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Invisiblelegallyhomeless
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Jeremy_Davis]
    #9311652 - 11/25/08 03:48 PM (15 years, 3 months ago)

:eek:


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Offlinefalcon
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Jeremy_Davis]
    #9314218 - 11/25/08 10:35 PM (15 years, 3 months ago)

:heart: Thanks Jeremy, this is excellent.

What are some of the unusual mushrooms that the Chinese have grown?

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OfflineParesthesia
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: falcon]
    #9315339 - 11/26/08 05:09 AM (15 years, 3 months ago)

Thank you for posting this!  I've been fussing over finding a source of cheap substrate material for a while.  Straw is generally unavailable, but there are a couple of rice mills nearby, which means the hulls are to be had for free by the truckload.  I'm also making contacts with local tree removal services, for both logs and wood mulch.

There's a vendor at my local farmer's market, and they often have nice, big clusters of yellow oysters for sale.  They buy them from another farm near theirs, and apparently they use the same substrate for oysters, white buttons and crimini.  Composted chicken manure.  I hadn't considered that, either!

Have you considered growing tropical species outdoors?  Paddy straw mushrooms come to mind here.  If they're as delicious as some claim when freshly prepared, then you only need to give out samples to get people hooked... right?  They adore hot, humid weather, and begin to set pins 7-9 days after inoculation.  Unfortunately they only last a couple of days after harvesting, which means you have to grow and sell locally if you want to compete with cheap canned imports.  I had an email exchange with a rep from a mushroom supply business when I was asking about Calocybe indica cultures, and this gentleman claimed that asian chefs "lust after" fresh straw mushrooms.  Wow.  That's a market that could be exploited. :grin:

My 'target' at this point is chefs and Slow Food Movement types, so growing seasonally outdoors makes more sense for me, at least at this point.  I've also been reading a couple of marketing books that discuss how marketing has changed in the last few years.  (All Marketers are Liars, etc...)

Thanks again for posting this!  It's given me a lot to consider.


--------------------
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

- T. S. Eliot

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OfflineJeremy_Davis
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: falcon] * 1
    #9315346 - 11/26/08 05:22 AM (15 years, 3 months ago)

Quote:

falcon said:
:heart: Thanks Jeremy, this is excellent.

What are some of the unusual mushrooms that the Chinese have grown?




I'll be honest, many of the mushrooms we consider to be "impossible" to grow are being cultivated in China in amazing ways. The language barriers are a funny thing sometimes...

When I was at UC Berkeley, a Chinese professor showed me a book in Chinese and from the pictures I could see Candy Caps (Lactarius Deliciosa sp?) and Morels. I had her begin to translate the morel cultivation (it was an outdoor method. plant in March harvest about 2.5-3 months later!! 2.5 Kg from about a 5 square foot plot/bed) but we never had time to finish before I had to get back to Florida.

I flipped through that book written entirely in Chinese, and I was seeing all kinds of interesting mushrooms, so keep in mind that not all technologies for mushroom cultivation are the same. In fact in China and most of the world, low-tech is king. That's why I promote low-tech low cost methods (and because they work, of course)

Light and Love
JD


--------------------
Jeremy Davis
Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization, Inc.
Check out the ECHO mushroom blog page to see our lab, growing facility, and more-www.echotech.org/greta

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OfflineJeremy_Davis
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Paresthesia]
    #9315367 - 11/26/08 05:45 AM (15 years, 3 months ago)

Quote:

Paresthesia said:
Thank you for posting this!  I've been fussing over finding a source of cheap substrate material for a while.  Straw is generally unavailable, but there are a couple of rice mills nearby, which means the hulls are to be had for free by the truckload.  I'm also making contacts with local tree removal services, for both logs and wood mulch.




Hey Paresthesia! I always love your posts. Check it out, I've used rice straw before with great success. If you complexify the substrate with some supplementation, you'll get a lot more in yields. Also it is great to focus on using locally available substrates - less shipping costs for you, less resources used for the planet, local recycling, and on and on.


Quote:

There's a vendor at my local farmer's market, and they often have nice, big clusters of yellow oysters for sale.  They buy them from another farm near theirs, and apparently they use the same substrate for oysters, white buttons and crimini.  Composted chicken manure.  I hadn't considered that, either!
Quote:



I haven't really tried growing oysters on manure, but Hotnuts here swears by it, and I also saw a posting way back for MonsterMitch's substrate bags and those were oysters on manure in the Sponsors forum. I think that needs to be investigated more since manure is abundant everywhere...

Quote:

Have you considered growing tropical species outdoors?




Here are two of my older projects;











I find the quality of the outdoor grown mushrooms to always be superior to indoor grown - texture, color, shelf life, etc.


Quote:

Paddy straw mushrooms come to mind here.  If they're as delicious as some claim when freshly prepared, then you only need to give out samples to get people hooked... right?  They adore hot, humid weather, and begin to set pins 7-9 days after inoculation.  Unfortunately they only last a couple of days after harvesting, which means you have to grow and sell locally if you want to compete with cheap canned imports.  I had an email exchange with a rep from a mushroom supply business when I was asking about Calocybe indica cultures, and this gentleman claimed that Asian chefs "lust after" fresh straw mushrooms.  Wow.  That's a market that could be exploited. :grin:




I apologize, but I have to take my kid to school. I'll pop back in later, but I grew paddy straw mushrooms and they decay so fast, even in the fridge. I couldn't figure out how to do it with the strain I had because the mushrooms were great, but only for a few hours :wink:


--------------------
Jeremy Davis
Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization, Inc.
Check out the ECHO mushroom blog page to see our lab, growing facility, and more-www.echotech.org/greta

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InvisibleJaComet
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Jeremy_Davis]
    #9315457 - 11/26/08 06:40 AM (15 years, 3 months ago)

Thanks J_D. Appreciate your efforts.

Be Well.


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OfflineParesthesia
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: JaComet]
    #9315938 - 11/26/08 09:58 AM (15 years, 3 months ago)

Quote:

Hey Paresthesia! I always love your posts. Check it out, I've used rice straw before with great success. If you complexify the substrate with some supplementation, you'll get a lot more in yields. Also it is great to focus on using locally available substrates - less shipping costs for you, less resources used for the planet, local recycling, and on and on.




Thanks for the compliment!  My brain is constantly cranking and I have difficulty shutting that chatter down.  It's good to know it isn't all babble.

I've come to that realization regarding substrates after many fruitless searches for "standard" oyster substrates, although I may get some sugarcane bagasse this weekend.  I'm going to try a few combinations of readily available substrates like cardboard supplemented with worm castings, which I have bucket loads of.

Quote:

I apologize, but I have to take my kid to school.




Whoa, you can afford a kid?  Growing mushrooms must be more lucrative than I imagined! :grin:

Quote:

I'll pop back in later, but I grew paddy straw mushrooms and they decay so fast, even in the fridge. I couldn't figure out how to do it with the strain I had because the mushrooms were great, but only for a few hours.




Did you pick them when they were still buttons?  When I got them dried, they were like little eggs sliced in half with the universal veil still intact.  When you get them in cans, the veils have been peeled off.  Talk about a tedious job!  Mushroom peeler.

I'm going to try getting spores from my dried straw mushrooms to germinate using the spore slurry method in Mycelium Running.  Unfortunately I won't be able to conduct much of a growing experiment until it warms up again.

Also, have you considered that the fridge might be too cold?  Is the point of refrigeration to halt growth or kill the mushroom?  (I've noticed that P. eryngii stay fresh in the fridge for at least three weeks and will still provide viable tissue cultures.)  If it was still living it might stay fresh longer.  Maybe 55-65 degrees or so?  I'm not sure how much cold they can take.

One other "high tech" approach that's being taken with bag lettuce is filling the bags with nitrogen before they're sealed.  Not practical for the small scale grower, I know!  It may be something to think about, considering how lettuce seems to break down quickly into a slimy mush while in a plastic bag exposed to oxygen, but can stay fairly crisp and delicious for a couple of weeks using this method.


--------------------
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

- T. S. Eliot

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OfflineJeremy_Davis
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Paresthesia]
    #9321125 - 11/27/08 07:40 AM (15 years, 3 months ago)

Quote:

I've come to that realization regarding substrates after many fruitless searches for "standard" oyster substrates, although I may get some sugarcane bagasse this weekend.  I'm going to try a few combinations of readily available substrates like cardboard supplemented with worm castings, which I have bucket loads of.




Living in Florida I've used bagasse and it works pretty well! But it does need supplementation to really put out some mushrooms.

Quote:


Whoa, you can afford a kid?  Growing mushrooms must be more lucrative than I imagined! :grin:




Don't you know farmers put their kids to work?




Quote:

Did you pick them when they were still buttons?  When I got them dried, they were like little eggs sliced in half with the universal veil still intact.  When you get them in cans, the veils have been peeled off.  Talk about a tedious job!  Mushroom peeler.





We'd catch them at all different stages. I know exactly what you're talking about when you buy them. I think  they just wait for th vulva to break before picked, labor can't be that cheap!

Quote:

Also, have you considered that the fridge might be too cold?  Is the point of refrigeration to halt growth or kill the mushroom?  (I've noticed that P. eryngii stay fresh in the fridge for at least three weeks and will still provide viable tissue cultures.)  If it was still living it might stay fresh longer.  Maybe 55-65 degrees or so?  I'm not sure how much cold they can take.




I put them in the fridge to slow down the growth. It may actually kill them and that is a very interesting point! Like maybe they're dead and just start decaying? I really had not thought of that, but I would think that even when dead, the fridge would preserve the mushrooms...I don't remember studying up on post-harvest storage on those, so...

But I remember the mushrooms still GROWING in the fridge, like it had not stopped the inertia of all that cell division enough. Oysters will do that if you do not refrigerate them, so I remember being really amazed at this.

Quote:

One other "high tech" approach that's being taken with bag lettuce is filling the bags with nitrogen before they're sealed.  Not practical for the small scale grower, I know!  It may be something to think about, considering how lettuce seems to break down quickly into a slimy mush while in a plastic bag exposed to oxygen, but can stay fairly crisp and delicious for a couple of weeks using this method.



actually when I was teaching a class one day someone started telling me about experiments that were being conducted with tomatoes. Apparently they were just using increased atmospheric pressure at room temperature and getting really great results. He said it was not a lot of pressure maybe 5 PSI or less, but I thought it was interesting because usually I think of REMOVING air to preserve foods.

So I never did do any experiments based on that conversation, but I tell you, I actually looked into buying one of those things that you put 3 tennis balls in and can pressurize to keep them "fresh." I was going to get one and then put a mushroom in a room temp and see how long it stayed "good" for. Or rather how long it took to spoil.

Anyone who does this experiment, please check back in with me in case I remain to lazy to conduct it myself :grin:.

Light and Love,
JD
Act


--------------------
Jeremy Davis
Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization, Inc.
Check out the ECHO mushroom blog page to see our lab, growing facility, and more-www.echotech.org/greta

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OfflineParesthesia
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Jeremy_Davis]
    #9321278 - 11/27/08 09:00 AM (15 years, 3 months ago)

I don't have time for a long response, since I have a green bean casserole in the oven.  No canned anything, not even the onions!  I'm going to introduce my redneck relatives to king oysters and bunapi-shimeji.

Anyways, I'm still trying like crazy to find cultures or spore prints of Calocybe indica mushrooms.  You can find some info here:

http://www.vuatkerala.org/static/eng/advisory/agri/mushroom/milky.htm

It sounds amenable to "low tech" growing techniques, can consume a wide variety of substrates, prefers hot, humid weather, has an unrefrigerated shelf life of 3-5 days and offers a whopping 143% bioefficiency rating.  If these claims are correct, this species holds a huge potential for cultivation in the South.

I can't get cultures to save my life, though.  I keep sending emails to people and I get no response!  If you have any leads on this sort of thing, I'd love to get my hands on a culture.


--------------------
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

- T. S. Eliot

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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Paresthesia]
    #9322252 - 11/27/08 01:41 PM (15 years, 3 months ago)

Hi guys

Straw mushrooms are really sensitive to cold temperature.  spawn should not be stored below 12 deg C.  Storing below normally kills them.  Of course they are able to take the heat and some strains go up to 45 deg C that is why they grow best in a compost pile.

As far as I know if you pick them before the veils open, that is the way most Asian chefs prefer them and they should last 1-2 days that way.  But if picked open then storage is not really possible.

Make those children work :grin:

Thank you Jeremy that was a fantastic post!!


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OfflineParesthesia
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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: solumvita]
    #9330933 - 11/29/08 06:28 AM (15 years, 3 months ago)

Quote:

Living in Florida I've used bagasse and it works pretty well! But it does need supplementation to really put out some mushrooms.




The paddy straw growing method shown in GGMM uses composted cotton seed hulls in addition to the straw.  I have a few jars of blue oyster spawn cooking now, so I'm going to try a little experiment with cardboard substrates and worm castings as I mentioned earlier.  I'm also going to try putting spent sawdust blocks in my compost tumbler and supplement the mix with blood meal or corn gluten meal, which seems to be an excellent, cheap supplement for fungi.  (Especially trichoderma mold, argh.)

I'm also able to get my hands on green chicken manure, or goat manure if I'm willing to drive for it.  Hanging out with local farmers every weekend seems to be a good way of making contacts for potential nitrogen sources. :smile:

Quote:

actually when I was teaching a class one day someone started telling me about experiments that were being conducted with tomatoes. Apparently they were just using increased atmospheric pressure at room temperature and getting really great results. He said it was not a lot of pressure maybe 5 PSI or less, but I thought it was interesting because usually I think of REMOVING air to preserve foods.

So I never did do any experiments based on that conversation, but I tell you, I actually looked into buying one of those things that you put 3 tennis balls in and can pressurize to keep them "fresh." I was going to get one and then put a mushroom in a room temp and see how long it stayed "good" for. Or rather how long it took to spoil.

Anyone who does this experiment, please check back in with me in case I remain to lazy to conduct it myself




That seems counterintuitive to me as well!  Still, I think mushrooms like oysters and paddy straws should be treated like fresh fish.  As soon as they reach the dock, they're on a truck and on their way to restaurants.  A chicken rancher who has a booth at the farmer's market only sells fresh, pasture raised chickens, and he's out there every day hauling chickens from the abattoir to restaurants.

The nitrogen idea is something I heard reading The Omnivore's Dilemma in the section discussing "Industrial Organic" agriculture.  This is how Earthbound Farms is able to keep its baby greens fresh for weeks.  This operation is HUGE, and quite a bit of it is automated.  I suppose if you were able to shell out the money for a big bottle growing operation, this would be the way to go.

Using pressurized containers might work just as well as the nitrogen treatment, but both methods introduce additional challenges for handling and transporting mushrooms.  A truckload of exploding mushroom bombs seems a little scary to me!  Using nitrogen might be better if it allows you to avoid handling pressurized containers.

When I bring in my next large outdoor oyster harvest, I'm going to give freezing them a shot.  I've never tried this, but I understand they hold up pretty well if you sweat them in a dry pan before freezing.  Once they cool down they can be placed in a single layer on a baking sheet and individually frozen like peas or ravioli, then packed into bags.  They need to be frozen as quickly as possible to keep large ice crystals from forming, so if I was going to do this at home I'd have to make some kind of rack in the deep freeze.  This might make it possible to sell things that have almost no shelf life, like paddy straws or shaggy manes.

So what's your experience with trying to market "new" varieties?  I got a Lentinus tigrinus culture recently, and one of my field guide authors loves them.  She seems to think there's some big potential for commercial cultivation with this species.  It's an aggressive, fast growing mushroom that laughs at many mold contaminants, and waixingren seems to think they taste like pork chops.


--------------------
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

- T. S. Eliot

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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Paresthesia]
    #17210071 - 11/12/12 09:29 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Amazing write up. I read the whole thing on my phone and it was worth it!

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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: systemz]
    #17210555 - 11/12/12 11:37 PM (11 years, 4 months ago)

Pare ask Terry for a culture he has

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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Jeremy_Davis]
    #24151895 - 03/10/17 04:34 PM (7 years, 10 days ago)

Thank you very much! Massively helpful!

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Re: Some Answers to Your Questions Regarding Making Money Growing Mushrooms [Re: Jeremy_Davis]
    #27451551 - 08/31/21 09:31 PM (2 years, 6 months ago)

Great write up!

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