and here we can sterilize up to 1600 pounds of fresh substrate at a time and basically steam comes through and and sterilize that at a high temperature above about212 degrees if it's not sterilized properly we'll take it into inoculate and you'll run into a lot of contamination problems and molds outgrowing your mycelium.

We have our spawn right here this is a California reishi so we'll take our spawn and just kind of break it up separate the each individual grain and I allow that to become a vehicle for our mycelium so take a scalpel and then I'll heat sterilize it the HEPA filter right here is basically providing us just a clean workspace to perform our inoculation.

So we're getting a stream of sterile air it's eyeballed I get I can pretty good at eyeballing it so that's what I do so they have the bags that place in front of the flow hood inflated with a little bit of that sterile air and then sealed alright so now our bags inoculated and we're just gonna want to shake it up some people think that all mushrooms are growing in the dark on manure we have wood loving mushrooms.

Mushroom that can grow on insects and micro rhizomes species of mushrooms that can connect with like different plants this area are shiitake incubation area the shiitake generally takes 8 weeks before we can get into the fruiting room we can see the mushrooms at this stage beginning to like popcorn as the mushroom begins to mature you let the blocks ripen and they begin to turn brown and this is a block that's that's ready to go into our fruiting room it's ripe and ready yeah generally a lot of people a lot of new growers will mistake the brown for a contamination but that's actually.

Produce a Good Crop of Mushrooms

Just the mycelium ripening and getting ready to produce a good crop of mushrooms and yeah over here we have some freshly inoculated blocks we could see the mycelium start and jump off from the grain that it was inoculated with and looking for sawdust to basically break down and utilize as a food source in nature you'd find out mushrooms drawing off of the sides of trees.

So here we kind of try to simulate that way of growth with this block inside is a oak hardwood sawdust and the bag kind of acts as an artificial bark tree bark so when we give it an incision that kind of just acts as an in nature when the mycelium starts poking out at the right points and receiving the right Oh to levels that sends mushrooms out once it completely devours all of its food sources the mycelium signals to produce mushrooms basically.

The mushrooms will start pinning within a few days you'll start to see a bunch of little baby mushrooms forming all over the block usually they'll have like a stem in acap underneath the cap will be the gills and then kills are responsible for like producing all the spores that the mushroom will utilize to continue the life cycle we grow mushrooms that in nature you find them growing right in the forest right off.

Of the sides of different trees so we try to give these mushrooms a little bit of light stimulation kind of just similar to what you'd get in like a shaded part of the forest what we do is as our blocks are ready to go on the we slap our blocks with our hands to basically simulate the tree falling in nature to shock the mycelium into growing once the tree or branch would hit the floor the mycelium would be shocked into producing the mushrooms because it's basically thinking that its life cycle is.

Earth Mushrooms

Coming to an end that's what mushrooms do they're basically nature's like brandy composers their job is to break things down and turn it into organic material that can be reused by the environment there's been stories of toxic waste cleanup by mushrooms.

Mushroom being able to breakdown oils kind of like the immune system for the planet also plastics in the environment without mushrooms we would be over run with wastes basically there would not be any life on earth mushrooms are very crucial to the environment and eco system I started.

When I was about 15I just got interested in mushrooms picked up a couple books and was just really fascinated by the whole process how something can just start from spores something that we really can't see with the naked eye into just being able to devour things at such a fast rate and produce these mushrooms by the time I Was 16 I was growing mushrooms as a hobby and just became really hooked on the process so I started this business after selling some stocks and cashing out my 401k.

So I wanted to continue working with mushrooms as a for life aguess and kind of make it a career path so and I'm just harvest the mushrooms just by simply cutting as close to the base of the block as possible and then from there we can go ahead and pack very thing in the next warehouse and get everything to the desired weight creaminess and button mushrooms and portobellos those are secondary decomposing mushrooms.

Oyster Mushrooms

So those mushrooms desire like manure or compost based substrates you wouldn't want to keep that stuff under the same roof just because you don't want any kind of cross contamination getting into your into your grows so yeah we're just specializing in wood loving species subspecies that basically decompose hardwood in nature they'll find them growing off like fresh trees or basically recently fallen trees strains are like shiitake.

Oyster mushrooms more of the medicinal species such as reishi turkey tail lion's mane defined mai take growing on oak or in certain hardwoods also the medicinal benefits that they offer are far greater than what you'd find in like a portobello or kamini mushroom these are the mushrooms that contain those anti-cancer anti tumor benefits those amino modulating immune system enhancing benefits their antiviral antibacterial like ratio and specifically is used in chemotherapy and cancer treatments it's been shown to shrink and terminate tumor growth a lot of people that have compromised immune systems are able to utilize certain mushrooms like shiitake for instance has been shown to dramatically increase like production of necessary T helper cells to help fight off infection and keep your body safe.

Ganoderma Cecile Mushroom

This is a reishi species from Palmer woods near Michigan and this mushroom is mainly used for the medicinal benefits we can take it and brew it into a tea or make tinctures out of it and utilize it for the health properties a lot of mushrooms have their own unique lime health benefits that you can only get from that mushroom it's been used by Eastern medicine for about 4,000 years shiitake for instance produces a polysaccharide called Linton and that's something that you can only get from shiitake oyster mushrooms produce a compound called lovastatin which naturally reduces blood pressure lion's mane produces harissa nose and Aran scenes which is able to stimulate nerve growth factor in the brain well here's your lion's mane.

Harissa Marigny Mushroom

This is wonderful teeth fungi the mushroom is a medicinal mushroom as well as the culinary delights known for the fact that it can enhance cognitive function boost your memory basically enabling people to recover from traumatic brain injuries helping people deal with Alzheimer's dementia we've got some regulars out there that love our lion's mane powder and all of our products.

Really it's just started with like the farmers markets and everybody just being really amazed by our quality of mushrooms and from there like chefs started asking us about mushrooms so I started dealing with chefs and then know your mushrooms are making it to grocery stores and restaurants all over the state now the reishi is definitely an intensive harvest so we'll just cut eachantler off at the base of the block it's kind of like a forest of reishi down there but patience and time right where we have the cut right there.

We have a little bit of sawdust attached so I'll Just trim this off it shows that it really breaks down the substrate into almost a pulp like matter ready ready for to begin a composting in the soil yeah this this is the most aggressive reishi that we have cultivating fungi and mushrooms is like a balance between science and art one you got to understand the science of it and two the art of it is basically being able to execute your crop the right way if you have a passion and you want to turn it into a business then you know don't let anything stop you.