Transferring clean mushroom culture from agar to grain (grain spawn). We use whole oats for grain. This helps to expand and feed the colony before transferring to a wood block. 🍄 🍄
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Today is our last farmers market at Garfield park in mentor. We're here from 2-6pm. Our supplies are limited!! See you there! 🍄 🍄
This is one of my best producing lions mane mushrooms. Growing pretty high up in this tree in my brother's yard. My son knocked it down a few years ago for me with a football. We brought it home together and cloned it. This makes it very special to me and I think it needs a proper name. However I'm not sure just yet what that is. 🤔 😊 I think we're going to have to figure this one out together. ❤️ 🍄
It's lions mane season everyone!!
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They look amazing!! 😍 So happy to have them back! And sooner then we expected. 🍄
Here we have our mushroom colony moving from whole oats (we call it grain spawn) to sawdust. Grain spawn is a grain of your choice (oats, milet, rye, wheat, corn, rice) already fully colonized by that mushroom variety. The purpose for using grain spawn is to feed and expand your mushroom colony. 🍄
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As much success as we've had here at Elysian Mushrooms I think it's time we introduce the flip side of things. When working with mushrooms there are many possible ways of contamination. In this situation we're going to assume a bad case of "sterile technique". Since there's an obvious center location in each bag where the contam is growing from that tells us the sawdust and grain was not the issue here. If so the entire block would have contamination growing. If your growing your own mushrooms consider deep cleaning your work space once a week minimum and clean every single time before working.
On another note we've had a hard time keeping up with production overall. Growing mushrooms isn't too hard but also can be a pretty sensitive job considering all the possible circumstances. On a larger scale of growing it has been a bit harder but we've been learning how to adapt. We will be making a courtesy call to everyone on the waiting list. Unfortunately all of these mushroom blocks are lions mane which seems to have the most interest. 😕
Lastly,
We of course want to thank everyone who has bought our mushrooms! YOU help support our growth and we also get the satisfaction of providing a healthy food source. We plan to grow more and look forward to teaching as many people as we can about how amazing mushrooms truly are! 😀
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A bit of what it looks like when we're working in the lab.
The syringe is an old blue oyster spore syringe we made over a year ago that grew into a culture. We'll see what happens.
The first three petri dishes are varieties of oyster mushrooms we're attempting to breed.
Last of the dishes were clean cultures being transferred to "master" dishes for storage in the refrigerator. There are long term and short term ways of doing this, we are doing short term here.
The camera angle isn't the best... We'll work on that next time. 😉 ?GROW MUSH? 🍄 🍄 🍄