Yesterday, I did quite a bit of mushroom work. I put in 60 oyster mushroom blocks (our current amount of weekly oyster production) into the fruiting chamber, which is maintained at 61-66F throughout the summer. This cool temperature is key to keeping our mushrooms at top quality in the summer months. After that it was off the the lab for bag inoculations, but dont forget the shower first :) Got to be clean to do lab work. After the shower I suited up into a clean tyvek suit and surgical face-mask, and began inoculations. I did 90 bags yesterday, alone, which generally takes me 1.5 minutes/bag without prep or clean up time. We will be bumping up the quantity of bags we produce each week soon from 90-108. That extra 18 will be more shiitake blocks, though they take 4+ months till the mushrooms will be ready. The Beloit Farmers market this weekend was great; sweet sunshine and plenty of smiling faces! We sold out around 1100, so if you want mushrooms try to come a little earlier. Next week, the first of our weekly batches of lions mane, or Yamabushitake, should be ready; come and get em! From then on we will have lions mane at the market each week. I just harvested the oyster crop for restaurant sale, take a look at this time-lapse of photos. It is over only a 5 day period; a picture taken each day. The mushrooms only took 5 days to finish because they already had primordia(the beginnings of mushroom formation) within the bag, due to over incubation by a couple of days. SO only 5 days in the fruiting chamber to bring in this crop, and we averaged 1.25lbs/block of harvest weight. We generally go for 3 to 5 crops with our oysters, so by the end of their cycle, each block should have an accumulated yield of quite a bit. Generally with oysters, each subsequent harvest(or flush as it is called for mushrooms) yields 1/2-1/4 of the previous one.
Thanks for stoppin in!
No comments:
Post a Comment