Well the blue on these blue King oysters is absolutely electric in the cooler weather.
They're so dark they're nearly black black with electric blue highlights!
It's even more impressive in person!
All we are is spores in the wind.
Jeez Louise!
This is what I get for skipping harvesting for a day while Jess and Mac are out of town!
Going to be a late night at the fungus Farm today!
Moving a few hundred mushroom blocks into the new farm today.
We're harvesting shiitake's and golden oysters, and trying to figure out the best arrangement for the mushrooms in the new farm.
Unlike industrial mushroom farms that can create separate fruiting rooms and conditions for each variety of mushroom, we grow our mushrooms in the same space.
Which means that we've had to create a fruiting space that has a gradient of humidity and CO2 levels as well as airflow across the room allowing us to position some mushrooms in spaces that prefer less airflow, higher CO2, and higher humidity. While others prefer to be in direct path of our ventilation system.
We will have a second fruiting room here at the new Farm that I plan on building out this fall. We'll be using that room much like our old greenhouse and grow mushrooms seasonally providing only heat in the dead of winter.
While this room will soon have air conditioning allowing us to grow a wider variety of mushrooms than previously possible and to grow most varieties year round.
Well it's taken far longer than I anticipated but I'm putting the finishing touches on one of our fruiting rooms at the new location this evening.
Humidity system is up and running, patching up the last few waterproofing aspects and I just need to install lighting and a couple of CO2 and timer controlled exhaust fans. Next week we'll install a 48,000 BTU dual zone mini split heating and cooling system. Requiring up to 10 fresh air exchanges per hour, mushrooms demand a lot of environmental modification to maintain their preferred fruiting environments; while still being far less environmentally impactful than traditionally grown crops and especially other protein sources.
In a few weeks this space will be producing producing 600 lb of mushrooms a week. I introduced our first mushroom bags this evening.
I always think that because I'm self-employed I have all the time in the world to work on "extra" projects, but the reality is our day-to-day tasks take up 60 hours of my week. 60 relatively relaxed and generally awesome hours, I might add.
And yet, somehow my favorite part of my job is working alone at night on those things that will move us forward.
The freedom from mundanity provided by being self employed in a unique field that provides continued opportunities for growth is better than any job I could have ever hoped for.
