Production Estimates

I had my first restaurant delivery a few days ago and delivered 5 lbs to a Korean restaurant nearby where I live. In addition to that, I also got into a third saturday market, which I will be at maybe twice a month.

At this point, I am supplying all of the following:

• Govans town market - 5 - 10 lbs / week (upper bound)

• UMB Market - 10 - 20 lbs / week

• Crofton market - 10 - 20 lbs / every other week

• Restaurant - 5 lbs / week

• Mushroom coffee client - 2.5 lbs / week (10 lbs / month)

• Mushroom powder to sell at markets - 5 lbs / week (20 lbs / month)

• Miscellaneous orders for 2 - 10 lbs a week

In order to produce enough mushroom to satisfy demand, I would need to grow around 50 - 70 lbs a week which seems quite intimidating as I am closer to 50 to 70. This will force me to look at my production schedule more carefully.

So far, I have been making 24 - 30, 6lb bags weekly. This provides a first flush of 1 - 1.5 lbs consistently for the lions mane and around 0.7 - 1 lb first flushes for the Italian oyster - this is when using masters mix (half oak, half soy hull supplement for nitrogen). I am a little disappointed that the Italian oyster first flushes are not bigger as normally they have greater BE than lions mane, but maybe I am still doing something wrong.

My main concern is that I will not be able to provide even the 5 lbs for the korean restaurant consistently. I am thinking that I should do at least 10 bags of Italian oyster every single week so that I have a consistent production of those mushrooms for the restaurant and also to provide ingredients for the oyster fritters. Other than that, I'm not too worried and will continue to grow lions mane and other oysters like pink and king oysters.

In order to increase the amount of produce I generate, I think I would want to do at least 80 lbs of dry substrate every week. This would create ~40 bags each week, which I would need to run all my sterilizers for 2 - 3 times. I was hoping I could optimize output sooner so that I could do less bags, but 40 bags a week seems to be the minimum I can get away with in order to adequately supply my clients for now.

In terms of what I'm growing, I think I could do this split: 20 bags of lions mane and 20 bags of oyster mushrooms. Over time, I would maybe do like 15 bags of Italian/blue and then 5 pounds of pink oyster. Then, I would want to maintain this same split every week, which would give me the most consistent production. This would provide me with AT LEAST 50 - 60 lbs a week. Hopefully, I can get here without any hiccups not being able to supply the restaurant.

Let's talk about spawn needs. In order to do 20 bags of lions mane and 20 bags of lions, which are ~6 lbs each, so 240 pounds wet. I would need about 5 lbs of lions mane spawn and five pounds of oyster spawn to maintain a ~13% wet spawn to dry substrate rate. I currently am good to do this split for the next 3 or 4 weeks using third party substrate, and I'm in the process of growing lions mane and Italian oyster in agar.

If the agar growing is successful, after about a week, I will spread it to grain and also liquid culture which will take maybe another 7 - 10 days to colonize, then I will use those to inoculate more grain, which will take another 7 - 10 days. So within about 25 days, I should be ready to use my own home grown spawn assuming everything goes well, which may not be the case. So I should make new agar plates every other week to inoculate as much grain as possible for back up. Doing the spawn work in house will give me much more peace of mind in being able to supply my clients steadily.

So if I want 10 lbs of grain every week, I would need to inoculate about 10, 1-quartz jars weekly - with half being lions mane and half being Italian oyster. This would be done through the medium of liquid culture.

I want to circle back to the Italian oyster. After I made the changes my basement where I started tubing in fresh air through the chimney, the oyster mushrooms definitely seemed to grow better. However, even so, the first flush for the Italian oysters seemed to be closer to 0.7 lbs than to 1 to 1.5 lbs, which I would expect given oyster mushrooms - especially pleurotus pulminarious' - extremely prolific growth. Why is it the case that some of them were less than a pound.

There are a couple factors that come to mind. The first is just that I harvested some of them too early. I may have been afraid of allowing them to grow to full size as oyster mushrooms sporulate tremendously at maturity. This causes me to harvest them before fully grown. Second, I wonder if the fruiting humidity is too high. One grower based in UK noted that he lowered the fruiting temperature to around 70 F after fruiting started, which I feel seems a bit low.

The humidity is likely not the issue, but I wonder whether making the cuts alongside the top and then making the cuts smaller would help form denser clusters. I don't know that I need to make a huge cut on the side of the block as I had been doing. Therefore, I will do two things: (1) I will allow them to grow out a little more than before and (2) I will make cuts closer to the top (but still along the side) and make them slightly smaller than before. Let's see if these changes help.